#849: Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelectricity, Updating ”Software” for Anti-Aging, Treating Cancer Without Drugs, Cognition of Cells, and Much More

2026-01-21

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Dr. Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. He is primarily interested in how intelligence self-organizes in a diverse range of natural, engineered, and hybrid embodiments. Applied to the collective intelligence of cell groups undergoing morphogenesis, these ideas have allowed the Levin Lab to develop new applications in birth defects, organ regeneration, and cancer suppression.This episode is brought to you by:ShipStation shipping software:...

Dr. Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. He is primarily interested in how intelligence self-organizes in a diverse range of natural, engineered, and hybrid embodiments. Applied to the collective intelligence of cell groups undergoing morphogenesis, these ideas have allowed the Levin Lab to develop new applications in birth defects, organ regeneration, and cancer suppression.

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TIMESTAMPS:

[00:00:00] Start
[00:03:18] The Body Electric: A Vancouver bookstore discovery that launched a career.
[00:04:19] Bioelectricity 101: Your brain uses it to think; your body used it before you had a brain.
[00:06:05] The lesson learned by scrambled tadpole faces that rearrange themselves.
[00:08:51] Software vs. hardware: The genome is your factory settings, not your destiny.
[00:11:43] Two-headed flatworms: Rewriting biological memory without touching DNA.
[00:16:20] Seeing memories: Voltage-sensitive dyes reveal the body’s hidden blueprints.
[00:20:12] Three killer apps for humans: Birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
[00:24:27] Cancer as identity crisis: Cells forgetting they’re part of a team.
[00:25:40] The boredom theory of aging: Goal-seeking systems with nothing left to do.
[00:30:09] Planaria’s immortality hack: Rip yourself in half every two weeks.
[00:31:27] Manhattan Project for aging: Crack cellular cognition, everything else falls into place.
[00:33:47] Giving cells new goals: Convince a gut to become an eye.
[00:37:42] Must mammalian mortality be mandatory?
[00:40:25] Cross-pollination: Why biologists would benefit from programming courses.
[00:47:15] Does acupuncture actually do anything?
[00:50:57] Placebo as feature, not bug: Words and drugs share the same mechanism.
[00:55:06] The frame problem: Why robots explode and rats intuit what matters.
[00:59:41] Binary thinking is a trap: “Is it intelligent?” is the wrong question.
[01:07:46] Minimal brain, normal IQ: Clinical cases that break neuroscience.
[01:08:45] Super panpsychism: Your liver might have opinions.
[01:13:48] The Platonic space: Bodies as thin clients for patterns from elsewhere.
[01:15:24] Keep asking “why” and you end up in the math department.
[01:23:07] Polycomputing: Sorting algorithms secretly doing side quests.
[01:28:24] Power scaling for the future and avoiding red herrings for understanding machine minds.
[01:34:06] Sci-fi recommendations.
[01:37:24] Cliff Tabin’s toast and Dan Dennett’s steel manning.
[01:41:21] Parting thoughts.