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

Dr. Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin (https://x.com/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 (https://www.drmichaellevin.org/) to develop new applications in birth defects, organ regeneration, and cancer suppression. This episode is brought to you by: ShipStation shipping software: ShipStation.com/Tim AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim Our Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “forever chemicals”: FromOurPlace.com/Tim 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.

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