He makes tadpoles with eyes on their tails. Could that one day help solve birth defects in humans?
MEDFORD, Mass. — Imagine the earliest possible snapshot of yourself, and it would look something like this: a single cell in the primordial soup of the fallopian tube, preparing to assemble itself into tissues and organs and systems, which will in turn give rise to breath and heartbeat and memory. Somewhere in there is a microscopic blueprint for the structures that allow you to be you.
If you ask how that cell is able to assemble itself among others to make the right shape — heart on the left, liver on the right, two hands with five fingers each — most people would say that’s all in the genes.
To Michael Levin, those people aren’t quite right. It’s true that genes code for proteins, and proteins are the building blocks of life. But if you want to fix a problem in the body’s structure — a birth defect, say — knowing which genes are involved will only get you so far.
“It’s like if you have a car that was missing the front axle, and I gave you a bunch of iron atoms and a bunch of titanium atoms — there you go!” he said. “I mean, it’s a good start, and it’s necessary, but it’s certainly not sufficient to know how to put this thing together.”
In his lab at Tufts University, Levin has been trying to figure out the other steps of the equation. He’s convinced that bioelectricity — the electrical circuits that ebb and flow among cells and tissues — plays a central role.
Levin is a basic scientist: Part of his interest is simply to understand
