Photo by Ousa Chea

The laboratory of developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University, with its dozen or so postgrads, is a hub of ideas, experiments, and discoveries. Most exciting is the focus on cognition as a process involving the entire human organism—not just the brain—and what this implies for new ways to cure cancer and other diseases.

The “ethical imperative” to find the cause of—and relieve—pain and disease is a guiding concept for the lab’s biomedical work. Underpinning all Levin’s work is the remarkable idea that some form of cognition (thinking) is the “glue” that allows cells to communicate bioelectrically. This concept expands the study of cognition from a brain-only approach to one that extends to every cell in the body. Expanding the notion of consciousness to all living cells helps researchers at the lab to discover new things about humans and about whatever else exists or can be created.

Using AI (artificial intelligence) in the quest for new therapies, the lab has released frog skin cells from their two-dimensional confinement into a three-dimensional water container to study their behavior. The new entities, called

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