GROW's Best of 2020 (eBook for Mobile/Tablet)

BEST OF 2020

t

he s tr a nge s t y e a r

in recent

history is drawing to a close and we can barely conceal our

relief. We spent 2020 — a year where

work often felt somewhere between difficult and impossible — building up our digital platform and publishing our second print issue. In June, we launched growbyginkgo.com and have since been publishing long-form stories about biology and its muddy intersections with culture and politics.

Our magazine has grown with every new story we’ve published. For readers who recently joined us, and others

who may have missed something, we have put together this e-book.

It contains our five favorite digital stories of 2020.

Here they are, in no particular order.

We hope that you like them as much as we do and that you will keep following our evolution in the new year.

As always, thanks for reading, the editors

Christina Agapakis, Grace Chuang, Leon Dische Becker, and Nadja Oertelt

contents

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The Loneliest Creature in the World br it t w r ay

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Beyond Smart Rocks cl a i r e l . e va ns

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Anatomy of an Underground Wildfire k a it l i n su l l i va n

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The Food of Exiles su deep ag a rwa l a

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Is DNA Hardware or Software? ch r ist i na ag a pa k is

futures

JUNE

23, 2020

The Loneliest Creature in the World Meet Greta, the first mammoth-elephant hybrid. by br it t w r ay i l l u s t r at i o n

by lian cho

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hundreds of times before she can fully open her eyes. This fact eludes her, of course. All she can make out through the walls of her tank are the fluttering white suits of her creators. r e ta is photo gr a phed

The room is bright and her bath is warm. A clamp slides over her sides. She squeals as it hoists her up, her trunk and feet gliding along the plastic walls.

The temperature drops as she is pulled through a narrow rubbery slit. Adjusting well to the cold air, she suddenly feels alien hands patting her down.

A grinning being approaches her, white fluff all around its face. Is this her mother? Instinctively, she reaches out with her trunk, but recoils upon feeling its starchy lab coat. Greta feels disoriented and confused. She is longing for something, but she doesn’t know what.

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They finally walk her out of the lab, down a long bright hall, but then she hears the echo of the crowd, the squeak of the microphone. She shuts her eyes and curls into a ball. The cameras flash and snap at her. Greta tries to tear away, but realizes that she is bound by invisible leashes. She trembles fiercely and trumpets wildly, a temper tantrum broadcast all over the planet. Where are her parents? Who are these grinning beings all dressed in white? What are they planning to do to her?

Everything goes blurry. Weeks pass with every slow blink. Her captors introduce her to other animals that look similar to her, albeit without all the fur. Unfortunately, her elephant cousins gather that there’s something strange about Greta.

They snort at her and keep their distance.

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Her first pleasant memory will be her little brother’s arrival in her pen. Bill (named after another climate advocate) is hairy, too, misshapen in a different way. Soon, the two of them are joined by more and more lost souls of their kind. A few months later, this listless gang, who the white coats affectionately nickname their “climate marchers,” are moved to a big outdoor pasture in Siberia called Pleistocene Park. Here, anxious Greta enjoys her first spell of relative stability. It is a comfortable temperature, and though she’s still confused and afraid, at least her brothers and sisters feel the same. Unaware of the human hopes on their shoulders, they trample around all day in the snow, looking for blades of grass to eat.

Does Greta have any idea who she is? Does she feel any connection with her distant ancestors, the woolly mammoths, who roamed the same steppe more than 12,000 years ago?

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Greta’s Parents The scientific project that may make our hypo­ thetical friend Greta a reality is currently underway at Harvard University, supervised by renowned inventor of genetic technologies George Church. His team’s goal is not to bring woolly mammoths back to life, per se, but to engineer mammoth–elephant hybrids. To that end, they have taken Asian elephant cells and edited woolly mammoth DNA sequences into them using the gene-​editing tool known as CRISPR. These are the first steps to making an elephant with thicker hair, fattier insulating skin, smaller ears that allow less heat to escape, and the ability to bind and release oxygen in blood at freezing temperatures.

The woolly mammoth and Asian elephant are believed to have about 1.4 million specific genetic differences between them. That might sound like a lot, but when the entire genome is made up G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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of several billion bases, it’s mere pocket change.

Editing important differences away may yield a cold-​tolerant elephant, expanding the range of where today’s elephants can live. In this sense, it’s a high-tech approach to elephant conservation.

But why create a Greta when they could just do a better job at helping today’s elephants thrive in the wild? Greta, too, may wonder about the point of it all. Her creators say their dream is to resurrect, not a species, but an entire ecosystem.

And the productivity of the woolly mammoth’s former ecosystem, they say, needs to be revived to stave off a climate catastrophe far worse than the one we already face.

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The Lost World Walking in the footsteps of her ancestors — ​whose population crashed over 12,900 years ago, but who continued to survive on certain islands until 3700 years ago — ​Greta’s trunk rifles through decomposing plants, looking for a blade of grass to eat on a cold winter day. Her hairy foot punches through a crusty top layer of snow. Her hip bows out to the side with a forceful thrust, toppling over a tree stump. A mountain of shit rains down to the ground, where grasses will soon grow. Whether she knows it or not, Greta is a geo-​engineer with an urgent task.

The mammoth steppe ecosystem dominated the Arctic in the late Pleistocene and spanned Europe, northern Asia, and northern North America.

It’s been estimated that there were once one mammoth, five bison, six horses, and ten reindeer for each square kilometer in some parts of the G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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steppe, with an extra smattering of muskox, elk, woolly rhinos, saiga antelope, snow sheep, and moose. Grasses dominated the land thanks to the animals’ constant grazing, while most of the trees and shrubs were trampled under their hooves and feet. But as the climate changed and the number of human hunters increased, the megafauna started to disappear, as well as the productive ecosystem they maintained.

There are currently about 1500 billion tons of carbon trapped in permafrost in the mammoth steppe, which is twice as much as what is currently in the atmosphere. The carbon from plants and animals that died thousands of years ago is not dangerous in itself, but its decomposition would be. When carbon-rich organics are exposed to the elements, bacteria chew away at the stuff, producing either carbon dioxide or methane, two greenhouse gases. Released into the atmosphere, they accelerate global warming, which is why G R O W D I G I TA L   |   T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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thawing permafrost is increasingly talked about as a ticking time bomb.

That’s where Greta comes in. Russian scientist Sergey Zimov, who runs Pleistocene Park, believes that the best way to keep the carbon locked up in the permafrost is to restore the ecosystem that thrived there during the Pleistocene. At that time, the area was covered with rich grasses, which reflected light from the sun. As the large animals grazed all day, they trampled other, darker light-​absorbing plants and carved holes in the snow with the force of their feet.

The three-foot layer of snow that lays on the ground of the mammoth steppe today for much of the year might be seen as an insulation blanket.

It keeps what’s beneath warmer than what’s on top. If the outside temperature is -40 degrees Celsius, then it might only be -5 or -10 Celsius under the snowy layer. But when millions of feet G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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are punching holes in the snow, as they once did during the Pleistocene, that insulating blanket is perforated and cold air is pumped into the ground.

Woolly mammoths oversaw a ventilation system, according to this theory. The air circulation they caused with their heavy footsteps kept things cool; the stumps and plants they’d destroy reduced the amount of heat-​absorption from dark vegetation; and the lighter grasses they’d fertilize with their dung would reflect the sun’s rays.

That’s why George Church and his team at Harvard want to create a herd of 80,000 Gretas, and send them to Siberia.

The Trouble with Elephants Their work is well underway, but the outcome is still speculative. As Bobby Dhadwar, a former post-doc in the Church Lab who did a lot of the G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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initial gene-​editing work, says, “When people hear about it, I think they get confused on the timescale.

It’s not like we are anywhere close to giving birth to a woolly mammoth.”

One hurdle they must overcome is how they’re going to source eggs from Asian elephants. Female elephants ovulate every sixteen weeks, although they can also skip years of ovulation during preg­ nancy and lactation. In most animals, it is possible to use an ultrasound to locate the follicle where the egg is developing, and harvest it from their ovaries.

But that’s not so easy with elephants. Turns out, it’s notoriously hard to navigate an elephant’s vaginal opening. Females have more than a few feet of canal, called a vestibule, between their vulva, where any instrument would enter, and their hymen. Another problem is that the elephant hymen remains intact even after it has intercourse.

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grows back after each pregnancy. Sperm can reach the egg only by passing through a tiny aperture in the membrane.

With artificial insemination tools, researchers have been able to get sperm through that tiny opening, but to actually get an egg out, they must navigate an enormous depth on the other side until they locate the egg-​producing follicle — ​too deep for an ultrasound to visualize by itself.

Laparoscopic surgery, in which operations are performed through small keyhole incisions, can help when the follicle is so hard to reach. The process typically requires that the animal’s abdomen is inflated to allow for better visualiza­ tion of the internal structures. But inflating the abdomen of an elephant could kill it, since elephants lack a pleural cavity (the space between the squishy membranes that surround the lungs and line the inner chest), which makes inflation harmless in other animals. The elephants’ chest G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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cavity could easily become overcompressed. As a result, researchers are hoping for a breakthrough in embryogenesis — ​the creation of embryos — ​to make this work.

The technical complexity doesn’t stop there. If they one day manage to insert all of the desired mammoth DNA into a fertilized elephant egg cell, they will then have to put it somewhere it can develop. Elephants are having a hard enough time reproducing in the wild as it is, so Church’s team has tentatively rejected the idea of using real elephants as surrogates.

Instead, they are working towards using artificial wombs. Ectogenesis, a term coined by British biol­ ogist J.B.S. Haldane in 1924, refers to the growth of an organism in some sort of vessel outside of the body. In the 1990s, Japanese researchers came up with a technique called extrauterine fetal incu­ bation. They connected catheters to large blood G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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vessels in goat umbilical cords, and fed oxygenated blood to the fetuses as they grew in tanks of amniotic fluid, which were heated to a goat mother’s normal body temperature. Getting all the technical components of mammoth de-​extinction right will take years, if not decades.

But this isn’t really about her, anyway.

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Growing Up in a Vacuum Let’s say they eventually succeed in putting an edited elephant embryo into a surrogate Asian elephant mother or artificial womb. If all goes well, it will develop and be delivered into this world, just like Greta, as a healthy elephant calf with woolly mammoth traits. How is that creature going to learn to act like a mammoth, when there are no mammoths left to learn from?

It’s possible that at first scientists might create something that doesn’t look much like either a mammoth or an elephant, but something in-​ between. Will a surrogate Asian elephant mother accept a pseudo-​mammoth calf with an oddlooking haircut into its herd? Proboscideans, the order to which mammoths and elephants belong, have complex social structures, with matriarchal societies. Knowledge about how to survive in the wild is passed from mothers and aunts to babies.

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If the pseudo-​mammoth is rejected, then you have a social species living all by itself, which makes for a really sad existence. Some zoos are no longer keeping elephants at all, particularly solitary ones or those in small groups, because of the psycho­ logical stress it causes them. If we do succeed in creating a Greta, she may be a very anxious woolly elephant. But this isn’t really about her, anyway.

The names given to blockbuster lab-​animals reveal something about the scientists who make them.

Dolly the sheep, for instance, got her name because the nucleus used to clone her came from a yew’s udder. The scientists who cloned her thought it was funny that udders are kind of like breasts, so they named her after Dolly Parton. Greta’s creators — ​we can only hope — ​won’t be so boyishly immature.

This leads inevitably to a photo op: elephantmammoth Greta, the unwitting bio-​engineer, peer­ ing into the eyes of her namesake, the wise, elderly G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E L O N E L I E S T C R E AT U R E I N T H E W O R L D

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climate activist. An awkward moment for both of them, at first: Greta, the mammoth, doesn’t care about names, and wonders who this new person is.

Greta, the person, has her doubts whether bringing back the woolly mammoth is a wise investment given all the suffering around the world. And still, it is cool to see what weird tricks we can perform when we put our mind to it. And for a moment, at least in the picture that goes around the world, the two of them do seem to have a connection of some kind. Hope is a long-shot investment that doesn’t always pay off as intended. author

Britt Wray is a broadcaster, storyteller, and author of Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics and Risks of De-​Extinction.

i l lu s t r at o r

Lian Cho is a children’s book illustrator based out of Brooklyn. Her work features a mix of various mediums and she enjoys creating charismatic characters in colorful compositions.

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futures

J U LY

15, 2020

Beyond Smart Rocks It’s time to reimagine what a computer could be. by cl a i r e l . e va ns i l l u s t r at i o n

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by k aren in g r am

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technological frustration, it helps to remember that a computer is basically a rock. That is its fundamental witchcraft, or ours: for all its processing power, the device that runs your life is just a complex arrangement of minerals animated by electricity and language. Smart rocks.

The components are mined from the Earth at great cost, and they eventually return to the Earth, however poisoned. This rockand-metal paradigm has mostly served us well. The miniaturization of metallic components onto wafers of silicon — an empirical trend we call Moore’s Law — has defined the last half-century of life on Earth, giving us wristwatch computers, pocket-sized satellites and enough raw computational power to model the climate, discover unknown molecules, and emulate human learning. n mom en t s of

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But there are limits to what a rock can do.

Computer scientists have been predicting the end of Moore’s Law for decades. The cost of fabricat­ing next-generation chips is growing more prohibitive the closer we draw to the physical limits of miniaturization. And there are only so many rocks left. Demand for the high-purity silica sand used to manufacture silicon chips is so high that we’re facing a global, and irreversible, sand shortage; and the supply chain for commonlyused minerals, like tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold, fuels bloody conflicts all over the world.

If we expect 21st century computers to process the ever-growing amounts of data our culture produces — and we expect them to do so sustainably — we will need to reimagine how computers are built. We may even need to reimagine what a computer is to begin with.

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Starting from Slime It’s tempting to believe that computing paradigms are set in stone, so to speak. But there are already alternatives on the horizon. Quantum computing, for one, would shift us from a realm of binary ones and zeroes to one of qubits, making computers drastically faster than we can currently imagine, and the impossible — like unbreakable cryptography — newly possible. Still further off are computer architectures rebuilt around a novel electronic component called a memristor. Speculatively pro­ posed by the physicist Leon Chua in 1971, first proven to exist in 2008, a memristor is a resistor with memory, which makes it capable of retaining data without power. A computer built around memristors could turn off and on like a light switch. It wouldn’t require the conductive layer of silicon necessary for traditional resistors. This would open computing to new substrates — the possibility, even, of integrating computers into G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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atomically thin nano-materials. But these are architectural changes, not material ones.

For material changes, we must look farther afield, to an organism that occurs naturally only in the most fleeting of places. We need to glimpse into the loamy rot of a felled tree in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, or examine the glistening walls of a damp cave. That’s where we may just find the answer to computing’s intractable rock problem: down there, among the slime molds.

Slime molds are way ahead of our computational speculations. Take memristors: in 2014, a group of researchers at the University of West England discovered memristive behaviors in the manyheaded Physarum polycephalum, a primitive but compellingly intelligent slime mold. Slime molds aren’t fungi, nor are they animals; at different points in history, they’ve been classified both ways, earning them the latin name Mycetozoa, or fungal G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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animal. That a slime mold could act as a living memristor — regulating the flow of electricity through a circuit and “remembering” electrical charges — is remarkable, but it’s not unique in the natural kingdom. Scientists have observed these behaviors in the sweat ducts of human skin, in flowing blood, and in leaves. A 2017 study concluded that, most likely, “all living and unmodi­ fied plants are ‘memristors,’” proof that Mother Nature anticipates even our cleverest speculations.

She may even dictate our the next computational frontier, after quantum and memristive computers have arrived and gone.

Biological systems not only anticipate, but excel at certain thorny computational tasks. In one experi­ ment, researchers released a Physarum polycephalum slime mold on a topographical relief map of the United States. They placed it on the West Coast, on the Oregon coastal town of Newport, and placed a pile of oat flakes — the slime mold’s favorite G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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food — at the other end of the country, in Boston, Massachusetts. The mold shot out protoplasmic tubes, searching for an efficient path towards the oat flakes it sensed via airborne chemicals. After five days, the mold reached Boston, cutting across the country while avoiding mountainous terrain.

You may recognize its path if you’ve ever roadtripped from Oregon to New England: the slime mold charted Route 20, the longest road in the US. Physarum polycephalum is an expert at such tasks.

Its sensing, searching protoplasmic tubes can solve mazes, design efficient networks, and easily find the shortest path between points on a map. In a range of experiments, it has modeled the roadways of ancient Rome, traced a perfect copy of Japan’s interconnected rail networks, and smashed the Traveling Salesman Problem, an exponentially complex math problem. It has no central nervous system, but Physarum is capable of limited learning, making it a leading candidate for a new kind of G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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biological computer system — one that isn’t mined, but grown. This proposition has entranced researchers worldwide and attracted investment at the government level. An EU-funded research group, PhyChip, hopes to build a hybrid computer chip from Physarum, by shellacking its protoplasmic tubes in conductive particles. Such a “functional biomorphic computing device” would be sustain­ able, self-healing and self-correcting. It would also be, by some definition, alive.

This unorthodox hybrid of computer science, physics, mathematics, chemistry, electronic engi­ neering, biology, material science and nano­ technology is called Uncon­ventional Computing.

Professor Andrew Adamatzky, the founder of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England, explains its ethos: “to uncover and exploit principles and mechanisms of information processing in… physical, chemical and living systems” in order G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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to “develop efficient algorithms, design optimal architectures and manufacture working proto­ types of future and emergent computing devices.”

In short, Unconventional Computer scientists build computers not from rocks and sand but from the nutrient-seeking protoplasma of slime molds, among other natural materials.

If you’re looking for a computer — even if you’re looking under a rock — a computer is what you’ll find.

Professor Adamatzky proposes that we will someday be “close partners” with slime mold, harnessing its behavior to grow electronic circuits, solve complex problems, and better understand mechanics of natural information processing. Over the last decade, his lab has produced nearly 40 prototypes G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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of sensing and computing devices using Physarum polycephalum. He has recently shifted his interests to more widely available fungus, finding that fungal mycelium — the complex, branching filaments that spread below ground before sprouting up the fruiting bodies we know as mushrooms — can solve the same kinds of computational geometry problems as slime mold. The Unconventional Computing Lab recently received funding to develop “computing houses” out of mycelium, “functional­ izing” the fungal matter to react to changes in light, temperature and pollution. Adamatzky’s view is expansive. “Everything around us will be a com­ puter and interface results of the computation to us.”

We are left to imagine computer chips bristling with energy and life, laced with the unusual branching filaments of protoplasmic tubes, and monolithic buildings, grown in-situ by computationallyactive mycelial networks, adapting, searching, self-repairing, sensing “all what human can sense.”

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One science fiction story published in this magazine gives us a utopian (and later a dystopian) vision of such a future: “Everything we touched was alive. Each morning I woke up in a bed made of mushroom, covered in sheets of fresh spider silk. The limbs of our home opened with sunrise….

Instead of a cell phone, I gazed at a beautiful organic ecosystem with fluorescent proteins arranged to display the news. My teeth stayed clean naturally, a self-balancing ecosystem consuming the excess sugar from my diet.

Everything, absolutely everything, was alive.”

A Very Different Kind of UX Switching from silicon to slime is a transformative idea. For me, the very question feels radically hopeful: might building computers from slime molds and mushrooms transform computing from a sophisticated solipsism into a far more G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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sophisticated expression of our awe-inspiringly complex, interconnected world? Certainly it would change our whole relational experience of comput­ ing. It might also be more sustainable, as biological computer systems would consume far less energy than traditional hardware and, at the end of life, be completely biodegradable. “We can shut down our PC completely,” Adamatzky explains, “but we will never shut down a living fungi or a slime mould without killing it.” Forget planned obsolescence.

The research folders on my very rock-based computer are crammed with papers on plant leaf computing; computing driven by the billiard ball-like collisions of droplets and marbles; the problem-solving algorithms of lettuce seedlings; computing systems built around the behavior of blue soldier crabs, rushing between shade and sunshine on a beach. The sheer multiplicity of approaches is enough to make you think that computing is not so much an industry as a way G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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of seeing — an interpretation of the world. “If we are inventive enough, we can interpret any process as a computation,” Adamatzky says. If you’re looking for a computer — even if you’re looking under a rock — a computer is what you’ll find.

The artist and critic James Bridle, in his book New Dark Age, describes “computational thinking” as the unique mental disease of the twentieth century, arguing that massively powerful, seductive calculators reformed our world in their image. In making data-processing machines, we turned our world into data, and “as computation and its products increasingly surround us… so reality itself takes on the appearance of a computer; and our modes of thought follow suit.”

Training Artificial Intelligence models on large datasets, for example, we often make the erroneous assumption that our future progresses as some predictable extrapolation of our past, without G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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taking into account the many external factors that determine how humans behave, react, and make choices. In the process, we reproduce and codify historical biases, obliterating any chance we might have of learning from our mistakes.

These kinds of errors, Bridle argues, are a conse­ quence of trying to smooth reality’s edges to fit into the inflexible world-model of the computer, reducing all our nuances and contradictions to mere data. Perhaps if our computational systems were built from the Earth up to model the ways nature processes information, we wouldn’t need to jam a square peg into a round hole.

It’s radical, but not impossible. Computing para­ digms are hardly set in stone. In the 1950s, electrical analog computing was standard, and today we live in a digital world. Only twenty years ago, quantum computing was science fiction, and today it’s being actively developed by Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Google, among tech titans worldwide. A similar G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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process might well unfold with biological systems.

“Unconventional computing is a science in flux,” Adamatzky says. “What is unconventional today will be conventional tomorrow.”

Of course, the natural world is more complex than slime molds and lettuce seedlings. These are only the simplest systems that can be studied and manipulated in a laboratory environment. The real world — the living world — is unpredictable, tenacious, and soulful, a humbling entangle­ment of mutual need. What we call “nature” is a concert of behaviors and processes entirely coeval with the organisms running them, each connected further to an unimaginable multitude of other behaviors and processes, the whole system regen­ erative, seamless, self-correcting, magnificent.

It’s hard to imagine that we will ever succeed in building a computer system as brilliantly complex as the interrelation of fungal mycelium, far-reaching G R O W D I G I TA L | B E YO N D S M A R T R O C K S

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tree roots, and soil micro­organisms in your average healthy forest, what scientists call the “wood wide web.” Smart devices, connected to one another through cloud-based servers vulnerable to cyberattack and plain old entropy, could never do this. And perhaps this is the real reason fully biological computers may remain always beyond our grasp. Even now, as we dream of embedding artificial intelligence into every mate­rial surface of our lives, we are at best poorly emulating processes already at play beneath our feet and in our gardens. We’re making a bad copy of the Earth — and, in mining the Earth to create it, we are destroying the original.

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author

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, the founding editor of Terraform, VICE’s science-fiction vertical, and author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

i l lu s t r at o r

Karen Ingram is an indie Creative Director who focuses on science communications. She is a co-author of “BioBuilder: Synthetic Biology in the Lab (O’reilly, 2015),” which has recently been released in Japanese (2018) and Russian (2019).

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“Wildfire” by NPS Climate Change Response (marked with CC PDM 1.0)

r e p o r tag e

AUGUST

1 7, 2 0 2 0

Anatomy of an Underground Wildfire Can we help scorched soil heal itself in the wake of supersized wildfires? by k a it l i n su l l i va n i l l u s t r at i o n

b y s o p h i e s ta n d i n g

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Bruthen is nestled along Australia’s Great Alpine Road, but in the small flat town you are likely to forget the nearby Victorian Alps. Bruthen is surrounded by rarer, more impressive towers. Eucalyptus regnans, plainly known as the Mountain ash, stretch 33 storeys into the sky and erupt with white spindly flowers, their petals tipped with ivory bulbs. Bruthen is surrounded by the tallest flowering plants in the world.

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tore through the landscape surrounding Australia’s Great Alpine Road late last year wasn’t sentimental: it took everything.

A few days after Christmas Day, Bruthen’s residents grabbed what they could and fled, leaving two-story homes and full-size mattresses to burn. By then, the mountain ash around their town resembled huge candles. The nearby wine country was a cloud of smoke. Their he w ildfir e th at

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scenic highway was framed by inferno.

The natural world they inhabited was being obliterated in front of their eyes; and, where they couldn’t see it, underground.

The East Gippsland bushfire burned for three months, one of several blazes that amounted in sum to the most destructive fire season in Australia’s history. As a final trick, the fire created its own weather systems. When the smoke cleared, the damage was tallied: more than 46 million acres destroyed, roughly the size of Pennsylvania, 1.25 billion wild animals killed, 2,680 homes lost, and at least 33 human lives. Understandably, given the human interest in visible things, almost no one was talking about the loss of life in the soil.

But this microscopic community is no minor matter: its healing will provide the foundation for the area’s recovery.

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This is the purview of a few concerned biologists, who study the damage wildfires do underground: the heat sinking into the earth, shriveling and popping its microscopic residents. As the fires around the world burn hotter, longer, and more frequently, the damage occurring below the surface is also achieving novel extents. Desertifi­cation threatens: rich soil turned to dirt, luscious landscapes left barren. This unique threat presents questions both scientific and ethical.

What could we — ​and what should we — ​be doing to help our glorious underground interwebs heal?

The Damage Below To appreciate what’s at stake here, we must first delve underground. We don’t have to dig very deep.

Most microscopic life can be found in the top 15 centimeters of soil, meaning we have to travel only the length of an iPhone 11 to witness some of the most complex living systems on earth.

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We are now steeped in the rhizosphere below a North American pine forest. The roots of these towering trees are host to a glorious society, abuzz with mutually beneficial and parasitic partnerships.

Spindly mycorrhizal fungi cling to the roots searching for nitrogen in the soil, which they trade with the tree in return for carbon. The survival of both depends on the success of this chemical bartering system. To hold up its end of the bargain, the fungi are constantly on the lookout for nitrogen-rich nematodes. The fungus ensnares these slender worms like a python, exuding enzymes to liquidate its prey, and then shares the spoils with its pine overlord.

Further below, a six-​legged springtail feasts on the fungi, and then suddenly takes off. These insect ancestors have a cool trick when they’re facing hos­ tile mites and arthropods, using their detachable appendage as a spring, propelling them to safety.

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of influence. Fungi that are unappetizing to spring­ tails tend to die off. Back above ground, decom­ poser saprotrophic fungi break down leaf litter on the forest floor, converting it to usable carbon and nitrogen, and remitting it to its allies underground.

We see the system hard at work when it’s moist.

Fungi and bacteria dwell in spongy moss and lichen, the system’s water-​keepers. And then the whole thing dries up. Rain has been scarce.

Parched air sucks moisture from soil ecosystems, turning the moss and lichen into uninhabitable tinder. Water-​dependent nematodes dry up and begin to hibernate. In the absence of rain, sections of the balanced ecosystem disappear.

Others become fuel for the approaching wildfires.

The stagnant blazes change the porosity of soil, opening wide gaps, sealing portals, changing how water moves through it. The chemical composition and acidity of the dirt changes immediately. The G R O W D I G I TA L | A N AT O M Y O F A N U N D E R G R O U N D W I L D F I R E

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inferno lingers, dining on underbrush, saplings, and hefty trunks. The heat incinerates the leaves, pine needles and dehydrated moss that covers the forest floor, halting the transfer of carbon and nitrogen. It burrows into the soil where it consumes entire root systems, setting off a domino effect in the microscopic food chain.

This sterilizes those precious top 15 centimeters of soil. Even if some inhabitants survive the heat, the diversity of microbes moving through the soil is drastically thinned. The survivors are left with a habitat that is fundamentally different.

These conditions pack a one-two punch for soil health: first the fires eliminate soil diversity, then drought conditions make it difficult for new microbes to repopulate the area.

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sterilized soil. If plants cannot quickly reestablish, the fauna-less earth turns to desert. Dead soil erodes and blows away and can no longer capture and store water, the basis of all life. The ecosystem it once supported disappears, and with it, the few bacteria and fungi the soil needs to flourish. Soil becomes its lifeless cousin, dirt.

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Beyond Recovery?

Soil inhabitants are naturally good at recovering from occasional wildfires, which have been a part of their life cycle for eons. “The organisms necessary for a healthy soil ecosystem are falling out of the sky constantly and they will recolonize the soil environment quickly, as long as the condi­ tions are right,” says William Mohn, a professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of British Columbia. Given time, most burned soil ecosystems heal themselves.

Indeed, they can gain strength from the fires, kicking the microscopic soil builders into overdrive.

Unfortunately, the coming decades are expected to bring unprecedented spans of drought. This will fuel wildfires that rage with an intensity that today’s microbial communities haven’t evolved to endure.

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New threats like this, paired with the possibility of new biotechnology, invite the specter of human intervention, even though the science of altering the soil microbiome is still in its infancy. For nearly half a century, biologists have attempted to inoculate Earth’s surface with designer microbes that feast on pollution. More recently, the notion of terraforming Mars — ​converting the planet’s lifeless red canyons into oxygen-​pumping swaths of greenery — ​has outgrown the realm of science fiction to become a NASA-​f unded research topic.

Meanwhile, on planet earth synthetic biologists are working on new ways to speed up the healing of scorched land and the restoration of plant life.

Matthew Bowker, a dryland ecologist at Northern Arizona University, thinks that jumpstarting recovery with beneficial plants, and thus creating a habitat for a diverse microbial community, is the best launch point when exploring new ways to speed up soil-​healing in the future. His team has G R O W D I G I TA L | A N AT O M Y O F A N U N D E R G R O U N D W I L D F I R E

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successfully transplanted biocrust in contaminated areas, such as military sites.

“I’m interested in the benefits of sourcing soil organisms and plant materials from the same location as the fire, versus just letting the plants deal with whatever soil organisms are present in the area to be restored,” Bowker says.

When a fire tears through a forest, it leaves pockets of intact ecosystems. Bowker believes these unburned islands could function as soil microbe banks. Chunks of soil, full of carbon sources (mostly plants), could be used to inoculate the disturbed area with a microbial community that likely looks a lot like the previous one. Providing an easily-​inhabitable habitat will ensure that new microbes have the best shot at survival.

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technology and research, such an approach is sure to fail. Ninety-nine percent of known microbes are unculturable. Previous trials have shown that the few that can be lab-grown almost never survive in the wild.

However, professor William Mohn says that this very issue — ​a lack of microbial diversity in burned soil — ​could be the factor that allows laboratory colonies to colonize a real ecosystem. “As a microbial ecologist I’m skeptical, but I wouldn’t condemn the idea until somebody tries it,” he says.

Soil becomes its lifeless cousin, dirt.

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Risky Business Ricard Solé, a research professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, wants to genetically engineer microscopic soil life, entrusting restoration efforts to organisms that are altered to have specific traits that soil ecosystems need to thrive. But the research is controversial. When his team applies for funding, Solé says there is always someone who asks: “How do we know that this isn’t going to create something that we don’t want?”

With the current body of research, he says, we can’t.

Most research surrounding modified or human-​ arranged soil microbiomes has never evolved beyond theoretical models. Solé is among a small number of researchers who want to develop real microbial communities on a small scale to see if they can reproduce what the models predict.

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Victor de Lorenzo, a synthetic biologist with the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia in Madrid, says he has about 10 types of life in mind that could thrive in burned soil, because they sequester nitrogen and carbon very well — ​a huge part of a healthy soil ecosystem. His lab specializes in extremophiles, organisms that thrive in Earth’s most hostile environments. Nevertheless, he expects that transporting these communities from the laboratory to real ecosystems would be difficult.

“In my opinion, the ultimate mechanism for prop­ agating traits is through horizontal transfer,” he says. “Bacteria have very good natural channels for propagating their own DNA. You don’t need to propagate the entire bacteria, just the DNA.” Such modified DNA could be added to the cluster of genetic matter of existing, thriving soil bacteria.

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ecosystems. It’s also possible that this modified DNA could harness attributes from other biological systems, such as plants or animals that are uniquely suited to thrive in harsh conditions, which would make the microbiome more resistant to new challenges including extreme drought.

Three species of desert-​dwelling lizards, for example, never drink water. Instead, the reptiles, including the spikey, terracotta-​colored Australian thorny devil, have evolved to siphon small amounts of water through capillaries — ​straw-like tubes roughly the same thickness as a strand of human hair — ​in their skin. Other organisms could be modified to take on this trait, and capture and hold water in a landscape of dry or burned soil. Moisture creates a niche for bacteria, which sets off a domino effect that could quickly restore soil life.

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“Although there will likely be some bacteria that are still present, with the vegetation gone, these life forms are very limited,” says de Lorenzo. “We have an opportunity to bring in some of the concepts that were considered earlier for the colonization of Mars, and discuss using them here on Earth.”

De Lorenzo recognizes the legitimate safety concerns that are part of the modified organism discussion, but he believes that researchers must begin to run trial scenarios that will help determine the potential consequences of synthetic ecology. He wants to move research forward, from theoretical models to tangible replicas.

“My concern is that we don’t have an unlimited time to deal with environmental problems. We cannot keep discussing whether or not it’s right to use synthetic biology,” says de Lorenzo. “Society will have to decide whether or not we should intervene.”

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author

Kaitlin Sullivan is a health, science and investigative reporter based in the Midwest.

i l lu s t r at o r

Sophie Standing is an illustrator specializing in human sciences, with a passion to improve communication and understanding of health and wellbeing through illustration.

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p e r s o n a l e s s ay

SEPTEMBER

24 , 2020

The Food of Exiles Technologies of memory and loss in a displaced world. by su deep ag a rwa l a i l l u s t r at i o n

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Omnes Generationes Where does food come from?

It is March, 2016. I’m at Logan Airport and should soon be en route to London, if only I can make it through this TSA checkpoint with a five-pound bag of flour in my backpack.

I’m not doing this for the thrill of smuggling or because I desire to be interrogated. No: I have just found out the hard way that American flour is different from British flour, culminating in The Great Croquembouche Catastrophe of 2015. And failure, this time around, simply isn’t an option.

I am meant to bake the challah for my brother-inlaw’s two-​hundred-​person wedding, sanctifying the meal for every distant relative and friend that I, by virtue of living on a different continent, haven’t met before and may never have the oppor­ tunity to meet again.

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This story does not seem to move the agent who eyes the large bag of white powder emerging from the scanner. All I can do is smile and try to charm my way out of purgatory. In the end, I walk away with a salvaged package of King Arthur bread flour thoroughly wrapped in TSA tape. A minor miracle.

My in-laws receive the story with sharp humor, ribbing me lovingly for being so particular about flour, but I don’t have time to explain. There’s work to be done. A large pile of precious white dust has made it from my luggage onto the counter. I massage eggs, honey, olive oil (the best I could buy while still making rent), salt, water, and my special yeast into the growing loaf. Then there’s the matter of architecture: I’ve practiced the braids at length, but it’s clear that what I had in mind won’t fit this London oven. A quick re-work averts disaster, and I sit cross-​legged anxiously peering into the chamber where the plaited dough springs to life and transforms into bread. When it comes out, it G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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cools, is carefully wrapped, and is gingerly trans­ ported to the art deco miracle that is the Royal Institute of British Architects. That night, my father-in-law tells of my misadventures at Logan Airport to a crowded room of wedding guests; he sings the hamotzi while ceremoniously drawing a knife over the auburn crust; I dance the horah faster than I ever have before and sweat through my suit; my husband and his older brother break into fits of giggles reciting the grace after meals.

In my life with my husband, Paul, challah is much more than bread: baking it punctuates my memories of our time together.

Near the very beginning, I am twenty-eight and have just burned myself pulling loaves out of the oven one crisp spring Friday morning. I am dis­ tracted because our relationship seems doomed. I have been seeing Paul for four months and he has just accepted a job here in Cambridge, while I have G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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been contemplating post-docs on the West Coast.

I have lost an entire night’s sleep to the worries.

Next: I am standing in my kitchen trying to remember how to braid a six-strand loaf under the watchful gaze of my husband’s advisor who is staying with us for the night. He is kind and patient, but I am nervous and keep wrecking the strands. Or here, I am laughing with my mother-in-law, Ruth, at the counter as tiny rivulets of egg and water break through the dam of flour; these loaves will be the first she’s ever made.

And then, I am soaking precious spices for the bread celebrating an as-yet-​unborn baby who will never enter our house (a misunderstood gesture, an unread text); the adoption fails and the loaves are thrown away, untouched, as we prepare for an especially long journey home.

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Finally, my friend Milan drops off a prototype of challah he has designed for my wedding, only two weeks away: it is as delicious as it is beautiful; I can never recreate it. I’d burn with jealousy if my mouth weren’t so full.

This swirl of time has one last stop, further back than I had bargained: we are standing at Tab’erah on the Sinai Peninsula, in a scene narrated in the Book of Numbers of the Hebrew Bible. Moses has just finished his intercession on behalf of his people. For decades, almost a generation, they have subsisted on crystalline manna the size of coriander seeds, which collects like dew overnight.

It is ground and cooked into pats that taste like oil cakes; there’s a double portion on Friday mornings to tie them over the Sabbath. They are sick of this food: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our bodies are dried out, for there is nothing at all; G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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we have nothing but manna to look at.” In the Judaism that Paul has brought into my life, food has always been a symbol of perseverance in exile.

I suppose it’s conceivable that these cakes from ground manna three thousand years ago are the same thing as the pillowy Viennoiserie I bake on Thursday evenings in preparation for next day’s sabbath. But the dish has evolved profoundly over time. In my mind’s eye, I see coarsely ground wheat puffed into orbs; aged sourdough gently shaped into voluptuous boules. In Northern Europe, eggs are introduced; fragrant honey is easier to come by here than sugar; oil, instead of butter, will make sure that the bread remains pareve for Shabbat.

From there, I see the refinement of the flour, the labyrinthine plaiting. I see the different vogues of shaping and forming the loaves, the different seasonings that adorn the bread.

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Every Friday evening is a reminder that each chal­ lah is as significant as its predecessors, and even the moment that originated this tradition; the Torah is not in Heaven, after all. All previous challoth, even the ones to come, are convened at this one point, this one Shabbat we are now celebrating: no matter which hands have shaped it or how it is made, the plaited bread on the board is the same loaf that was eaten by the generations of our family that pre­ ceded: by Moses’ plaintive followers at Tab’erah, the Varsani in Spain, the Confini in Bulgaria, the Jacobi in Germany, the Kosminski in Poland, and by our children, should they come, in America.

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Perhaps it’s all nostalgia.

Legend has it that in 1658, when Job Charnock of the British East India Company arrived at Sutanuti in Bengal, he was greeted with the tradi­ tional dish of cooked pulses and rice, khichuri.

In Bengal, this dish is still a staple of cloudy Spring days, when its bright yellows and reds flatter the grey skies and sheet rain. Onions, cumin, turmeric, and tomatoes fried in mustard oil form the base for cooked vegetables — ​in my recipe, potatoes, cauliflower, peas and beans — ​that are simmered with dal and parboiled rice, topped with ghee, garam masala, and green chili peppers.

During the monsoon, it’s served in the afternoons with ilish fish taken from the Ganges, dusted with a coating of turmeric and salt, and lightly fried. Onion fritters sit on the side of the plate with a teaspoon of achar; peels of raw onion, and G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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raw green chilis are tacked onto the plate as an afterthought; green mango chutney to finish.

This food didn’t stay in India, of course. Khichuri would be anglicized as kedgeree and served for breakfast all over the Empire: smoked haddock, simmered with bay leaf, served with rice, peas, and curry powder. Heavy cream and sultanas finish off the dish, with a dribble of lemon. This meal is some­ thing to wake up to, with milky tea, buttered toast and jam on the side. This is only one of the dishes that has marked Britain throughout its colonial expansion. Tea, imported from across the globe, is a cornerstone that dictates the rhythms of life, served at practically every gathering. Doner kebabs, peri peri chicken, curries — ​not to mention the ultimate cross-​cultural contrivance, chicken tikka masala — ​ all abound as cultural staples. Their imprint on British life bubbles up after late nights of drinking as sloppy piles of cash are traded for precious packets of food in folded newspaper or styrofoam containers.

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Our wobbly-​legged bureaucrat on the shores of swampy Bengal may be seen as an early omen of this exchange. Was there disgust or curiosity that possessed the East India officer when the clumpy dish of rice and lentils greeted him fresh off the boat? What was it like for the life-long Londoner, raised on mutton and beef, to live on foreign grains and vegetables never seen by the nation whose interest he represented and under which this foreign land will come to be ruled?

To step off and taste is to become part of the country that will determine his future. There are decisions to be made; we have lived and died, and still live, in their wake.

We are told that a Rajput Princess is prevented from performing sati (self-​immolation) at her husband’s funeral pyre; she changes her name to Maria and marries this man from London. Later, there are rumors among his Puritan colleagues that he has converted to Hinduism. Sutanuti, G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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where Charnock landed, ate khichuri, married, and buried his wife twenty-five years later is where he will go on to establish the administrative center of the British East India Company. That swamp village will continue to grow and be subsumed into the larger city of Calcutta, soon to become the seat of the British Raj, overseeing all of India. Today, a few blocks away from the Victoria Memorial, in the graveyard of St. John’s Church on the banks of the Hooghly River, there is a diminutive Indo-​Islamic monument carved from Charnockite. It shelters a patch of land that never quite managed to remain for ever England.

A moment’s pity for the petty bourgeois adminis­ trators that plotted the takeover of the known world. EM Forster captured their longing for home in A Passage to India. During tea, they fret over the inadequacies of the imported dishes.

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[…A]nd the menu was: julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-​cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of Anglo-​India. A dish might be added or subtracted as one rose or fell in the official scale, the peas might rattle less or more, the sardines and the vermouth be imported by a different firm, but the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it.

Nostalgia touches the seventeenth-​century explorer just as it did my parents, half a world away from the land where they were raised.

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to New York in 1974. Nor was it the famous bittersweetness of exile. It wasn’t a fear of flying either, even though this was her first time in the air. It wasn’t even that she was on the verge of having her Anglo-​Indian education tested in America, her practice of medicine scrutinized along with her understanding of culture, of language, of clothing. No: it was the food.

Raised to become a doctor, Rita Agarwala had spent her days in India poring over textbooks and experiments in the lab, rather than sitting beside my grandmother in the kitchen absorbing the arcane techniques required to feed a family.

Now, a world away — ​on her journey from Kharagpur to Kolkata, to Dhaka, Paris, New York, then Chicago — ​the sole thread that connected her home was a slender collection of hand-​written notes from my grandmother outlining the dishes of her childhood.

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I imagine my mother six miles above the North Atlantic, mid-air between Europe and the Americas, blissfully unaware of the importance of these notes until she is served an unremarkable tray at lunch time. She tells this story to this day, of making her first journey outside of India, of unwrapping the platter, of her utter shock and horror at seeing this plate of salad greens, with a plastic cup of dressing on the side, and realizing that it was meant to be eaten: what am I, a goat?

My grandmother’s notes may have seemed like a refuge, but, stored in a blue binder under the counter in a tidy house in the Western Suburbs of Chicago, they came to form the basis of a life of frustrated meals and homesickness. The recipes had to be adapted to the realities of the new land they found themselves in. The closest store that sold the necessary spices was an hour drive from the house. Fish, which forms the basis of the Bengali diet (and, some might say, the Bengali G R O W D I G I TA L   |   T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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psyche) was too expensive. They had to get it frozen; a flavorless, bland simulacrum of the fresh fish back home. Even familiar fruits and vegetables tasted off. There were no daily trips to the bazaar to identify provisions that had been freshly picked from the fields the night before. Instead, food was shipped from far away. Month-old produce was arranged in chilled grocery store displays to be picked up on the weekends and molder in the fridge all week.

To my mother and father, my grandmother’s notes were nostalgia: simultaneously hope and torture.

My sister and I have inherited this sense of comfort and loss. Almost every meal we ate growing up was compared to the ideal from India. And the losses would continue. As adults, my sister and I have gone to great lengths to recreate these meals, only to find that they are a culinary language we don’t quite understand. My grandmother’s notes are hints at a heritage we will never know, having been G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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cut off from the India of our parents and relatives.

It is not everything, but the food is a key to the world my parents left behind: I cannot let it go.

As part of this striving, I have been laboring recently to recreate bhejitebil chop — ​fried vegetable cutlets. My grandmother’s notes on this are odd and hint at the food’s Anglo-​Indian origin, trans­ literating the English “vegetable” rather than using the Bengali word, anaz. The recipe suggests sea­ soning cooked potatoes, beets, and carrots mixed with raisins and peanuts, and scooping them into oblong balls to be breaded and deep-fried. It is almost identical to a Scotch egg, adapting the deep-fried minced pork dish to vegetarian India.

When I tell my mother about my most recent attempt, there is a pause in the conversation. It dawns on me — ​and not for the first time — ​that I’m a late receiver in an international game of recipe telephone. These fritters are a strong enough G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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attempt, but are ultimately a misunder­standing of the food; a rushed shortcut that reminds my mother of everything that has been lost over the years: of my grandmother, of having tasted the warm chop from her hands, her notes kept under the counter on yellowing paper, the flight from Paris to New York.

Where does food come from?

There is nothing ancient about the tea leaves my father fusses over every morning: they come from plants that were introduced to the soil of the Darjeeling hills and the Assam valley by British merchants and landowners less than 200 years ago. My mother’s vegetable chop? I can’t pinpoint its beginnings, but can start with each of its component parts: the modern carrot is thought to have been bred in Afghanistan in the 10th century CE; beetroot is much older, Middle-​Eastern or Egyptian in origin, probably spread across Europe G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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and Asia by ancient trade. Potatoes come to Europe from the Andes mountains in the late sixteenth century. They made their way to India via Portuguese traders in the South and were introduced to Bengal through the British. Around the same time, Job Charnock of the East India Company first tastes khichuri.

We must remember: the plagues that were visited upon Egypt were also miracles.

The disasters Moses and Aaron inflict on the state are a clear mark of divine retribution. But in the logic of Pharaoh’s Egypt, the ability to reproduce and match a rival technology implicitly ensures the ability to remedy or reverse it. First, the waters are turned to blood; Egypt becomes a land of star­ vation and scarcity. But Pharaoh and the magicians are on familiar ground: they are able to do the G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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same; there is no change in course. Next, there is the plague of frogs called from the waters by Aaron’s staff. Again, the magicians match miracle with technology; no reason for concern.

Perhaps it dawns on Egypt that these calamities are divine miracles as their technology begins to fail. A plague of gnats comes next, the magicians falter. Soon, they are inundated by the plagues of the locusts, of the cattle, of boils, of pestilence, of hail, of darkness. Despite the suffering of the Egyptians, despite the one clear solution in front of him — ​to release Moses and his people — ​it takes his personal loss, his first-born, for Pharaoh to recognize the divine source of this devastation.

Were there omens? Before the plagues, before the suffering inflicted on his people and the State, were there signs that all this tragedy could have been averted?

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The tools we’ve developed for averting our impending apocalypse seem quaint, but have proven themselves elegant and powerful. The ones I know best as a biologist have been fighting hunger and disease since the dawn of civilization.

Archaeological evidence of beer-​brewing comes from the Near East 12,000 years ago. We’ve known, shaped, and exploited these microbes from before agrarian society and cities had been conceived of or formed: grain, left unattended, will bubble and pro­ duce potable alcohol, safer for consumption than polluted water or food. This technology, the ability to produce safe food and drink, is so powerful, so central to our conception of civilization that it is etched in the earliest forms of literature: in the epic of Gilgamesh dating from second millennium BCE, the wildman Enkidu is tamed by the prostitute Shamhat, and becomes civilized only after he eats bread and becomes drunk on beer. It is in religion: G R O W D I G I TA L | T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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the earliest recipe we have of brewing beer comes from a hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of bread and beer, scrawled on a clay tablet roughly four thousand years ago.

The greatest achievements of the nineteenth century killed the God responsible for these miracles. The same Louis Pasteur, who developed the germ theory of disease and understood the principles of developing immunity through vaccines, also demonstrated that it is not magic, but yeast — ​Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a singlecelled fungus — ​that turns sugar into gasses and alcohol. The story of understanding, cultivating, and industrializing this fungus is one that has led to the development of biology as a field over the past century — ​not only for the production of alcohol and bread, but, perhaps more impor­ tantly, for understanding the fundamental processes that are at the heart of all life.

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Today, our technology is one of our last hopes for addressing the challenges posed by a changing climate and dwindling resources. Yet, as I prepare dinner, I wonder what food will taste like when the plants and animals we have known, loved, and consumed are no longer here. Our food may resemble the food my parents and the generations before them have loved, and imbued with meaning, or it may be a new creation without precedent.

Regardless, this stuff will be how I mark my place in the world and in history.

But where has this food come from?

In the small hours of lockdown, I try to remember that this plague, too, is a miracle. But now, we can match this reality with technology. The tools we have used to engineer microorganisms for fighting scarcity have, almost overnight, made The Virus knowable. Our new technology is already begin­ ning to bear fruit: at work, we have transitioned G R O W D I G I TA L   |   T H E F O O D O F E X I L E S

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from our regular research to developing tests instead. We search for the virus the quickest, cheapest way possible and fight this plague by searching for it among our friends and neighbors.

In isolation, we still seek to convene with each other. On evenings and weekends, I meet with friends and family all over the world on my laptop.

In fact, this is the way that I regularly access my father who is currently stranded in West Bengal, having failed to leave India before travel restric­ tions were imposed. It’s how I tell him and my mother about the miracle that has taken place during the plague: that a bolus of cells has been extracted from a woman half-way across the country. That now there is a growing marble inside the womb of yet another woman Paul and I have never met before, but have somehow managed to communicate with more often than we do with most friends and family. My parents, God willing, may see the next generation.

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The omens! You may grow up to see and taste our lovely navel oranges, but in all likelihood, in your lifetime, they will disappear. I have wished for nothing more than to feed you mouthfuls of the chocolate I grew up on, but that, too, is fading away in the world we inherit. Of course there will be chocolate; it will not be the same. Perhaps, if I am able to trick you, I can remind you of the precious Kashmiri saffron your grandmother would have loved to use to bless the sweets for your first birthday; even as I write this, that is increasingly unlikely. I hope for my sake, you will hold onto this false memory. It is the tragedy of my fatherhood that you will not know the world that I’ve lived in and loved. I will try to explain our exile. I hope you understand.

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author

Sudeep Agarwala is a yeast geneticist and Program Director at Ginkgo Bioworks, focused on platforms for protein production. He also writes occasionally.

i l lu s t r at o r

Tomekah George is an illustrator and occasional animator, whose work can be described as somewhere between a collage and painting. She is based in the UK.

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A manufactured organism. Credit: Douglas J. Blackiston – ​ Levin Lab, Allen Discovery Center

dialogue

JUNE

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Is DNA Hardware or Software?

A conversation with Michael Levin about Xenobots, the world’s first living robots. by ch r ist i na ag a pa k is

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i

n m id - ja nua ry,

a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — ​xenobots, the world’s first living robots. They had harvested skin and cardiac cells from frog embryos, designed and sculpted them to perform particular tasks with the help of an evolutionary algorithm, and then set them free to play. The result — ​it’s alive! — ​ was a programmable organism. Named after the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, from which they were harvested, these teams of cells were wholly liberated from constraints of frog DNA. Their behavior was determined by their shape, their design. They can already perform simple tasks under the microscope. And due to their minuscule size and great G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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adaptability, they could soon be put to work in the human body to deliver new medical treatments, or out in the world to do environmental clean-ups. Naturally, this raises all kinds of questions and challenges for both humanity at large and synthetic biology. Earlier this year, Grow’s Christina Agapakis discussed some of them with Michael Levin, one of the scientific minds behind xenobots.

This mind-​bending conversation delves into how Levin and his team discovered and conceptualized a new life form, the possible applications they envision, and what this all says about the different ways computer scientists and synthetic biologists think about DNA.

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I’m interested in the language you use to explain these xenobots — ​how you conceptualize what some people are calling a new life form. What inspired this project? What kicked off this research direction?

CHRISTINA AGAPAKIS:

Our group studies cellular decision​making. We’re interested in what is called basal cognition: the ability of all kinds of biology — ​from molecular networks to cells and tissues, from whole organisms to swarms — ​to make decisions, learn from their environments, store memories.

We were thinking about new forms of minimal model systems that are synthetic or bio-​engineered, where we could build basic proto-​cognitive systems from scratch and really have the ability to understand where their capacities come from.

MICHAEL LEVIN:

We are also interested in the plasticity of cells and tissues. What can they do that is different from their genomic defaults? In our group, we think that G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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what the genome does is nail down the hardware that these cells have: the proteins, the signaling components, and the computational components.

When these things are actually run in multi-scale, biological systems, there’s an interesting kind of software that drives the structure and function.

We’ve been working for years now on the repro­ grammability of that software — ​the idea that you can give cells and tissues novel stimuli or experi­ ences and thus change how they make decisions in terms of morphogenesis, in terms of behavior, without actually changing their hardware.

That’s fascinating because it’s different from how the synthetic biology world typically uses words like hardware and software. When folks at Ginkgo, or other molecular or synthetic biologists, talk about software, they often mean the DNA code. What do you mean when you say software?

CHRISTINA:

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I have a completely different perspective.

I don’t think DNA is the software. Not that only one metaphor is valid, but the one that we have found useful is this idea that the real-time physiology of the organism is the software. My background is in computer science, so I come at this from more of a computational perspective.

The important thing about software is that if your hardware is good enough — ​and I’m going to argue that probably all life at this point is good enough — ​ then the software is rewritable. That means you can greatly alter what it does without meddling with the hardware.

MICHAEL:

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100 designs for a walking organism composed of passive skin tissue (cyan) and contractile heart muscle (red). Computers model the dynamics of the biological building blocks and use them like LEGO bricks to build different organism anatomies.

The rainbow streak traces its behavior in simulation.

(Credit: Sam Kriegman)

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People are very comfortable with this in the computer world. When you switch from Photoshop to Microsoft Word, you don’t get out your soldering iron and start rewiring your computer, right? In fact, that is exactly how computation was done in the 1940s, and I think that’s where biology is today. It’s all about the hardware. Everybody’s really interested in genomic editing and rewiring gene regulatory networks. These are all important things, but they are still very close to the machine level. In our group, we think of the DNA as producing cellular hardware that is actually imple­ menting physiological software, which is rewritable.

That means you can greatly alter the behavior of the system without actually having to go in and exchange any of the parts. I think that’s the amazing thing about biology. The plasticity is quite incredible.

I’ll give you a simple example of what I mean by software. We have these flatworms, planarians, G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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and they have a head and a tail. What we’ve shown is that there’s an electric circuit that stores the information of how many heads the planarian is supposed to have and where the heads are supposed to be. The important thing about this circuit is that it has this interesting memory aspect. We can transiently rewrite the stable state of this electric circuit with a brief application of ion channel drugs, inducing a permanent change in the animal’s body plan.

CHRISTINA:

It’s actually electric.

It’s physically electric. A large chunk of our lab works on developmental bio-​electricity — ​ electrical communication and computation in non-neural tissue. We’ve discovered that the planarian’s tissues store this steady state electrical pattern, which dictates how many heads they are supposed to have. Their genetics give you a piece of hardware, which self-​organizes an MICHAEL:

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electrical pattern that causes cells to build one head, one tail. That’s the default. Now that we understand how this works, and it took a good 15 years to get to this point, we can go in and rewrite that electrical state. The cool thing about that circuit is that, like any good memory circuit, once you’ve rewritten it, it’s stable, it saves the information, unless you change it back.

You can rewrite it so that, if you cut the worm in half, it creates worms with two heads, no tail.

Those two-headed worms continue to make twoheaded worms, if you cut them in half again. All of these worms have completely normal genomic sequences. We haven’t touched the DNA at all. The information on how many heads you’re supposed to have is not directly nailed down by the genetics.

People are comfortable with this in electronics: you turn it on and it does something. If it’s an interest­ ing piece of electronics, you can reprogram it to do G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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something else. It turns out that biological electric circuits are exactly like this. They have incredible plasticity. They are very good at enabling some of these electrical states to be rewritten. Once we know how to do it, you can actually reprogram those pattern memories. These are structures in the tissue that tell the cells what to do at a large scale. That’s the kind of thing I mean by software.

There are physiological structures in the tissue that serve as instructive information for how it grows.

CHRISTINA:

And how did this research lead to

xenobots?

We wanted a synthetic, bottom-up system where we could see this from scratch. In particular, we wanted to understand not just the hardware of cells, but the algorithms that enable them to cooperate in groups. Josh Bongard at UVM is a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics. He and I have had many conversations about how MICHAEL:

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biology can inform the design of adaptive and swarm robotics and AI, and how the tools and deep concepts from machine learning and evolutionary computation can help understand different levels in biology. He was a very natural partner for this work, and we decided to establish a tight integration between computational model­ ing and biological implementation.

We took some cells from a frog embryo, and we let them re-​envision their multicellularity. Individual cells are very competent. They do all sorts of things on their own. How do you convince them to work together toward much bigger goals?

Cells in the body work on massive outcomes, things like building a limb, or building an eye, or face remodeling. They are called upon to do it and they stop when it’s done. So, when a salamander loses a limb and the limb is rebuilt, you can see that this collective knows what a correct salamander looks like, because it stops all that activity as soon as the G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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limb is complete. We wanted to know: how do cell collectives store and process these kinds of largescale anatomical pattern memories?

We liberated the frog cells from the boundary conditions of the embryo. And we said to these cells: here you are, in a novel circumstance, in a novel environment: what do you want to do? What we observed is that the cells are very happy to once again cooperate with each other. They build a synthetic living machine with behaviors that are completely different from what the default would be. They look nothing like a tadpole, nothing like a frog embryo. We have lots of videos of them doing interesting things. They wander around, they do mazes, they cooperate in groups, they commu­ nicate damage signals to each other. They work together to build things out of other loose cells.

I think what we’re scratching at here is just the beginning of understanding what cells are willing G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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to do under novel environments, and how plastic they really are. That was the origin of this project: to try to understand what cells can do beyond their default group behaviors. That’s what we have here.

You’re collaborating with philosopher/ ethicist Jeantine Lunshof on the next phase of this project. What are the ethics of manipulating life in this way?

CHRISTINA:

In terms of the ethics of the platform itself, I don’t find it particularly far past the range of things that have already been done. We [as a society] manipulate living cells all the time. We have a food industry where we manipulate whole organisms, adult mammals, who we can be quite certain have some degree of agency. In that sense, I don’t think these things push the envelope on any ethical issues.

I do think that they highlight the inadequacies of the definitions that we throw around on a daily basis. There are all sorts of terms we think we MICHAEL:

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understand, people use them all the time: animal, living being, synthetic, creation, machine, robot.

Lots of work in robotics and synthetic biology has been showing us recently that we actually don’t understand what those things are at all.

I gave a talk once and I referred to a caterpillar as “a soft-bodied robot” and some people complained about that. They said, oh my God, how can you call it a robot? That’s because they’re thinking of robots from the ’60s — ​you know, these things that are on the car assembly line. That’s a very narrow and, in 2020, not very helpful view of what a robot actually is. We are still trying to come up with good definitions for all these things. What do we really mean when we say machine? If you think some things are not machines, what does that mean? And what do you think they have that makes them different from machines? This raises very interesting philosophical questions.

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That’s part of the work your xenobots are doing — ​philosophical, conceptual, perhaps even artistic work. I’d like to talk a little more about the practical uses and implications. What types of appli­ cations do you imagine? If we’re in the 1940s or 1950s of biology: how do these look 50 years from now?

CHRISTINA:

I would start with what I would call near-term applications. You could imagine these things roaming the lymph nodes and collecting cancer cells, sculpting the insides of arthritic knee joints. You could imagine them collecting toxins in waterways. Once we learn to program their behavior, which is the next thing that we’re doing, you could imagine a million useful applications, both inside the body and out in the environment.

MICHAEL:

This is the kind of model system that can tell us a lot about where true plasticity comes from.

What are the strategies that you might want to build into your robots or your algorithms that G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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would allow them to respond to novelty the way that living cells in collectives do?

Individual cells are very competent. They do all sorts of things on their own. How do you convince them to work together toward much bigger goals?

Michael Levin

The medium-term applications, I think, are more in the fields of Regenerative Medicine and AI, specifically looking at how to program collectives.

If you are going to rebuild somebody’s arm, or a limb, or an eye, or something complex like that, I think that we are going to have to understand how cells are motivated to work together. Trying to micromanage the creation of an arm from G R O W D I G I TA L   |   I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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stem-cell derivatives, I think, is not going to happen in any of our lifetimes.

We need to understand how you program swarms to have the kinds of goal states that we want them to have, so they can build organs in the body, or for transplantation, or for complex, synthetic living machines. If we figure out how this works, and where these anatomical goal states come from, we will be able to make drastic improvements in regen­ erative medicine. It’s not just that we might have these bots running around our bodies. It’s the fact that we will be able to program our own cell collec­ tives at the anatomical level, not at the genetic level.

The idea is to understand how cell collectives encode what it is that they’re building, and how you could go about rewriting this — ​to offload the computational complexity onto the cells themselves and not try to micromanage it. Our recent paper on frog leg regeneration is a good example of that.

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Frogs normally do not regenerate their legs, unlike salamanders, and we figured out how to make them do it. The intervention is 24 hours, and then the actual growth takes 13 months. So it’s a very early signal. We don’t hang around and try to babysit the process. You figure out how to convince the cells what they should be doing and then you let the system figure out how to do it on its own.

Maybe it’s an accident in the history of biology, but I think our narratives are so dominated by the idea of molecular control — ​by DNA as this central driver of everything. There are synthetic biol­ ogists who basically say that DNA is the only thing that matters. You’re highlighting a very different per­ spective. You’re saying the stimuli plus the cell and its existing hardware can create a totally different out­ come. That has fascinating implications for how we think about genetic determinism in synthetic biology, and, more generally, in human behavior, in human outcomes, and so many other different things.

CHRISTINA:

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I think we have a good framework to think about this, which is the progress in computer science. I am not saying that living things are computers, at least not like the computers you and I use today. What I mean is: computers are fundamentally a very wide class of devices that are in an important sense reprogrammable. My point about DNA is that when people think about genetic determinism, they’re not giving the DNA enough respect. DNA doesn’t give you hardware that always does the same thing and is determined. DNA is amazing. DNA has been shaped by evolution to produce hardware that is eminently reprogram­ mable. I think we need to respect the fact that evolution has given us this amazing multi-scale goal-driven system where the goals are rewritable.

MICHAEL:

I’ll give you another very simple example. Tadpoles need to become frogs. And tadpole faces need to be deformed to become frog faces: the eyes have to move, the jaws have to move, all this stuff has to G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in simulation (top row) to perform some desired function. Transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems (bottom row) with the predicted behaviors.

(Credit: top, Sam Kriegman; bottom, Douglas J. Blackiston)

move around. It used to be thought that what the genetics encodes during metamorphosis is a set of movements that would make that happen. If every tadpole looks the same, and every frog looks the same, then that works, right? You move the eyes, you move the mouth, everything moves a pre­ scribed distance in a certain direction, and you’re good. To test this, we made what we called Picasso G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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tadpoles. Everything is in the wrong place: the mouth is up here, the eyes are sideways, the jaws are displaced, everything is just completely moved around. What we found is that those tadpoles still become pretty normal frogs. Everything moves around in really unnatural paths, and they keep moving until a normal frog face is established.

This shows that the genetics don’t just give you a system that somehow moves everything in the same way every single time. They give you a system that encodes the rough outline of a correct frog face, and then it has this error minimization scheme where what the hardware does is say, wherever we’re at now, I’m going to keep taking steps forward to reduce that error to as low a level as possible. That’s just an example of this goal-​directed plasticity. And I think it’s important to realize that that’s the beauty of the hardware that evolution has left us with. That’s the trick. The hardware is much more capable than we’ve been giving it credit for.

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Hearing you talk about these non-​ genetic factors, it does seem like you’re pointing at what’s fundamentally missing from how we think about synthetic biology and genetics more broadly.

There’s the critique of genetic studies of human behavior that basically says: you can never really control for all the variables — ​social, environmental, whatever — ​so your studies of the genes for almost anything are going to be fatally flawed. Then conversely, if you are only seeing a small picture of what it means for a human to be anything — healthy, smart, athletic, beautiful — ​engineering someone’s DNA with those outcomes in mind is probably not going to get you what you want, and we should focus on the ways we can change a person’s environment that will make them healthier, smarter, happier etc. If biology is so plastic, why do you think the genetic idea and the dream of designer babies persists?

CHRISTINA:

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I want to be clear: I’m not denigrating genetics in the slightest. I think understanding the hardware is critical. You’re not going to get very far without understanding your hardware. And I think that genetics is essential for that. In some cases, working at the level of hardware is fine. If you want to fix a flashlight, you can do everything you need to do at the hardware level. Or if people want to make, say, bio-​engineered bladders, a sphere, you might get away with literally micromanaging this thing directly with some stem cells and growing them on a scaffold. But if you really want to make large-scale control of complex anatomy, I would say there’s not a com­ pelling history of capabilities today that would suggest that we have good anatomical control at the genetic level. We are not very good at it right now.

MICHAEL:

A lot of people make a promissory argument.

They say, turn the crank, keep going, we’re going to sequence a whole bunch more stuff. We’re going G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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to do a lot more transcriptomics. We’re going to do a lot of genomics. We’re going to keep at it and someday we’ll just be able to do it. You want seven fingers? You got it. You want gills? Fine. I don’t find that promise very compelling.

You could spend all your time drilling down into the molecules that it’s made of, but at some point, you have to ask yourself, what are they in a cybernetic sense? What’s the function of this thing? What are the control loops? What are the internal capabilities? Is it reprogrammable? Is its structure modular? All of these things are completely invisible at the level of the hardware.

I think it would be incredibly unwise to throw away all the lessons of engineering, of cybernetics, of computer science. Can you imagine where our information technology would be today, if every change you wanted to make you had to make at the hardware level, or even in machine code?

I mean, it’d be insane. We wouldn’t have anything.

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DNA has been shaped by evolution to produce hardware that is eminently reprogrammable.

Michael Levin

I do molecular stuff. I live in that world.

I’m interested in your critique or challenge of that.

Maybe there is a limitation to how we’re imagining things. You might be able to sort of open up much more interesting questions and possibilities if you’re looking at how things grow. How did you arrive at some of these more holistic perspectives?

CHRISTINA:

Some of this stuff is absolutely ancient.

I mean, back in the ’40s, you have this biologist who took a paramecium, or a similar kind of single-cell animal, which is covered with these little hairs that MICHAEL:

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(top) Five red-cyan designs are placed amid a lattice of simulated debris, in yellow (below) the traces carved by a swarm of these organisms as they move through a field of particulate matter. (Credit: top, Sam Kriegman; below, Douglas J. Blackiston)

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all point the same way. He took a little glass needle, cut a little square into the surface of the thing, turned it 180 degrees, and put it back. An amazing technical feat. Now the hairs are pointing the wrong way in that little square. And what he found is that when the paramecium divides and has off­ spring, all of the offspring now have little squares of hair that are pointing the wrong way. Why is that?

It’s because the structure of the cortex is templated onto the previous one. So when it makes a daughter cell, it just copies whatever it has. The non-​ genetic piece of information is critical. This is the original demonstration of true epigenetics. This information is simply not in the genome.

In our view, turning on and off specific genes to make specific cell types is such a tiny corner of all this. It’s critical, but we’ve got to think more broadly, in pattern control, in large scale goal-​ directedness, and think about the computations that all these different levels are doing to get G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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where they’re going. There’s no way we’re going to do what we need to do in biology without an appreciation of those other levels.

One thing we’re interested in doing in Grow is outlining future scenarios, the possibili­ ties for biology. What’s the end goal for xenobots?

CHRISTINA:

I’ll jump way forward because it’s more fun that way. Regeneration and limb regeneration is critical, but we can fantasize further than that. In the sort of asymptote of all of this, I see two things that I think should be possible. On the one hand, I think this is progressing towards a total control of growth and form. At some point, when we really know what we’re doing — ​when we actually know how morphology is handled — ​you will be able to sit down in front of a kind of a Computer Aided Design (CAD) system, and you will be able to draw whatever living creature you want, in whatever functional anatomy you want. It might be for MICHAEL:

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something with an application here on Earth. It might be an organ for transplantation. It might be a creature that you’re going to use in colonizing some far off world. Whatever it’s going to be, you are going to be able to sit down and specify at the level of anatomy, the structure and function of a living creature at the high level, and then this will sort of compile down and let you build the thing in real life.

Right now, we can only do this in a very simple set of few circumstances, but ultimately if we really knew how this worked, we would be able to have complete control. People talk about constraints on morphogenesis and on development. I think those are constraints on our thinking, not on the actual cells themselves. I think you should be able to build pretty much anything within the laws of physics. Almost anything.

You talk about not wanting to micro­ manage the cells, but you’re sort of shaping the CHRISTINA:

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growth, you’re facilitating and influencing it.

What do you mean when you say control?

To use another super-​anthropomorphic phrase, I think our goal is to convince the cells to do what we want them to do. Your goal is to exploit the computational capacity of the system, and to understand how it is that you communicate your goals to the growing tissue. We’re already starting experiments on basically behavior-​shaping the tissue with rewards and punishments. Humans have figured out over 10,000 years ago that we don’t have any idea how the animal works inside.

But what we do know is that if you give it rewards and punishments you can achieve outcomes that you like. This ability of living things to change their behavior, to make their world better, is ancient, and that’s how rewards and punishments work. This probably works all the way down. Your goal is to convince the system to do what you want it to do not to try to build it up brick by brick.

MICHAEL:

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It’s a top down view of control. Your goal is to specify the end goal, and let the system figure out how to get there. That works very well with systems that have the necessary IQ. So that might work with your kids, and it might work with various other animals. It doesn’t work real well with a cuckoo clock. It just doesn’t, because its hardware system isn’t amenable to that kind of control. As always in science, you have to figure out when these kinds of approaches are appropriate and when are they not. There’s a large class of systems where that’s useless, and a massive class of biological systems where I think that’s going to be the way to go. I think that’s part of our future.

One thing I think this is showing us is that focusing on the brain as the source of inspiration for machine learning is derived from a very specialized architecture. I’ve been suggesting that a true general purpose intelligence is much more G R O W D I G I TA L | I S D N A H A R D WA R E O R S O F T WA R E ?

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likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning.

CHRISTINA:

Paramecia?

Even before that. Bacteria biofilms.

All that stuff has been solving problems in ways that we have yet to figure out. They’re able to generalize, they’re able to learn from experience with a small number of examples. They make self-models. It’s amazing what they can do. That should be the inspiration. I think the future of machine learning and AI technologies will not be based on brains, but on this much more ancient, general ability of life to solve problems in novel domains.

MICHAEL:

CHRISTINA:

Bacterial intelligence.

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Exactly. And not just bacterial — ​individual cells building an organ and being able to figure out how to get to the correct final outcome from different starting positions, despite the fact that you went in there and mixed everything around. I think a lot of our true general AI in the future is going to come from this sort of work on basal cognition.

I guess my theme is consistent. I think we need to step back from any kind of uniqueness of the human condition, and try to generalize it more and more broadly. We need to take evolution seriously.

MICHAEL:

This conversation is Part 1 of Grow’s coverage of xenobots. Continue reading Part 2, “The Lab Philosopher,” where we interview Harvard ethicist and philosopher Jeantine Lunshof on the long-term ethical and the philosophical implications of the discovery.

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c o n tac t t h e r e s e a r c h e r s

Michael Levin Director, Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University Associate Faculty, Wyss Institute at Harvard University drmichaellevin.org | @drmichaellevin

author

Christina Agapakis is a biologist, writer, and artist. She is Creative Director at Ginkgo Bioworks.

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Grow is a magazine that tells the unfolding story of synthetic biology, published by Ginkgo Bioworks and edited by Massive Science.

Ginkgo Bioworks uses the most advanced technology on the planet — ​biology — ​to help companies grow better products. Our cell programming platform allows us to design custom microbes, everything from materials to food to therapeutics. We power our labs with software and automation in order to widen our view of the biodiversity and the possibilities that nature holds.

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