Team Builds the First Living Robots

https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/team-builds-first-living-robots

by jonbaer • 7 years ago

87 42 7 years ago

tudorw• 7 years ago

Rare that a headline is so worthy, these are novel living things that are not from nature. Quite an achievement, well done, I think, obviously terrifying and disturbing too, what could possibly go wrong...

1e-99• 7 years ago

It seems they cut up frog embryos and stitched the pieces back together to move in a certain way through involuntary muscle contractions. Maybe I'm being shortsighted, but I have a hard time thinking of this as anything but a rather nauseating bit of Frankensteinian experimentation.

blaeks2• 7 years ago

is current breakthrough this:

"The big question in biology is to understand the algorithms that determine form and function," ?

colordrops2• 7 years ago

How far removed would this have to be from an embryo for you to no longer have an emotional reaction? What if they only used proteins? Do you wear leather?

cmroanirgo• 7 years ago

The article itself is claiming 'Living', which is to state that it is something more than a simple protein chain reaction. However to conflate what's been done here and compare it to wearing leather, just doesn't compute. I don't think anyone would reasonably compare a leather jacket to a Hannibal Lecter style 'skin suit'.

I think the parent post's comment is very astute, as the article mentions how it's taking frog cells and passing electricity through them and calling it alive. How is that not Frankensteinian? It's kind of the definition of it.

There is also the argument of making the assumption that there's an emotional reaction...

Morals and ethics classes are taught in nearly all university degrees these days to try and highlight the issues around this stuff, and I think it unfair to bluntly force it into black and white. For some people it's a question of how deep into the murky quagmire one goes, whereas for others "it's just science" is completely sufficient. But, it's clear that the latter will never have complete approval, nor will the former ever have its way entirely.

For me, I look at this experiment as such: Were any frogs killed in doing this experiment? If so, how is the destruction of a life-form comparable to making a laboratory made one? Do the two actually have the same 'life' in them? Philosophically speaking, I'd say not, and as such I call this experimentation a 'dark pattern' and should be avoided: no matter the perceived marketing benefit.

1e-99• 7 years ago

For me, it would need to not involve the unjustified sacrifice of intelligent life. I believe this is a viewpoint that increases the longterm survival probability of humankind.

taneq• 7 years ago

Makes me think more of The Island of Dr Moreau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau) but yeah. Sounds useful, but ghoulish.

pavlov• 7 years ago

“Cut up embryos and stitched back together” seems like an uncharitable description of a multi-stage microsurgical process where the starting point was only stem cells.

This is the description from the article:

” Then the team at Tufts, led by Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston—transferred the in silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from the embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. (Hence the name "xenobots.") These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.”

1e-99• 7 years ago

...where the starting point was only stem cells.

According to the article, the starting point was embryos.

"Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms."

I don't see much difference between "scraped" and "cut up"... perhaps a nuance of scale.

fsloth• 7 years ago

We can't really yet design organisms on a genetic level to fully control their phenotype. But if we would - and wanted to - something like this seems like a step to that direction.

I'm not sure what you find nauseating about this. If you want muscle and skin cells frog embryos are as fine source as any, I suppose.

1e-99• 7 years ago

If you want muscle and skin cells frog embryos are as fine source as any, I suppose.

There's the issue. I prefer to see us pursue technologies that don't require the harvesting of parts from intelligent life, even if we deem that intelligence to be low or embryonic. Yes, I am aware that we are omnivores, but I believe we can make ourselves into something better. I see this kind of experimentation as a step backwards.

blaeks2• 7 years ago

So, now I imagine a softy squishy and alive bed, breathing living room, and my wires, computers, keyboards, all that old pre-VR hardware finally floating in a living womb. Organic Internauting iz now.

potta_coffee2• 7 years ago

Reminiscent of Dune, which had living "chairdogs".

satori99• 7 years ago

Or Red Dwarf (novel);

    The trend spread. GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere,
    and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue. Gelf 
    armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when 
    you were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life. Gelf vacuum 
    cleaners, which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, 
    waddled around on their squat little legs, doing the household chores and 
    amusing the children. [...]

    The rebellion started in the Austrian town of Salzburg, when a vacuum cleaner
    and Gelf Volkswagen Beetle robbed a high street bank. They took the manager
    and a security guard hostage, agreeing to release them only if Valter Holman
    was brought to justice for murder.

    Valter Holman had killed his armchair, and the whole of the Gelf community
    was up in arms, those that had arms, because the law courts refused to accept
    that a crime had been committed.

ohiovr• 7 years ago

H.R. Giger would dig it.

mattxxx• 7 years ago

Something about this is interesting:

  used an evolutionary algorithm to create thousands of candidate designs for the new life-forms

Basically, "find a way to combine living tissue together to exhibit this behavior"... maybe the beginning of research into designing "meat compilers." x_x

Hydraulix989• 7 years ago

Essentially that’s how nature works, starting at the encoded amino acid level and building itself up to increasingly complex structures and life forms.

type0• 7 years ago

Needs to be huge amounts of military funding for "meat compilers" to create first ever Battletoad automatons.

Accujack• 7 years ago

Nah, genetic algorithms are quite well known, and have been taught in college courses since before 1990 or so. They're very useful for certain things, but they do take a lot of computing power to iterate on... they were once the domain of supercomputers (to produce usable models) but are now able to run on less expensive systems.

tyscorp• 7 years ago

Michael Levin gave a talk about the reprogramming tech used in this around a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

29athrowaway• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

carapace3• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage

Blue goo.

shalasaska• 7 years ago

So when can I expect to be able to order myself my very own Pikachu?

darepublic• 7 years ago

Pretty incredible but could these be programmed to do harm?

carapace3• 7 years ago

Sure. There are already efforts to create "Daleks" from human brain organoids.

fl0under• 7 years ago

Very interesting and exciting work. Michael Levin (one of the scientists in this study) has some amazing things going on in his lab. There is a few talks of him on YouTube, I have seen the following one from May this year

https://youtu.be/4sFpJF0dp8Y

All sorts of work about setting the electrical potential between cells/parts of the body to certain states to induce the desired growth. E.g. growing a eye on the gut of a tadpoles.

carapace3• 7 years ago

Ah! The penny drops! Dr. Michael Levin hinted at these back in his amazing talk: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

This is the true Information Revolution: when we learn to "talk" to the four-billion-year-old nanotech that the world and we ourselves are made of.

jessaustin• 7 years ago

One is reminded of the Primordials from Twig. In that crapsack world, they were considered the most horrible things with which humanity could ever have the misfortune to coexist. Maybe it will work out better IRL!

Team Builds the First Living Robots

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