Good day, our dear readers! Before I start talking about serious things, I want to remind you of a cult movie. According to the scenario, a biorobot assassin in human guise pursues a girl with the aim of killing her while a soldier tries to save her life in every possible way. Both the soldier and the biorobot arrived from 2029 (that is already close) to the nowadays far and quite 1984. Didn’t you guess? So, here is another hint: “I’ll be back!”. Yes, yes, James Cameron’s “The Terminator” with the amazing Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn and Arnold Schwarzenegger as key stars. It was a great movie about time travel, technological wars, romantic love and, of course, biorobots.
The issue of biorobots has long ceased to be something special in science fiction literature and cinema (Robocop, Iron Man, Azimov’s Bicentennial Man, Dan Brown’s Origin, and many others), and also in modern science and medicine. For example, the implantation of mechanical or electronic regulators and prostheses into a living organism has returned millions of people with serious hearing problems, vision, heart failure, even problems in the musculoskeletal system and lost limbs, to de facto healthy life. There are a lot of examples. The Internet is full of reports about such developments, that are certainly great!
However, there is also the flip side of the coin – in pursuit of superiority (for militaristic, industrial or even sporting goals), implantation of electronic devices and chips into a healthy human body takes a person farther and farther away from his/her native state, and, ultimately, can lead to terrible consequences. Bioethics should be on guard, but with the beginning of the era of cloning, the boundaries of permissiveness become more and more blurred.
Nevertheless, the above-mentioned developments relate to the healing methodology of implantation of artificial objects into the person’s body. But it is a completely different matter when we mention the purposeful change in human biological settings (from biochemical modifications to genetic transformation). If you are curious, please google the word “biohacking”. So, the next logical step of such evolution will be the creation of a living organism which is genetically reprogrammed to perform certain tasks, in other words, a biorobot created exclusively from living biomass. Similar to the heroes of Arthur C. Clark, Frankenstein’s monster, the Prince Charming from the ironic novel “Bring Me the Head of the Prince Charming” by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley, or Igors from Terry Pratchett’s books…
Why am I telling you about all these issues and scaring you with such futuristic horror stories? Because on January 13, 2020, a new era in the history of mankind officially began! On this day, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal published the article “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms” by Sam Kriegman (University of Vermont), Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin (both from Tufts University and Harvard University), and Josh Bongarda (University of Vermont). The authors introduced the concept, technology and tool-kit for a mass production of novel lifeforms with the predicted (programmed) functional behaviors.
The scientists designed stable multicellular structures to perform some desired function, and then created them using pluripotent stem cells from the embryos of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis). Artificial intelligence (AI) methods automatically designed diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function (a kind of natural selection), and life-forms were then created using a cell-based construction toolkit. In addition, the researchers incorporated the precursor cells of cardiomyocytes (cardiac muscle cells) into the “organisms” to obtain contractile movements. You can read and see more details (there is a video as well) at https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/01/07/1910837117 and https://cdorgs.github.io/.
Finally, the scientists created a variety of three-dimensional lifeforms with programmed design and functioning (the activity and locomotion of the “organism”, as well as the collective behavior of its constituent cells) that can survive for a period of days or weeks without additional nutrients. The obtained results of the “vital activity” of these organisms, as well as the management of such structures, are perfectly consistent with theoretical algorithms and models of their behavior. In simple words, the researchers created a real multicellular biorobots built exclusively from living cells.
No doubts that this work has a huge scientific and applied potential. The authors have proposed to use these lifeforms as a novel vehicle for intelligent drug delivery or internal surgery. Moreover, these reconfigurable organisms could serve as a unique model system facilitating work in the evolution of multicellularity, exobiology, artificial life, basal cognition, and regenerative medicine.
On the other hand, Kriegman, Blackiston and their colleagues (for own reasons) did not aim testing the possibility of self-learning and self-reproduction of the obtained bioforms; however, the acquisition of such functions is, of course, possible (especially considering the use of stem cells with multipotency). Naturally, such programming depends on the desire and goals of the researchers. So, with this study, the authors have opened up a kind of Pandora’s box.
In any case, I congratulate all of us on a new stage in the life development on Earth… and let’s everyone will select an emoji (of happiness, irony, disappointment or anger) of his own taste!
Featured image by Arek Socha from Pixabay