与塔夫茨大学生物学教授Michael Levin博士的对话，主题围绕生物电（bioelectricity）、细胞集体智能、癌症研究以及形态发生等话题。
节目开场与嘉宾介绍
节目由主持人（未透露姓名）主持，他首先介绍了共同主持人兼首席科学顾问、物理学家Dr. Yu，并对今天的嘉宾——塔夫茨大学生物学教授Michael Levin博士表示热烈欢迎。主持人提到，Levin博士近期在YouTube上因其创新性研究获得了不少关注，出现在多个知名节目中（如Lex Friedman的播客）。主持人对此表示调侃，称Levin博士可能与YouTube算法有“特殊关系”，但随即表示这只是开玩笑，旨在活跃气氛。
主持人提到，Levin博士的研究聚焦于生物电（bioelectricity），这是一个他和Dr. Yu此前探讨过的话题，但他们希望通过Levin博士的视角深入了解其在生物学中的意义。主持人还提到了一些具有争议性的理论（如Rupert Sheldrake的形态场理论），表示自己不关心学术界的政治，而是希望通过节目探索真相，并对Levin博士的先锋研究表示感激。
Levin博士的研究核心：生物电与集体智能
Levin博士首先介绍了他的研究重点：探索不同基质中的智能形式，包括记忆、学习、决策和问题解决能力，涉及的系统包括细胞、组织、器官、黏液霉菌、分子网络以及实验室制造的生物机器人（biobots）。他特别强调“认知胶水”（cognitive glue）的概念，即一组机制和策略，使个体单元（如细胞）能够协同工作，形成一个整体，完成个体单元无法单独实现的功能。
Levin博士以人类大脑为例，解释了认知胶水的功能：大脑中的神经元通过电生理机制（electrophysiology）连接成网络，形成一个统一的个体，拥有计划、记忆、偏好和目标，而这些是单个神经元无法实现的。他进一步指出，生物电不仅是神经系统的特性，它在生命早期（远早于大脑和神经元出现之前）就已经存在。生物电在细胞协同中起关键作用，帮助细胞形成复杂器官、修复组织、抑制癌症、形成胚胎以及再生。
Levin博士提到，他的团队通过研究生物电，试图理解细胞如何形成集体智能，并利用这种理解与细胞集体“沟通”，设定新的目标，以用于医疗目的，例如治疗先天缺陷、促进再生和抑制癌症。
生物电在癌症研究中的应用
主持人询问Levin博士是否直接参与癌症研究，或者只是提出理论假设。Levin博士确认，他的实验室在过去15至20年中一直在进行癌症相关的实验研究。他们发现：
Levin博士强调，癌症的发生不仅是基因问题，更是生理问题，生物电信号在其中扮演了重要角色。
柏拉图空间（Platonic Space）与形态和行为的来源
主持人提到Levin博士提出的“柏拉图空间”概念，询问其含义以及是否与认知胶水相同。Levin博士澄清，柏拉图空间与认知胶水不同，是一个更哲学和理论性的概念。
他解释说，传统上，生物学中关于生物形态和行为模式（patterns of form and function）来源的解释依赖于进化历史，即通过自然选择形成的特定形态和功能。然而，Levin博士的团队通过制造新型合成生物（如用青蛙细胞制造的“异种机器人”xenobots和用成人人类细胞制造的“人类机器人”anthrobots）发现，这些新生物展现出全新的形态和行为，而这些形态和行为并非来自进化选择（因为这些生物从未经历过自然选择）。
这引发了一个问题：如果形态和行为不完全来自进化历史，它们从何而来？Levin博士提出，这些模式可能源自“柏拉图空间”——一个数学家和哲学家（如毕达哥拉斯和柏拉图）提出的概念，指的是一个包含数学、几何和计算规律的抽象空间。这些规律独立于物理世界，不受物理参数（如宇宙大爆炸时的常数）的影响。Levin博士认为，生物学中的形态和行为模式部分来自基因和环境，但也部分来自这些数学规律，即柏拉图空间。
他进一步推测，柏拉图空间不仅包含静态的数学事实（如圆周率π的值），还包含更复杂的、动态的模式，包括不同类型的“心智”（minds）和解剖形态。他认为，生物学（以及生物工程和人工智能）创造的是一种“指针”，指向柏拉图空间中的特定模式，从而形成特定的形态和行为。
生物电作为认知胶水的机制
Dr. Yu询问生物电如何作为认知胶水，以及它在细胞集体中的作用。Levin博士解释说，在大脑中，神经元通过离子通道（ion channels）和电突触（gap junctions）形成电网络，使神经元能够共享信息，执行个体神经元无法完成的复杂计算（如社会目标、财务目标等）。这种电生理机制使神经元形成一个整体，表现出更高层次的智能。
Levin博士进一步指出，这种机制并非神经系统独有，而是非常古老，早在单细胞微生物（如细菌）中就已经存在。细菌生物膜（biofilms）已经利用生物电形成电网络，具备记忆和决策能力。他强调，生物电通过共享记忆和信息，将单个细胞整合成更大的集体，使集体能够完成个体细胞无法实现的目标（如形成器官或再生肢体）。
细胞间的应激共享（Stress Sharing）
主持人提到人类社会中的应激传播（如一个人进入房间时，其紧张情绪会传染给他人），并询问细胞层面是否也有类似机制。Levin博士确认，细胞确实可以通过“应激共享”（stress sharing）机制协同工作，但这通常不涉及电信号，而是一种化学信号传递。
他解释说，生物学的核心是目标导向性（goal-directedness），类似于恒温器的反馈循环：细胞有一个设定点（set point），当偏离设定点时会产生应激（stress），并采取行动以减少误差，恢复到设定点。应激是细胞感知偏离目标的信号。例如，一个细胞可能需要移动到特定位置（如胚胎发育中），但如果周围的细胞已经处于正确位置，它们不会主动帮助。
在这种情况下，处于错误位置的细胞会释放“应激分子”（stress molecules），这些分子会扩散到邻近细胞，使邻近细胞也感受到应激。邻近细胞因此变得更具可塑性（plastic），愿意改变行为以减少应激，从而帮助目标细胞移动到正确位置。这种机制使细胞的个体问题变成集体问题，促进了共同目标的实现。Levin博士强调，应激共享是一种“胶水”，将细胞绑定到共同目标上，且不需要利他主义，是一种进化中非常简单的策略。
生物学的基本原则
Dr. Yu询问生物学的基本原则是什么，希望将其与物理学和化学的基本原则联系起来。Levin博士表示，这是一个极具争议的问题，生物学家对此没有共识。一些人认为自然选择（通过差异繁殖）是生物学的基本原则，但他对此持不同意见。
Levin博士提出，他认为生物学的基本原则是“认知贯穿始终”（cognition all the way down）。他认为，认知不是进化后期（如大脑出现时）才产生的，而是生命的超集（superset），先于生命存在。生物学系统的本质是多尺度架构（multi-scale architecture），其中较小的单元（如分子、细胞）具有小目标（如降低自由能），而更大的系统通过整合这些单元，追求更大的目标。
他引入了“认知光锥”（cognitive light cone）的概念，指的是系统能够追求的最大目标的范围。单细胞的目标很小（如维持pH值），而更大的系统（如人类）可以追求行星尺度的目标（如全球性计划）。Levin博士认为，生物学的核心是这种目标的尺度扩展能力，即通过整合子单元，逐步扩大目标范围。
细胞目标的来源与癌症
Dr. Yu进一步询问细胞的目标是什么，以及这些目标从何而来。Levin博士将这两个问题分开回答：
在癌症中，Levin博士描述了一种目标缩小的现象。正常情况下，细胞通过生物电网络与邻居共享信息，追求集体目标（如形成器官）。但当癌基因（如致癌基因）介入时，细胞会逐渐断开与邻居的电连接（通过关闭gap junctions）。这种断开使细胞能够进行独立计算，减少来自集体的信号影响，从而进一步断开，形成正反馈循环。最终，细胞脱离集体，目标从大尺度（如形成器官）缩小到小尺度（如自身代谢和分裂），导致癌细胞将身体其他部分视为“外部环境”，从而发生转移（metastasis）。
Levin博士强调，癌细胞并非更“自私”，而是它们的“自我”（self）缩小了，从整个组织缩小到单个细胞。
生物电操控与医疗应用
主持人提到一些国家和地区使用电场疗法（如穿戴带有电压的背心）治疗癌症，询问Levin博士是否了解这种方法。Levin博士表示，他不了解具体产品，但指出外部电场疗法与他的研究不同。他的团队研究的是细胞内部的生物电信号，而不是外部施加的电场。
他解释说，细胞通过离子通道自然产生电位差，形成特定的空间模式（spatial patterns），这些模式指导细胞行为（如形成器官）。Levin博士的团队通过药物（pharmacology）或光遗传学（optogenetics）操控这些离子通道，以改变电模式，进而影响细胞行为。例如，他们可以在动物模型中通过调整电模式诱导额外的眼睛、心脏或肢体。
Levin博士提到，外部电场（如电场疗法）可以影响细胞行为，例如使细胞沿电场方向移动（某些细胞偏向正极，某些偏向负极），这在伤口愈合中可能有用。但这种方法是“粗糙的工具”（blunt tool），只能提供单一信息（如方向），而无法产生复杂的模式（如指定器官类型、大小或手指数量）。他认为，未来可能有人会开发出更精确的电场操控技术，但目前这超出了现有技术能力。
光遗传学与实际应用
Dr. Yu询问如何用光激活离子通道，以及这种方法是否适用于人体（因为光无法穿透人体）。Levin博士解释说，光遗传学是一种实验室技术，依赖于光敏离子通道（如视紫红质，rhodopsins），这些通道通常来自视网膜或细菌。人类细胞通常不具备这些通道，因此需要通过基因工程将光敏通道引入实验动物。
他承认，光确实无法深入穿透人体组织（即使使用远红光，穿透深度也有限）。因此，光遗传学目前主要用于动物实验，而非人类治疗。Levin博士认为，未来的医疗应用更可能依赖药物（pharmacology），因为许多药物可以直接作用于离子通道，且成本低廉（约20%的现有药物是离子通道药物，许多已过专利期，价格便宜）。
再生医学与人类再生能力的局限
主持人提到儿童手指尖再生和蝾螈肢体再生的现象，询问人类为何难以实现类似蝾螈的再生能力。Levin博士确认，儿童确实可以再生手指尖，这是一个已知现象。他还提到某些哺乳动物（如鹿）的再生能力：鹿每年脱落鹿角后，可以以每天1.5厘米的速度再生骨骼、血管、神经和皮肤，表明哺乳动物并非完全缺乏再生能力。
然而，人类（除肝脏外）通常不擅长再生。Levin博士提出一个可能的进化解释：早期哺乳动物（如类似老鼠的祖先）在受伤后（如腿被咬掉），面临出血、感染和持续使用受伤部位的风险（例如在肮脏的森林地面上行走）。在这种环境下，再生可能不切实际，进化更倾向于瘢痕愈合（scarring）策略：通过炎症封闭伤口，杀死细菌，优先确保生存。而蝾螈生活在水环境中，浮力支持身体，无需负重，代谢率低，可以缓慢再生。
Levin博士认为，人类胚胎在发育过程中已经展示了构建人体的能力，这些再生机制可能仍然存在。如果能激活这些机制，人类可能实现更强的再生能力，这也是他研究的目标。
生物电与人类行为的关联
主持人提到人类行为的模仿理论（Rene Girard的mimetic theory），询问Levin博士的研究是否与之相关。Levin博士表示不熟悉Girard的具体工作，但他认为，所有活性主体（active agents，包括生物和非生物）都通过对数学、计算等基本规律的依赖而相互连接。他将这种连接比喻为“垂直下降”（vertical descent），类似于进化树的根，表明所有生命形式共享这些基本模式。
癌症免疫疗法
Dr. Yu询问是否可以通过激活杀伤性T细胞（killer T cells）来抑制癌症。Levin博士确认，这是一个活跃的研究领域——癌症免疫学（cancer immunology）。许多研究者致力于利用免疫系统识别和杀死癌细胞。然而，挑战在于癌细胞并非外来物质，而是自身细胞，拥有相同的表面标记（epitopes），因此免疫系统难以区分癌细胞和正常细胞。如果识别错误，免疫系统可能攻击正常细胞，导致严重后果。Levin博士对此领域表示乐观，认为未来可能取得重要进展。
节目结束
主持人感谢Levin博士的分享，表示通过这次对话，观众得以了解生物电、集体智能和再生医学的前沿研究。Levin博士也感谢主持人和Dr. Yu的邀请，表示很高兴参与讨论。节目在友好的氛围中结束。
总结
这场对话深入探讨了生物电在细胞集体智能、形态发生和癌症抑制中的作用。Levin博士提出了“认知胶水”和“柏拉图空间”等概念，强调生物电不仅是能量来源，更是指导细胞行为的复杂模式。他还讨论了应激共享机制、生物学的基本原则（认知贯穿始终）、癌症中目标缩小的现象，以及再生医学的潜力。Levin博士的研究为理解生命系统和开发新型疗法提供了新的视角。
Edit:2025.04.04
本期节目邀请了塔夫茨大学生物学教授 Michael Levin 博士，深入探讨了生物电等前沿科学话题。节目伊始提到了 Levin 博士近期在多个平台上的广泛关注度，并表达了对学习其独特见解的期待。节目强调了探索科学真理的开放态度，即使面对一些存在争议的理论，也应保持学习和探究。
Levin 博士首先介绍了其研究团队的核心方向，即在各种不同基质中研究不同类型的智能，包括细胞、组织、器官、黏菌、分子网络以及他们制造的生物机器人（如异种机器人 Xenobots 和人类机器人 Anthropobots）等。研究重点关注“认知胶水”（cognitive glue）——一套能让部分协同工作以形成更大整体的机制，这个整体能完成单个部分无法完成的任务。他指出，生物电是这种认知胶水的一种重要形式，它在生命早期就已存在，远早于神经系统。通过研究生物电，团队旨在理解细胞如何聚集形成复杂器官、修复损伤、抑制癌症、形成胚胎及再生。最终目标是能够与细胞的集体智能交流，施加有益的新目标，用于治疗疾病、修复缺陷和使癌细胞正常化。
在癌症研究方面，Levin 博士确认其实验室进行了大量工作。他们发现可以在动物模型中早期探测到肿瘤形成的区域；证明了仅通过扰乱细胞间电信号就能诱导类似癌症的状态，无需致癌物或基因突变；并且，即使存在致癌基因，通过调控生物电也能抑制肿瘤形成，使细胞表现正常。这强调了生理学在癌症发生发展中的主导作用。
随后，讨论转向了“柏拉图空间”（platonic space）的概念。Levin 解释这并非认知胶水，而是关乎生物形态和功能模式的来源。对于自然生物，其模式通常归因于进化选择。但对于他们创造的新型合成生物（如 Xenobots），其模式无法用进化解释。Levin 引用了古希腊哲学中关于数学模式影响物理世界的思想，提出这些独立于物理现实的数学、几何、计算等模式存在于柏拉图空间。他推测，这个空间可能还包含更复杂的、类似于心智和解剖形态的“活动形式”。因此，生物体的模式不仅源于遗传和环境，还部分源于这些来自柏拉图空间的数学定律。当这些模式（如心智模式）进入物理世界并互动时，意识可能是从“另一侧”体验到的感觉。
物理学家 Dr. Yu 就认知胶水和生物电机制提出了疑问。Levin 博士再次阐述了生物电通过离子通道和间隙连接形成网络，使细胞（如同神经元）能够共享信息、进行集体计算，从而实现超越单个细胞能力的目标。这种机制在进化上非常古老，甚至细菌生物膜就已在使用。
关于“压力共享”（stress sharing）这一认知胶水形式，Levin 博士解释说，这是一种（目前认为非电学的）机制，用于统一集体目标。生物系统具有目标导向性，通过稳态环路运作。压力是偏离目标状态的信号。当一个细胞处于错误状态（如位置错误）而产生压力时，它可以将压力信号分子泄露给邻居。邻居感知到压力后，也会变得更具可塑性，愿意采取行动帮助集体降低压力，从而使偏离的细胞得以归位或实现集体目标。
Dr. Yu 尝试从物理学角度理解生物学的基本原理。Levin 博士坦诚科学界对此尚无共识，但他个人认为“认知贯穿始终”（cognition all the way down）是核心原理。即认知并非高级生物的专利，而是先于生命存在，生命是擅长扩展其组成部分目标范围（认知光锥 cognitive light cone）的系统。从分子到细胞再到复杂生物，目标尺度不断扩大。
关于细胞的目标，Levin 博士指出，除了生存和复制，还包括维持特定稳态（pH、电压、代谢、形状等），甚至可能包括成为更大集体目标的一部分。癌症可以被理解为细胞与集体“断开连接”的过程，其“自我”范围缩小，目标从服务于整体变为只关心自身生存和增殖。健康组织具有抑制机制，会试图通过电信号将异常细胞“正常化”。他用诱导异位眼的实验说明了集体目标模式（如“成为皮肤”）与局部异常模式（如“成为眼睛”）之间的竞争。
在讨论如何调控生物电时，Levin 博士强调他的研究并非施加外部电场，而是通过药物或光遗传学手段，精确控制细胞自身的离子通道开闭，从而改写内源的、具有复杂指令意义的生物电模式。外部电场是相对“钝”的工具，主要影响细胞迁移方向，难以精确设定复杂的器官形成模式。他预测未来医学应用将更依赖药理学方法，因为许多离子通道药物已存在且廉价，而光遗传学面临光敏通道引入和光穿透深度两大难题。
关于再生能力，Levin 博士解释了儿童指尖再生的现象，并推测哺乳动物（除鹿茸外）再生能力普遍较差可能与陆地生活方式有关，快速疤痕化比缓慢再生在进化上更有优势。但他相信，构建身体的程序依然存在，未来有望通过激活这些程序实现更广泛的再生医学。
对于激活 T 细胞治疗癌症的免疫疗法，Levin 博士肯定了其作为重要研究领域，但也指出了核心挑战在于如何让免疫系统精确区分并杀死源于自身的癌细胞，同时避免攻击正常细胞。
整个对话深入浅出地介绍了 Michael Levin 博士关于生物电、集体智能、形态发生、癌症以及生命基本原理的前沿思考和实验工作，强调了生物系统内在的信息处理和目标导向性。
Edit:2025.04.04
00:00
All right, so we're going to have a fun conversation on our Science & U! segment that we do. As always, joining me is my co-host, our chief science advisor for our program, physicist Dr. Yu. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, it's nice. And it's great to see you as always, but we are really excited for our guest today, who is a professor at biology at Tufts University, Dr. Michael Levin. How are you doing?
00:30
Good. Hi, nice to meet you. Great. Now, you've been getting a nice algorithm boost. I don't know who you talk to at YouTube, but you've been getting lots of suggested videos. Every time I'm on YouTube, it's Lex Friedman, it's all these different programs interviewing you, and you've got some quite interesting ideas. I'm looking forward to talking to you. Thanks so much. Yeah, happy to talk to you. I know nothing about YouTube or the algorithm. Yeah, I know. I'm teasing you. I'm being facetious. So, I'm trying to…
00:59
break the ice there. Um, but, uh, anyways, I, I think it's a fascinating topic, the topic of bioelectricity, which we wanted to have you on. I, it's something that, uh, Dr. You and I have explored in different fields and different guests. And, uh, I I'm looking forward to learning your insights into this. You know, I know that there's folks out there who I've talked to like, uh,
01:23
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who's proposed morphic fields. And I know that he gets, you know, derided in a lot of circles, but I don't really care. You know, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to play politics and academia. That's not my world. I'm here to learn the truth and explore it. So I'm, I'm grateful for the opportunity to, to hear from pioneering scientists such as yourself. So for those who are not familiar, I want to dive into some, some of the,
01:48
implications of your work, but in general, what has been the distinctive focus of your research at your university?
01:59
Well, my group fundamentally works on different kinds of intelligence in various substrates. So we look at memory learning, decision making, problem solving in all kinds of unfamiliar substrates. So cells, tissues, organs, slime molds, molecular networks, various kinds of biobots that we make, all these different things.
02:21
And one kind of very important phenomenon is that of cognitive glue, which are basically just a set of policies and mechanisms that allow parts to work together towards some kind of a large scale hole that does things that the individual parts don't do.
02:37
So in our brain, the reason that you and I are not a pile of neurons, but something more than that is that there is this cognitive glue mechanism, aka electrophysiology, which binds the neurons together into a coherent being that has plans, memories, preferences, goals, and so on that no individual cell has.
02:54
So bioelectricity actually does this very widely across life. It was here long before brains and muscles and neurons and those kinds of things appeared. And so that's one reason that we study bioelectricity is to understand how it is that cells come together to form complex organs, to repair them, to suppress cancer, to form embryos, to regenerate.
03:17
And once we understand how that works, we can then communicate with that collective intelligence of cells, impose novel goals that will be useful for healing, for repairing birth defects, for normalizing cancer and things like that. Yeah, I've heard, I've seen some of your talks about the implications for cancer. Are you doing research in cancer yourself or just proposing, you know, theoretical work or where does that stand for you?
03:42
Oh, no, absolutely. We do. Yes, of course, we do research in cancer. We've shown over the last 15 to 20 years, we've shown that in animal models, you can detect regions where tumors are going to form early before they become histologically apparent. We've shown that you can induce, for example, something that looks very much like metastatic melanoma in an organism without any kind of
04:06
carcinogens or mutations or DNA damage or any of that simply by disrupting the specific electrical communication between cells. And most importantly, we've shown in these animal models that if you do put in nasty human oncogenes, things like KRAS mutations and so on, you can actually suppress tumor formation by managing the bioelectrics of the cells correctly.
04:28
It doesn't kill the cells, doesn't fix the mutation, but it basically, it's the physiology that drives, it's not the genetics that drives. And so despite some of these genetic defects, you can still get perfectly normal cells out of it. So yes, this is, we do, you know,
04:44
you know, the vast majority of my lab does experimental work. And you also mentioned this platonic space concept. This is something that we hear about in philosophy, but this is something that you think is very real. What is that? Is that, is that a synonym for the cognitive glue or something else? No, it's not the cognitive fluid, something else. Um,
05:03
Typically, when you look at any kind of a living organism, a standard natural living organism, and we ask why does it have the shape that it has? Why does it have certain behavior? So in other words, patterns of form and function, right? Different patterns, anatomical and behavioral patterns. And you ask, why does it have these specific patterns? The answer is usually, well, evolutionary history. In other words, eons of selection for a specific form and function.
05:30
The reason I've started speaking about patterns from the platonic space recently is that we can now make novel synthetic beings. And so, of course, people have made chimeras and various biobots before. We make something called xenobots, which are made out of frog cells. We make anthropobots that are made out of adult human cells.
05:51
And all of these novel creatures, they have new forms, they have new behaviors, they have new capabilities. We can talk about that if you want.
06:00
But the answer to where did those come from is not evolutionary selection because there have never been any xenobots. There have never been any anthropos. Nobody got selected to be a good anthropo or a good xenobot. So the question becomes if we can't infer the possible forms and functions of beings from their evolutionary history, where do they come from? And the question of where do patterns come from is
06:26
pretty deep and it's been studied for thousands of years. And so Pythagoras and Plato had already seen that there are these mathematical patterns, facts of mathematics, facts of number theory, facts of geometry, things like that, that matter in the physical world. They guide things that happen in the physical world. Biology exploits them all the, you know, all the time. And we could talk about some examples of how that works. But these are, the thing about these patterns is
06:52
is that they are not determined by any facts of the physical world. In other words, you know, there are specific facts about numbers, about the way that mathematical objects relate to each other that would not change, even if you changed all the different constants at the beginning of the Big Bang, right? So this is a view that many, not all, but many mathematicians kind of adopt is this platonic view where these are facts that are,
07:21
independent from the reality and from the parameters of the physical world. They do not derive from the structure of the physical world, nor can you change them by anything you do in the physical world. And so the space of those kinds of patterns, the mathematicians call it a platonic space. My more recent
07:39
attempts to develop a formalism for understanding where the form and function of new beings comes from, basically links to those ideas and suggests, and this is very, of course, this is very speculative and so on, but
07:53
What I suggest is that that platonic space has not only the facts of mathematics and geometry and computation and things like that, but it also has much more complex active forms that we would recognize as kinds of minds and kinds of anatomical forms. And so what we're doing, the question in biology is as to where does this specific activity
08:16
set of shapes and behaviors comes from? Well, partly genetics, partly environment, but partly something else, which is neither of those things. And that is the laws of mathematics. So there are inputs into biology that come from wherever it is that the laws of mathematics come from. And the standard name for that is the platonic space. Would you say that mathematics is that consciousness proceeds from mathematics or mathematics is an extension of consciousness? Or is that, are we not going…
08:44
We're not determining that yet. Well, yeah, I'm not exactly sure how to answer that question. I mean, I do think that if we're going to add in, okay, so I don't work on consciousness, and I don't talk about consciousness much yet. But if I had to say something about this, I would say that
09:04
Basically, when we have patterns ingressing into the physical world that we recognize as kinds of minds, that is behavioral patterns of behavior, patterns of information processing, behavioral propensities. When these things ingress into the physical world, consciousness is what it feels like from the other side. In other words, standard third person science is what we see from this side. So in the physical world, we can observe these things happening.
09:31
But minds are actually patterns that inhabit this platonic space, and consciousness is what it feels like to be one of those complex patterns when it is interacting in the physical world. That's about as much as I can say about it right now. Dr. Yu, do you have any questions?
09:49
Oh, you know, yeah, the professor said something, you know, very, you combined so many deeper concepts. Can we…
10:05
Can I ask some basic questions? You mentioned about what is called a cognitive fluid, is that right? Glue, like sticking together. Oh, cognitive glue, okay. So I watched some of the video you're talking about, some kind of universe. There's some purpose, right?
10:26
from the cell or from the integration of something. Can you explain what is the bioelectricity? You believe that's the energy how it functions, is that right? Well, specifically what I'm saying is that we know that in
10:50
in the brain, the reason that you and I have thoughts and goals and memories and preferences that our individual neurons don't have is because there is a process that binds all of those neurons together to do computations and other things
11:07
in other spaces to which neurons don't have access to. So for example, you may have social goals, you may have financial goals, you may have all kinds of strategies, planning, memories, and so on in spaces that your individual neurons don't have access to. And the reason that works is because these neurons are combined into a network
11:28
that processes information in a particular way. The thing that allows the network, the neurons to be part of that network is what they call electrophysiology. It's what neuroscientists call electrophysiology. It's the ability to construct an electrical network that can do some very interesting things in particular.
11:45
It can be the substrate for some really interesting patterns of computation and behavior that we call a human or some other kind of personality. Well, if you ask where did that amazing capability come from evolutionarily, it turns out that the way that neurons do this with ion channels, which allow every neuron to have a certain voltage parameter across the membrane, and electrical synapses, which allow them to…
12:10
exchange voltage across the network so the voltage can propagate through that through that network. They have a special electrogenic machinery meaning they have ion channel proteins on their surface which allows them to have a certain voltage state. They have electrical synapses known as gap junctions which allow that voltage to propagate through the network under specific rules.
12:28
And if we ask where that amazing machinery came from, we find that through evolution, it's actually extremely ancient. So it goes all the way back to unicellular microbes. So bacteria already and bacterial biofilms were already using bioelectricity. So the ability to form electrical networks that have memories to make decisions and so on. Already bacterial biofilms were doing this.
12:51
So what I'm interested in is the role of these electrical networks in merging individual subunits like cells into larger scale collectives. And so now we have we have now seen how how that actually works and how the bioelectrics allows cells to share memories. And when they share enough memories in a particular configuration, you end up with a larger scale collection.
13:15
computational system, which can do things that no individual cell can do. So that's why I call bioelectricity the, a kind of cognitive glue. It is not the only kind. There are other kinds of cognitive glue. There is stress sharing. There are certain bio, you know,
13:29
biochemical signals, there's other ways to do it. But bioelectricity is a very convenient way of doing it, which is why evolution uses it for neuroscience, for neural function. It's why we use it for our computational technologies. It's just a very convenient modality. You mentioned stress sharing, and I heard you mention you could maybe talk to our audience about how cells can share stress.
13:53
From an intuitive standpoint, you think about that in human beings, if someone walks in very stressed out into a room, they can share contagiously that stress. There's some various forms of communication, not just expressing a stressful attitude or whatever in words or something. Just the vibe, you know, people call that the vibe shift or something. Something's off. This person seems irritated or stressed. So I'm just thinking of that from the social standpoint.
14:20
But from the cellular standpoint, what do you think is the sheer stress and what's the mechanism that allows that to happen? Is that an electrical…
14:28
Well, stress sharing doesn't have to be electrical as far as we know. It probably is not electrical, but it's a very important mechanism for binding cells together towards common purpose. And what I mean by that is the key thing that underlies most of what's interesting about biology is goal-directedness. It's the ability for cells and even subcellular components to
14:53
to do a kind of loop where there's, it's basically a homeostatic loop. It's like your thermostat. There's a set point. You measure the state. If the state is different, then you take actions to get that error as small as you can. And when you reach the set point, you can stop working until it drifts off again. So that ability is really important. And so what happens, the thing that drives that loop is the mechanisms where
15:19
the further you are away from your goal or away from your set point, the higher the stress level is. So stress is a way to integrate and respond to the fact that you're away from your desired set point. Let's say it's for a cell that might be for pH or hunger level, or there's a million different things that could be off in the cell. So what you can imagine is imagine a
15:43
As a simple example, imagine that there's a field of cells here and there's a cell down at the bottom. And what it's trying to do is get up to the top. And the cells typically know their positional information because there are cues in their environment that tell them where they are. And so let's say there's cells in the bottom that needs to get up here. Now, all of the cells in between there, if they are in their correct positions, they're not going to move.
16:09
or they're not going to do anything to let the cell get up there because for them, their stress is very low. They are exactly where they're supposed to be. And it's very hard to get them to do anything else because they're in their correct positions. But now one thing you can do is as that one cell that's in the wrong position, one thing it can do is it can start leaking its stress molecule. And what I mean by stress molecules are all the way back from the beginning of cellular life,
16:34
There have been specific molecules that are the mediators of the stress of the fact that something is wrong. We're deep. We've gotten away from that happy set point where we're supposed to be. So now if that cell just becomes a little bit leaky to its stress molecule, you can imagine what's going to happen. It's going to leak out. It's going to affect the neighbors. And because the neighbors are using exactly the same molecule to signal to detect their stress, as far as they're concerned, now they're stressed out.
17:00
And so what, right? So by sharing your stress, my problems become your problems. What that means is that these other cells, as they get stressed out, they get more plastic. They're more willing to do new things. And as they get more plastic and start moving around to see what they can do to reduce their stress, now the cell can get up to where it's going. This is just one simple example. There are a million other ways this can work. But the idea is that by sharing the stress,
17:25
It provides, again, it's a notion of glue because what it does is it binds us all to common purpose. Before the stress sharing, those other cells didn't care that you wanted to get up there. They were not sharing your goals. Once you start leaking that stress, now everybody's interested in the exact same goal to get you up there so that everybody's stress can come down. So it's a way to…
17:45
bind multiple subunits towards common purpose in a way that doesn't require altruism or, you know, any of these kinds of mechanisms. It's just a very simple mechanism that evolution can exploit to make sure that multiple subunits are all aligned towards the same goal. Right. Okay, so I think I'm getting a little bit, okay, I try to learn here. So you mentioned about when people has a stress state,
18:13
So the cell is going to have a different position. You said that the cell has to move up.
18:19
So are you talking about the stress caused by the motion of the cell? No, no, I'm and I haven't said anything about people. So I don't I'm not talking about the people here. I'm talking about cells. Imagine the scenarios that we're interested in are where cells build a whole embryo or where they regrow a limb. For example, if a salamander loses the limb, right, the cells will rebuild a limb and then they stop.
18:44
All of those kinds of cases of remodeling, of regeneration, of embryogenesis, metamorphosis, all of those kinds of processes require many, many cells to work together to build something. When you look at an embryo, why do you call it one embryo instead of 100,000 cells at an early stage?
19:02
there's a hundred thousand cells why do we call this one embryo what is there one of well what there's one of is the fact that all of the cells under normal circumstances all of the cells are bound together by the same uh
19:14
uh, plan and journey that they're going to take in anatomical space. They're going to go from being a single cell, the fertilized egg to being a shape of a human or a giraffe or a whale or whatever they're going to be. And the reason that they're an embryo and not just a pile of cells, it's the same reason that we are us and not a pile of neurons is they all share the same goal.
19:32
Sharing goals is what makes for the boundary of a collective. It's when they all share the same goal. And you need some kind of process to enable these active subunits like cells to share the same goal. It could be the memory sharing through electrical networks. It could be stress sharing through diffusible signals. There are probably many other ways to do it, but you need them all to be aligned towards the same goal. And so what I'm saying is the reason that cell at the bottom there in my example, and there's many other examples that we could say,
20:01
The reason that that cell is under stress is because it's in the wrong position. So stress is what enables all of the cells to figure it to, to eventually land in the correct configuration, to be a proper body of a proper structure cells that find themselves in the wrong position.
20:17
they know they're in the wrong position and that's stressful to them. And morphogenesis is a kind of stress reduction scheme. So for example, if you take a salamander and you take the tail and you graft it onto the side, the flank of a salamander, over time, what happens to that tail is that it remodels into a limb. It becomes a limb, which is right. And so the individual cells, now imagine that tail, right? So here's the end of the, here's the tip of the tail, the cell sitting at that tip of the tail,
20:45
they're locally fine. They're tail tip cells sitting in the tail. Why should they change? But they become fingers over time. And they change because all of the cells are, there's a propagating large scale propagating signal that says to them, you are in the position where you are, you should be a different structure. And that's why they act. They don't just sit there. They spend energy. Many of them will actually die. Many of them will divide, but they'll do all these amazing things in order to reduce the error
21:13
And the error, if you're sitting in the flank of a salamander, you shouldn't be a tail, you should be a limb. And so the ability to store a set point, a large scale set point, like we're not just a bunch of cells, we are a tail or we are a forelimb or a hind limb, whatever we are. The ability to store that set point is what bioelectric networks allow. They allow you to have a memory of what you're supposed to be. And they also allow the cells to work together to implement that particular goal.
21:40
Okay, so I think I'm going to understand a little bit more. You know, I'm a physicist background and I'm a founder of the called the U.N. theory of everything. I believe that's the theory can supposed to can express any foundation, any fundamental physical principles in the world.
22:01
So from my point of view, can you tell me what's the fundamental principle in biology? What is it in your field? So I try to use that one, try to see if you can bring me higher from basic physical principles. And I know a fundamental chemistry principles, but now to biology is one step higher. So what is the fundamental principle for biology?
22:30
And you can teach me that one, and then we can graduate. Let me see if I can find out if you have any questions related. I can use that principle to educate myself. Yeah, well, you've asked a very difficult and controversial question. The fundamental principle of biology, I think, is…
22:53
You will not get any agreement on this among the scientists. I think we are still looking for it. I will tell you what I think, but it's somewhat of a controversial opinion and I'm not sure that how many biologists will actually agree with it, but I've not seen a better version. I mean, some people will say that it's something like natural selection through differential reproduction. So evolution, basically some people will say that's a basic principle.
23:21
I don't think that's the basic principle. So what I think is the most useful basic principle is
23:28
basically cognition all the way down. In other words, I think that cognition is not something that arises late in evolution when brains show up. I think cognition is a superset of life. I think cognition came first. And I think that biology, things we call life are just things that are very good at scaling up the size of the goals of their parts. So when you have
23:54
very simple things like particles or molecular networks that operate inside of cells. You know, you have molecular pathways and molecules interacting.
24:06
Those kinds of things have very tiny goals, basically free energy reduction and active inference and things like that. They have very tiny little goals. But biology is what we call systems where there is a multi-scale architecture where they form larger and larger systems where each system has the capacity to work towards bigger goals.
24:26
So eventually, I call the radius of these goals, I call it the cognitive light cone, which is just the size of the biggest goal that you can pursue. So molecules and cells pursue very tiny goal states, but the bigger you get, you start to see systems with bigger and bigger potential goals until you get to humans, which can have enormous planetary scale goals, both in time and space.
24:53
And various other smaller ones. So it's that ability to join into subunits that scale the cognitive light cone. I think that is the fundamental nature of life. So you said that this biology, so in this case, it's driven. You know, the growth of the body is driven by the goals. And what kind of goal do you have?
25:20
is for the other cell and for biology beings. So what are these goals? Where do they come from? Well, those are two separate questions. What they are and where they come from are two separate questions. So what are they? I can give you some examples. So for example, for a single cell, like a unicellular organism, the goals are going to be things like a specific pH range, a specific pH.
25:46
a voltage state of the membrane, a specific metabolic state, a specific shape, meaning tension around a certain degree of tension around the membrane. They're going to be these very small things, basically at the level of a single cell, that are the goals that it needs to meet in order to survive. When you have a group of cells, they might have very large goals. For example, in a salamander, there's a group of cells whose goal it is to make a limb with five fingers. The
26:16
No individual cell knows what a finger is. No individual cell knows how many fingers you're supposed to have. But the collective absolutely does. Because if you amputate that limb, the collective will very quickly regrow, right? And within a few weeks, you will get a perfect limb with the right number of fingers and then it stops. This is how you know it has a goal because if you deviate it from that goal, right? So this is a very cybernetic definition of goals. You deviate it from the set point and it works really hard to get back and then it stops when it reaches it. Yes, I have a…
26:45
Let's see if my interpretation of that goal. So that goal, so if you have a symmetric, right, limbs, if one limb is off, is that possible the goal for the other limb just copy the other, the healthy limb, because you want to maintain the symmetry? Is that possible? Yeah.
27:08
Interesting point. So on the one hand, I would say no, because you can amputate both limbs and they still regrow fine. However, however, it is true that we discovered this a few years ago. If I have a froglet with two legs like this and I amputate one leg,
27:29
there's a particular bioelectrical state that exists at the wound. Okay. Within 30 seconds, the other leg, which we never touch at the same location shows the same bioelectrical state.
27:42
Now, I don't know why. In other words, I'm not sure it's necessary. I'm not sure if they're communicating or not, but it's clear that some information here is not local, that the wound information of one leg was known by the other leg. Does the regeneration use the information from the other leg? I'm not sure. It doesn't seem like it because, like I said, you can cut off both and they both regenerate, so I'm not sure it's that simple. But I just want to say it is true that they pass information locally
28:11
you know, that way. So maybe there's something else going on like that. - So basically you mentioned about the two types. So whether symmetry, you know, okay. Another is a genetic, you know, like a DNA, right?
28:26
your different embryos, so your different embryos grow up, it just looks, exactly looks like a mom, right? All the information encoded in that embryos. Am I right? Yes and no. This is a tricky thing. So on the one hand,
28:44
certainly there are features and disease states that are past genetic, what they call past genetically, meaning that your children look like you more than they look like random people. And you can have certain diseases that are passed in families. This is of course, this is absolutely true. So there is, there is important information passed in the genome, but it is also important to realize that, um,
29:07
For example, when we make anthrobots, so anthrobots are these amazing little creatures that run around and do various interesting things. They're made from normal human cells with the completely normal human genome.
29:20
So if I give you the genomic information and it says homo sapiens 100%, you can't tell me if I got that from a human body or from an anthropod or from something else. The current way that I now, and some other people are now starting to think about this, is that
29:38
the information in the genome is a kind of generative model. It's a prompt. It's a set of cues that are given to the physiology of the cellular collective, and the cells will do their best to interpret parts of that information, to use it how they want. It's a creative problem-solving process. How we used to think is that the genetics determines what happens, that it's a kind of driver for what happens.
30:04
I think much more likely is that it's a set of prompts and a set of resources that the physiology of the cellular collective is using because we see under novel circumstances, the exact same genome can do many different things.
30:21
And it's not under standard circumstances. It will give you, you know, dogs will have puppies and cats will have kittens. Yes. Under standard circumstances, but under novel circumstances, that same genetic information will be used in new and creative different ways to make something completely different. So.
30:37
It's kind of tricky. It definitely has useful information, but it is not a determinant of what happens. And you cannot, by looking at the genome, the genome doesn't directly specify anatomical features. You can't look at the genome and see anything that says two eyes or that you're going to have eyes or what symmetry, that it's a bilateral symmetry or threefold symmetry. You can't see any of that in the genome. What you see in the genome are protein sequences.
31:01
right, the structures of the hardware, the tiny hardware that every cell gets to have. But then it's the physiological software that runs on that hardware that makes the decisions. And under normal circumstances, you see the same thing, but in new scenarios, you will see something quite different. So you said there's a software. Oh, okay. So in summer term, so the goal of a cell
31:30
Is that the goal of a cell is to try to survive, is to try to duplicate itself, like split the two? Is that a goal for a single cell or you have something more than that goal? No, I think, well, I think there's more, I think there's more to it because, because many cells will preferentially die instead of they, they will kill themselves instead of dividing in half. I, I, I,
31:55
we don't know all of the goals of the cell. And the critical point that I make is that you can't just know these by thinking about it. You have to do experiments. So the way you detect goals is by deviating cells from what they're doing and seeing how hard they work to get back to what they wanted to do. So we know some of these homeostatic loops. I'm sure we don't know all of them. For example, I think that it really is one of the goals of cells to be part of a larger collective goal.
32:23
goals, cells love to be part of a part of a group, they love to join the until this until things get really bad, you know, there's poisoning or serious stress or something they can leave. And this is part of what happens in cancers that cells actually disconnect from the collective mind, they disconnect, and then they go, they become like unicellular organisms. But but so I think some degree of collectivity is also a goal of cells. And then there are many others that we don't know yet. Are they told by the collective to disconnect? Or they do that as a local decision?
32:54
Good question. For sure, they can do it as a local decision. And the way it works is there's a kind of feedback loop. So imagine when you are under normal circumstances in the body, you're a cellular part of this electrical network.
33:10
It's very hard for a cell to do any kind of a calculus about to decide to make decisions. Am I going to stay? Am I going to go? You can't really do that because as you're connected to everybody else, you have this mind meld. So you cannot really have thoughts as an independent cell because all the others are sharing their computations with you. So basically all the computations are around. Are we the right shape? Are we the right size? Have we made the right organ? You know, these large scale things.
33:37
But now imagine that, for example, an oncogene comes in. And one of the first things that oncogenes do is they cause cells to start to disconnect from their neighbors.
33:47
As soon as the cell disconnects a little bit, it becomes easier to have new computations because it's not sharing everything with its neighbors, right? It's not feeling the full influx of the signals from the others. So then you can say, you know what, the cell decides, well, I'm going to try to disconnect even further. So it disconnects more and that allows it to have even more independent thoughts, which means it disconnects more. And so there's this kind of positive feedback loop that once you start disconnecting from that signal,
34:16
from that memory sharing syncytium, then you can make other decisions. And I think that typically happens when…
34:25
when there's a lot of local tissue stress. So cancer, there's a number of ways to have cancer mutations. There are only one of them. And you can imagine that if there is a serious local tissue level stress, cells have an ancient mechanism to disconnect from cells that are poisoned, right? They're called bystander effects. As a cell, you don't want to get poisoned by your neighbor by being too much, too closely connected. If your neighbor has a problem, you want to disconnect. So when tissues are under a lot of stress,
34:51
that can cause cells to electrically decouple. And the more they decouple, the easier it is for them to make new decisions, such as I'm getting out of here, I'm going. And then they leave. And this is metastasis because what happens is
35:03
the scale of the goals shrinks. When you're part of the collective, your goals are huge. It's like, you know, you're making a whole limb, you know, your goals can be centimeters in size. Those are very large goals. When you disconnect that cognitive light cone shrinks, that border between self and world shrinks. And now you have little tiny goals about, you know, my metabolic state, my, so my energy state, my pH, my, am I going to divide as, as you said? And then they're just, then the rest of the body becomes like external environment to them.
35:31
The boundary between where do I end and the outside world begins shrinks. And now, as far as they're concerned, the rest of the body is just the outside world. And they're just an ancient unicellular organism in the outside world. So these cancer cells, it's interesting. They're not more selfish. They just have smaller selves. Their self has actually shrunk. It used to be this large thing, a whole organ or a whole tissue. Now it's shrunk.
35:53
So cells can certainly start that process of disconnection. Whether the rest of the tissue can kick a cell out, so to speak, I suspect that's possible. I can't think of a great example right now, but I'm sure it must be possible for the rest of the tissue to also close off.
36:15
close the electrical connections and disconnect from a cell that's behaving badly. I know one thing that for sure that they try to do is the rest of the cells as a cancer suppression mechanism, the rest of the cells try to normalize each other. So in other words, so we had this set of experiments years ago where we took specific ion channels and we injected them into areas of the body to form an electrical state that says build an eye.
36:42
okay so there's a voltage pattern that says build an eye so when you do that you get an eye and we did this in the tadpole model and so you can put it on the tail you can put an eye you know anywhere anywhere you want
36:52
But what happens then is, so you have these cells, these cells that have a voltage that says we should build an eye. And what they do is try to recruit their neighbors to help them build this eye because we only target a few cells, but you need lots of cells to be an eye. So they recruit their neighbors, you know, like ants and termites, they will recruit their friends to help them solve tasks. So these cells, when they decide that when we push them towards making an eye, they recruit their neighbors.
37:15
But at the same time, their neighbors are trying to push them not to be an eye because as far as their neighbors are concerned, no, you should be normal skin or muscle or whatever the region is. And that's a cancer suppression mechanism. If you have a cell that has a weird voltage, the neighbors are going to try to normalize that voltage through these electrical synapse.
37:33
So what happens is there's like this battle, and it's not a battle of the cells. It's a battle of patterns. It's a battle of goals. You have one pattern that says we should be an eye. There's another pattern that says, no, you should be skin. And basically, it's the patterns that compete. And eventually, one will win. And either you'll have the ectopic eye or you won't. And those patterns are expressed by voltage. Yeah.
37:56
Those patterns are visible to us as, yeah, as spatial distributions of voltage. And we can, now we have the ability to see them directly. So we can, we can see them and we can, we can rewrite them. At least in many cases, we can rewrite them and make other things. We can make, you know, extra hearts and brains and limbs and some other stuff. But they're not, that doesn't mean they are the voltage. That's the expression that we have. Well, that's a very, that's a subtle philosophical question, you know, uh,
38:25
what we, what we have access to, what we observe is the pattern of the voltage and it's the pat and it's the voltage pattern that determines what happens. So by changing the voltage, you can control what happens. But, uh, I think, uh, as we said before, I think what's ultimately driving this are certain facts of mathematics that are, that are, that exist outside of the physics of this world that actually determine, um,
38:49
what kinds of patterns are going to be formed in cells that have specific types of ion channels, right? If you actually ask the question, well, why is it this pattern, not that pattern? The answer eventually boils down to math. You'll just eventually come to much like with touring patterns and chemical signals and embryos. Eventually you just get down to the answer is math is that, that, that ends up being the answer. And one of the reasons why I reached out to you is Dr. You showed me, I guess, uh, some other countries and maybe even here in America, they're doing stuff with, uh,
39:16
wearing garments and things that can help with electrical voltage for cancer. Have you heard of this? I'm sure you're familiar. This sounds like right up what you're talking about. I don't know about any specific products. I will say that, you know,
39:32
Anything is possible, but external application of external electric fields or things like different materials to modify electric fields, all of that, maybe that has effects, but that's not the system that I've just been describing. The system that I've been describing is very difficult to affect with external applications.
39:56
kinds of things like that. And so, you know, I don't know if there are if there are such such devices, maybe, but I don't know anything about. Oh, yes. So there's some kind of standard therapy say they wear a jacket in the back and the front. So they have the applied little voltage difference.
40:18
And, you know, whenever you have a voltage difference, right? And, you know, it creates some kind of basic vibration, emotion. And since you said, you know, apply different voltage, we'll be changing the goal of the cell, which, yeah, I think that's very logical because of the voltage, that's the power, that's the energy. Drive cell grow or drive cell split, you know, develop, right?
40:47
So that's an energy required. However… But just to be clear, sorry, it's not just an energy thing because it's the actual spatial pattern
40:59
Right. It's the same, you know, of course, yes, the information is carried by the by. So, of course, you need energy for sure. If you don't have energy, the whole thing will die. Right. You need energy to to to make the ion pumps go. But it's the it's the you know, there are there are multiple patterns that require the exact same amount of energy. But these patterns have very different meaning to the other cells and they make different organs. So exactly. So it's not a permissive energy thing. It's an instructive patterning thing.
41:28
Right. You know, first of all, you said that you have to apply voltage to… We don't apply any voltage, right? So we never apply any voltage. So what we're external, I mean, people have, there's a very long history of people using applied voltage to make certain kinds of effects. This is not what we're doing. The cells naturally have
41:51
These ion channels that can be opened or closed in different combinations. And this gives rise, according to some laws of mathematics, this gives rise to a specific pattern. It's an excitable medium and it gives rise to two specific patterns. What we do is we open and close the channels. In other words, there's an electrical interface that the cells are already using to talk to each other. And so what we either use optogenetics or we use polygenetics.
42:14
pharmacology, we use different ways to basically control it. Like every cell basically on its surface, it has a bunch of control knobs that we can tune. And it's quite complex. You need a computational simulator to know what to open and what to close, which we have developed. So there's a computational simulator that tells you that if you want a pattern like this, then you're going to need to open and close certain channels. How do you open and close channels?
42:41
There's a number of ways. The easiest way is by pharmacology. So there are drugs that will open and close specific kinds of channels. There are many drugs like that. Also, there's something called optogenetics because some channels can be turned on and off with light. And so this is what the neuroscientists use when they, you know, control neuronal firing with laser light. So we've done that too. We've done that in cancer. We've done it with birth defects. You can…
43:09
you can turn specific channels on and off with light. Okay, so you can turn on with the light. You know the difference between light and electricity is only the oscillation frequency difference and also the energy level are different. So can you turn on and off with electricity?
43:33
You can't turn on and off with applied electricity. You can't turn on and off individual channels. What you can do is
43:42
what you can do is provide long range electric fields. So if I put two electrodes on my system, I will have an electric field and many kinds of cells are very sensitive to these electric fields. And so they will crawl. So for example, one thing, you know, directionally, right? So, so some cells love the positive, some cells love the negative. And so,
44:03
you want to for example neurons are like this if you want to get your neurons and there's some very beautiful people like min zhao and colin mccague and other folks over the years have shown these incredibly beautiful movies where you have cells wandering around in a dish and you you turn on the current and they all start going then you flip the polarity then they all start going this way you know so so in the in the body this is used when you want to direct cells to a particular region um the
44:27
There are natural electric fields that will direct cells, but it's not the same. It's a different sort of phenomenon than to set up a pattern that makes for an organ or a bigger structure like that. Yeah, that's one of the principles of the electrical voltage therapy.
44:45
So if you turn adjustable to the human level, accessible level of voltage, you would align those cells, right? Align those cells because every cell has a voltage, which means it has north and south positive and negative polarities.
45:04
So when you apply external field, the magnet, electromagnetic field, so it will align cell. So it will, I believe it will have some kind of health benefit, you know, make all the cells towards it.
45:18
towards a common direction, common shape, instead of that cancer grow wildly? Yeah, I mean, so first of all, there are some cells that have different polarity on one side and the other, and they can be aligned. There are some cells like that. But the vast majority of cells have the same voltage all the way around. In other words, the voltage is between inside and outside.
45:40
Right. So if you have a if you have a cell, the voltage you measure is like this across. That's great. So it's not here. It's here. Exactly. So the cell cell exactly. Remembering to have a voltage. Exactly. So so most cells have a similar voltage all the way around on the surface. Some cells have different, you know, one end is more positive than the other end.
46:01
And the thing about these applied kinds of fields is maybe there are applications that have health benefits, maybe. But typically, when you do these kinds of things to a complex system, it's much easier to break things than to fix things, right? That's always easier to break things.
46:21
So you have to be really careful because in a system that's using these kinds of signals to orchestrate complex cooperative behavior, it's very simple to introduce signals that are going to confuse cells and so on.
46:38
But I mean, I'm sure it's possible to also have beneficial applications. The trouble is that applied fields are kind of a blunt tool. They provide one bit of information. That way they align. But what the cells really want are complex patterns that are going to say which organ, how big, how many fingers, how many eyes. And that's very hard to do with electrodes. Maybe someday somebody will figure out how to do it.
47:06
How do you use the light to activate it? You have to do it in laboratory, but inside of a human body, the light cannot go through it. Is that right? No. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's, that's right. So, so currently, well, there's two, there's actually two problems. One problem. And remember that the things I'm telling you, we don't do them in humans yet. So this is all in animal systems in the laboratory where we have the ability to do these experiments.
47:32
There are actually two problems. The first problem is that the light sensitive channels are not native to most species. In other words, we have light sensitive channels in our retinas, but the rest of the body typically doesn't have that many. I mean, there are some exceptions, but typically we don't. So that means we have to introduce light. If we want to do these experiments to prove that the bioelectrics is doing something, we have to introduce light sensitive channels into the animals.
48:00
And so we get these channels, we get them either from retinas or from other creatures. There are some creatures that have these rhodopsins and things, bacteria often have them.
48:09
So we can introduce them. So that's problem number one is that you have to have them. So normal humans walking around, I think the vast majority of your body does not have optogenetic sensors in it. The other problem, as you point out, is that the light doesn't penetrate very far. Now, some of these things are activated by far red. So you get a little bit of penetration through, but not really an
48:32
And so, you know, I think the actual applications in human medicine is going to be more pharmacology and not so much optogenetics, I suspect. Certainly. That's where the money is. I mean, well, yes and no.
48:50
I'm just saying. Yeah, but just to be clear, the vast majority of, so something like 20% of all drugs are ion channel drugs. And the vast majority of them that are being used for other purposes, so neurological disease, cardiac disease, gut, inner ear, things like that, many of those things are off patent. They're extremely cheap drugs. So a lot of these ion channel drugs are very cheap.
49:17
And so as a therapeutic, this is actually, this is not the same as some kind of million dollars stem cell therapy. Ultimately, when these drugs are deployed in humans, it's going to be a very cheap therapy. Are you familiar with Dr. Thomas Seyfried at Boston College, his work?
49:31
Michael Lasante, you know his work at Stanford University. He's using doxycycline and azithromycin for cancer, breast cancer patients. No, I don't know. I mean, there are many, you know. Yeah, I know. These are just folks that we've interviewed, but I'm just curious if you're familiar. Yeah, Thomas is, yeah, Seyfried is great. I love his work. I think he's really good. Yeah.
49:54
Is there an understanding, kind of like the bioelectrical level of what's going on with his proposed mechanism of treating the cancers with? Well, his is metabolic, right? Right. But there's always an electrical component to that, wouldn't there be? Probably. I don't know. We have not unified our approaches yet. So, yeah. But it's clear. It's very clear that he's on to something. That much is clear to me. Yeah. Yeah.
50:18
Well, I really appreciate your time. You know, I just, I thought it was a great opportunity to kind of introduce some of these ideas to our audience and to learn more about what you're doing and how these kind of correspond with some of the things that we've been learning along the way in our program. You know, one of the things that I, we, I don't know if you know, Dr., if you know the biologist, the late biologist Ray Peet, have you heard of him? He talked often about
50:42
these anecdotal stories you know where little children have their finger severed the whole tip of it and then they yeah don't expose it to oxygen put like a little cigar cap all these stories of them regrowing this is true children children regenerate their fingertips yeah that's that's known that's why is that why is that and how come you know it's so that that effect that salamanders express so easily is so hard to express for humans what's going on there
51:07
It's a good question. Now, I'll point out that some mammals, for example, deer. So deer, every year they shed their antlers and then they regenerate. They grow deer when they're regenerating, they regrow up to a centimeter and a half per day of new bone. Can you imagine that? A centimeter and a half of new bone per day. It's incredible. So here's a large adult mammal that can regrow bone, vasculature, innervation, skin, all of the things that it takes to make an antler rack that are regrowing. So
51:35
So it's not as if mammals can't do it, but humans typically are not good regenerators other than liver. So we regenerate our livers, otherwise we're not very good. It's not entirely clear why mammals are so much worse than generally, except for deer.
51:52
are so much worse, but I can give you a story that may be true or may not be true. We don't know. Imagine that you're an early mammalian ancestor. You're like a similar to a mouse. You're running around the forest and somebody bites your leg off.
52:06
Well, the problem is, are you going to have time to regenerate anything? You're going to A, bleed out. B, you're going to get it infected. C, you're going to be stepping on it, which means grinding it into the dirty forest floor. Nothing's going to regenerate under those conditions. I think it's interesting that the one example of a mammalian regeneration is one you don't put any weight on.
52:24
It's the antlers. Yeah, there's no, you know, you can keep that just sort of exposed and nice and clean and you're not trying to put weight on it. So I suspect that evolution basically at that point, because of our new lifestyle, evolution went the scarring route.
52:38
scar, seal the wound, scar, inflammation, kill the bacteria and hope you survive. That, that I think is where evolution went with this, as opposed to a salamander, which has a nice aqueous environment. They're buoyant. They don't have to put any weight on anything. They can sit there with their low metabolic rate and kind of take three weeks to regenerate. They don't need to be running around and, and, you know, have this like high metabolism.
52:59
So that's a story that I think makes sense, but nobody knows if that's actually why it got shut off. But I don't think there's any, I mean, it's very clear that mammalian embryos, including human embryos, know how to build a human. They did it once during embryonic development. Those processes are still there. And so if we knew how to activate them, I think we could get basically some very transformative regenerative medicine. That's our hope. Wow.
53:26
That'd be fantastic. When you see, I wanted to ask you briefly, is there any implications for your ideas in regards to, I'm a fan of Rene Girard's memetic theory and the idea of human mimesis and the patterns of why humans tend to, and not just humans, animals too to some degree, you know, memetic desire where they desire what their neighbor they perceive to be desiring. Do you see any of that with some of the different topics that we've explored today? Yes.
53:55
I'm thinking about the platonic space or these, there seems to be an interconnectedness to human beings. And Rene was, you know, he was an anthropologist from Stanford, so he didn't dive into the biology. But I'm always looking to talk to biologists to see if they see anything that kind of links up with the patterns of why we're so mimetic and why we sync up like that.
54:18
Yeah, I don't know the work, so I can't say anything specific about it. What I do think is that all of us, and it's not just humans, but it's basically all active agents, not even just biologicals, but all of us,
54:32
are fundamentally linked by our dependence on these fundamental truths of mathematics, computation and other things. We all have access to the same patterns basically. And so I think we share that vertical descent from these laws of mathematics that are kind of like the vertical descent of the evolutionary tree. We all have that root in common.
55:01
But, Dr. Yu, any final thoughts before we close out? Oh, I do have that one before the end for Professor. You know, there is one way, one called cancer therapy. They try to do is try to activate the killer T cell.
55:21
T cell, they call the killer cell. So activate the killer cell. That's somehow your natural body's immunization cell and helping you to kill any foreign objects like cancer somehow. So is there any biological method to activate the T cell and suppress cancer?
55:46
suppress some kind of cancer growing cell. Is there any method? So that could be some kind of significant cancer cure.
55:56
Yeah, well, there's a very large field of cancer immunology, which works on exactly this. So the idea is to get your immune system to kill the cancer cells. There are many people working on this. This is a large area of oncology. The problem, of course, is that it's not foreign material. These cells are your own cells. They have all your own materials. They have all your own epitopes. Right.
56:18
So distinguishing them is really hard. This is the challenge of the field is to educate the immune cells on what it is that they should be killing. Because if you get it wrong, they're going to kill a bunch of your own good cells and then precipitate a crisis. But there are many experts on this field. Cancer immunology is a very nice growing field. So I'm quite optimistic. I think they will have some good successes, I think.
56:46
Well, very good. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to meet you both. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you for teaching. Okay. Thank you for the conversation. Thank you. Bye.
Edit:2025.04.04
