Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…What was the thing you mentioned with the anthrobots that they can reverse aging? There’s a procedure called an epigenetic clock where what you can do is look at particular epigenetic states of cells and compare to a curve that was built from humans of known age. You can guess what the age is, okay? So we can take now… And this is Steve Horvath’s work, and many other people, that when you take a set of cells you can guess what their biological age is, okay? So we make the anthrobots from cells that we get from human tracheal epithelium. We collaborated with Steve’s group, the Clock Foundation. We sent them a bunch of cells and we saw that if you check the anthrobots themselves, they are roughly 20% younger than the cells they come from. And so that’s amazing, and I can give you a theory of why that happens, although we’re still investigating. And then I could tell you the implications for longevity and things like that. My theory for why it happens I call this age evidencing. And I think that what’s happening here, like with a lot of biology, is that cells have to update their priors based on experience. And so I think that they come from an old body. They have a lot of priors about how many years they’ve been around and all that, but their new environment screams, “I’m an embryo,” basically. There are no other cells around. You’re being bent into a pretzel. They actually express some embryonic genes. They say, “You’re an embryo.” And I think it’s not enough new evidence to roll them all the way back, but it’s enough to update them to about 28% back. Yeah, so it’s similar to, like, when an older adult gives birth to a child. So you’re saying you could just fake it till you make it with age? Like, the environment convinces the cell that it’s young?…

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