March 01, 2025

Bioelectric Networks: An Interface to Engineering with the Agential Material of Life

1 hour 2 minutes

This is a ~1 hour talk (given at the Departmental Seminar series at the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences) on the use of a cognitive approach to bioengineering and regenerative medicine, in which morphogenesis is the behavior (in anatomical space) of a collective intelligence of cellular swarms. I describe our work that takes advantage of the bioelectric interface to re-specify the targets of morphogenesis.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Agential Material for Bioengineering
(02:00) The Anatomical Compiler Goal
(04:00) Biology as Agential Material
(06:00) Intelligence Below Cell Level
(09:00) Anatomy Not Just DNA
(12:00) Hardware vs Software Biology
(14:00) Cellular Collective Intelligence Examples
(18:00) Creative Problem-Solving in Cells
(22:00) Cognitive Glue and Goal-Seeking
(25:00) Bioelectricity: Ancient Communication
(28:00) Reading and Writing Patterns
(30:00) Rewriting Collective Cell Memory
(33:00) Regenerating Limbs in Frogs
(35:00) Planaria Pattern Memory
(39:00) Plasticity Beyond Species
(41:00) Novel Shapes and Galls
(44:00) Computational Models for Repair
(49:00) Cancer as Goal Failure
(50:00) Bioelectric Cancer Suppression
(53:00) Novel Anatomical Goals: Xenobots
(01:00:00) Human Anthrobots from Cells
(01:02:00) Autonomous Personalized Therapeutics
(01:04:00) Top-Down Biomedical Approaches
(01:06:00) Biorobotics and Bioprompting
(01:07:00) Ethics of Diverse Beings