Dr. Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor, director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology and co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Joshua Bongard. He is the founding associate editor of Collective Intelligence and co-editor of the Bioelectricity Journal. 
Dr. Levin provided in this 50 minute discussion a master class on synthetic biology, regenerative medicine and bioengineering. He explained how birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer and degenerative disease would all be solved if we knew how to control the morphogenetic process. Advances in molecular medicine and genomic editing will not have an impact on biomedicine unless we know what to edit or which pathways to target to achieve system-level goals, such as ‘make a new arm’.
Beyond life on Earth, how would we recognize novel forms of life? What is the appropriate scale of observation for detecting the behaviour and appropriate problem spaces in which life operates? Bioengineering provides a crucial inroad for exobiology; a stepping-stone for enabling generalization of biology such that we can detect truly alien forms of life if and when we encounter them.
The new field of bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organisms, of which Dr. Levin is a leading scientist, suggests not only novel capabilities and advances in knowledge, but also the need for a new ethics. The frequently voiced statements that ‘living things are not machines’ reflect an outdated essentialism and a type of magical thinking that trusts in clear, binary lines separating evolved living beings from designed machines to define our moral duty to various agents comfortably. These lines do not exist, which will be made painfully clear in the next decades as we become surrounded by collections of agents that make the iconic Cantina scene in ‘Star Wars’ look tame in comparison.

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