Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Chair of the Biology department and director the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University who is focused on understanding the cellular motivations that govern biological systems. In other words, why do cells create the bodies that they do, and what are the environmental conditions that need to change in order to rewire the bodies that these cells will make? The successes of his work, including permanently altered body plants in planarian flatworms and synthetic bodies from frog skin cells, have significantly challenged our limited perspectives about the extent to which biological systems have wants and needs that can only be satisfied through the fulfillment of an inherent program. We talk new perspectives on the nature of bodies, teleophobia, the game of life, and much more.

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