The Logic Behind:-
The concept of designing a bot came from a very simple and common thing, i.e Paper Making.
Confusing... !!!Let's explain it and make it a bit simple.
'A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need.'
Here, one living cell is adapted for use for a different purpose, i.e the cells from a "Living" tree are changed and adapted to form a page, which is then used to form a book.
A similar logic was used by the scientists from the University of Vermont, who tried to use the cells from one living organism to create a robot that can be controlled and alive at the same time.
Let's move ahead and jump-start the main story.
The Main Characters:-
Building something new not only requires the working of an individual rather a team of like-minded individuals, tools, machines, time, etc.. etc... Each one of them has a role to play, so let's try to understand how all these components fell into one place to give birth to complete biological machines from zero(0).
The Machine:-
The major role was played by the supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont (UVM), which was given the task to create thousands of designs for the new life form using an evolutionary algorithm created by Sam Kriegman, a doctoral student and team.
Some of the tasks, apart from following the basic rules of biophysics of what a single cell of a frog can do, like moving in a given direction, healing etc, were given to the algorithm and the computer, that would run hundreds and thousands of iterations for months to create designs that would resemble some body shapes. These shapes were then filtered by the team and the most favourable designs were selected for further processing.
The Team:-
Another important role that was played in developing the bots included a lot of hard work from the team of scientists and biologists led by Levin, from Tufts University and Douglas Blackiston, a scientist from UVM, who is also known for building the first Xenobots.
He and his team took the designs shortlisted by Sam and his team, and operated the cells under a microscope, cutting them, joining them and doing many other microscopic things to design approximately exact design as produced by the supercomputer.
The Bot:-
The final product that was created from the hard and dedicated work of both the machines and humans was the "Xenobots".
They were designed using the concept of repurposing the cells of a living organism to create a new organism, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont(UVM) and biologists at Tufts University, scraped the cells from the embryo of an African Frog (Xenopus laevis species) to assemble a new life form/bot known as "Xenobots".
The design for this bot was designed using a supercomputer, which ran hundreds of iterations before selecting the most promising designs for testing. These designs were then used to create the test bots before selecting the final one.
These xenobots are less than a millimetre wide and are composed of skin cells and heart muscle cells and can carry a load, move freely towards a designated target and can also heal themselves. But they have a life span of just 7 days, after they die they are like dead skin cells and completely biodegradable.
These newly assembled, never seen before cells began to work together. The heart muscle cells were used as the powerhouse, creating enough power for the forward motion of the cells, thus allowing the bots to move on their own, whereas the skin cells formed more of passive architecture.
The Big Breakthrough:-
This is something phenomenal and is a big breakthrough in the field of science, but it has also raised many eyebrows, questions, doubts and concerns. It has also opened doors for scientists to look for advanced lifeforms in a new direction.
If we notice these xenobots, they are genomically built using frog cells, i.e. they are 100% frog DNA but they are not frogs. Thus, the question arises What else these cells are capable of building.
A few other big questions that have suddenly come up include:-
1. Fear of implications of rapid technological change and complex biological manipulations.
2. Need to understand the complex properties of life forms to have a better chance to exist in future.
3. Another thing that has come up is understanding the role of computers and algorithms in the betterment of biological research.
4. Messing around with a complex and unknown system can lead to unintended consequences.
5. What will be the limit of manipulating the cells and what we can achieve.
6. Need to collectively decide what type of modification we are ready for and what behaviours would we like it to present.
and many more...
Not only opening gates to many questions, concerns and doubts, this research has also opened gates to the most basic fear of human life... "The unintended or unthinkable consequences of changing or hampering something complex."
What Experts Say:-
"These are novel living machines,"
"They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artefacts: a living, programmable organism."
"It's a step toward using computer-designed organisms for intelligent drug delivery,"
These xenobots can further find applications in gathering microplastic in the oceans, travelling in arteries to scrape out plaque and searching out compounds or radioactive contaminations.
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