Xenobots — Robots Made Of Living Cells —Had A “Hello World” Moment

The African Clawed Frog and the Iron Laws of Technological Innovation

The African Clawed Frog, the species used to invent xenobots. On a side note, we humans, with all the fun confusion we get from our sexual diversification, have only two sex chromosomes. These frogs have *four* chromosomes. Just imagine the possibilities of gender identification. Vive la différence, indeed! (Phys.org)

“Eureka!” said the microbiologist

What do you get when you give a molecular biologist (with entirely too much time on his hands) access to a supercomputer, AI programming, embryonic genetic material from a frog, and sufficient funding? No, you don’t get this guy. Instead, you get something much scarier:

This is Xenopus laevis, an organism designed by an Artificial Intelligence. Click the link to see them dancing the “Hello World Hustle”. For those unfamiliar with the term, “Hello World” refers to what has become for most new coders the traditional results of their very first program. (NY Times)

What’s so special about those little specks in the image above? Those are “xenobots”, robots made entirely of living organic material. There are no wires, no circuit boards, no batteries. They can’t do much right now other than feed, move, and strive to survive, but they are alive. As with so many other great advances in technology, like Ben Franklin flying a kite in a thunderstorm, the Wright brothers’ first flight or Marie Curie’s fatal experiments with radium, the first successes of new tech are often not practical or profitable, but are only proofs-of-concept, demonstrations of viability, the barest hints of vast and unknowable future potential.

According to the team at Tufts University led by Dr. Douglas Blackiston, possibilities could range from collecting microplastics from the ocean to delivering drugs to a target tumor or scraping plaque from arterial walls inside a patient’s body. What’s more, the mortality of the xenobots is deliberately limited by the amount of yolk, their only form of nourishment, contained within their bodies. Once the yolk is consumed, the xenobots starve to death, and they decompose. Job done, no muss, no fuss, right?

Sounds great, doesn’t it? In fact, the Tufts team may be thinking too small, for the possibilities are as endlessly varied as life itself. For instance, consider extremophiles: some can flourish without oxygen, others without light, still others in boiling seawater. And then there’s tardigrades which can survive in space. All these have one thing in common: genetic material, and that genetic material may possibly be used to make xenobots.