Michael Levin's work in cellular intelligence, bioelectrical communication and embodied minds "is going to overturn everything."

These are some absolutely wild ideas, so before we get started, it's important to know that Michael Levin is no fringe scientist or crackpot. He's a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, as well as the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, and a co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms. He's co-authored several hundred research papers, with nearly 30,000 citations, and has a list of distinguishing awards as long as your arm.

All of which is to say: we can see why Levin's work might have flown under a lot of folks' radars; this quick summary is gonna get pretty 'out there.' But over more than two decades, he's earned the right to be taken seriously.

It's also important to note that Levin is just one leading researcher in a broad and expanding field – he just provides an excellent pathway into these ideas thanks to a number of clear, well-considered presentations and interviews.

So with that in mind, let's start out by upending one commonly held notion: that DNA is the blueprint from which our bodies are built; the set of instructions that tells stem cells where to grow and what to become, in order to assemble a biological organism. In an interview with "Head of TED" Chris Anderson in 2021, Levin explains one problem with that notion.

"A tadpole, as it becomes a frog, has to rearrange its face," says Levin. "The eyes, the nostrils, the jaws, everything has to move. One way to think about that used to be that you have a sort of hardwired set of movements, where all these things move around, and then you get your frog. But a few years ago, we found a pretty amazing phenomenon.