It’s only been a handful of days that agencies and other media outlets created a stir with the Xenobots, but since January of last year already Cuba Yes he had made room for the news.
At that time, our portal announced the arrival of the “first robots that heal themselves”.
Scientists at the University of Vermont had conducted research that resulted in the creation of “entirely new forms of life.”
Without a doubt, it was a momentous, unprecedented event. They had incubated stem cells from embryos of the African clawed frog of the type Xenopus laevis – hence the name Xenobots – and verified that they could heal themselves.
Now, that team, also made up of experts from Tufts and Harvard universities, and which had contributed in 2020 those structures that they qualified as “living robots”, has discovered that these organisms, designed by computer and assembled from that design created By Artificial Intelligence, they can find individual cells, gather hundreds of them, and assemble them to create “baby” Xenobots.
In this way, and within a special structure, they can give rise to new Xenobots with the same appearance and possibilities as those of their creators.
What is even more astonishing is that these new Xenobots just emerged from the originals, once mature they can also collect cells and build copies of themselves, replicating themselves over and over again.
Replication at the molecular level is more than known, but until now it has not been observed in cells or whole organisms. That was precisely what was achieved using an evolutionary algorithm resulting from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the use of a supercomputer.
This algorithm tested billions of possibilities looking for cells to be more effective in their kinematic replication. After experimenting with shapes of triangles, squares, pyramids and stars, they found that the best was a shape similar to Pac-Man, the age-old digital game of eat-eat.
On a Petri dish, this Xonobots with the appearance of Pac-Man collects stem cells that are around him with “his mouth” and assembles them to later transform into new Xenobots, which can repeat what has already been described.
The point is that they are frog cells, they have the genome of a frog, but by reprogramming them they have been freed from the function of creating tadpoles but something else, from their plasticity and, obviously, from AI.
University of Vermon robotics and computer science expert Joshua Bongard; together with Michael Levin, an expert in biology at Tufts University, they lead this team and its new task, whose technical details –possible to consult in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, under the title “Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms”
they are practically impossible to collect in a popular science text like this one.
Utilities and dangers of Xenobots
Having discovered this absolutely new form of biological reproduction that has become what could be considered as a first generation of living robots, is accompanied by a large number of questions and doubts.
Are they really robots? Said doctor Bongard assures that yes: “These are new living machines.”
“They are neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It is a new kind of artifact: a living and programmable organism ”, he adds.
Said researcher recalls that the definition of robots does not stipulate that they must be made only of metal, but that they act by themselves to help people. “So this living organism made of frog cells that have not been genetically modified is also a robot,” he says.
Xenobots arise from embryonic stem cells from this type of frog, the African ‘Xenopus laevis’, which has been used in medical science experiments for almost a century. Photo: taken from misanimales.com
Fearing that we will suddenly stumble upon a world flooded by Xenobots, Bongard clarifies that they remain “completely contained in the laboratory, are easily extinguished and are being examined by ethicists.”
The scholar assures that in reality they should not be seen as a threat. “What represents a risk is the next pandemic – he warns -; accelerating the damage to the ecosystem caused by pollution; intensifying the threats of climate change.”
Among the possibilities that open up with this amazing creation is that it is ideal for studying self-replicating systems. Also specialists refer that such Xenobots could be used to detect radiation-contaminated particles, collect microplastics in the oceans, or travel through arteries and clean them.
If with this transcendental novelty it is possible to understand the relationship between the “hardware” of the genome and the “software” of cellular communications used to create tissues, organs and limbs.
From unraveling such keys of life, regenerative medicine could have a great tool whose uses, among others, would extend to the treatment of diseases such as cancer and also aging.
Over time, what was science fiction gradually loses its name from fiction to be translated into real science. Hopefully, it will be increasingly at the service of all humanity, not as has been seen with the anticovid-19 vaccines. Because as long as economic and political interests continue to hinder the saving of lives, even the Xenobots could get upset.
