May 7, 2021
(The New Yorker) – Levin had been invited to present at an A.I. conference because his work is part of a broader convergence between biology and computer science. In the past half century, scientists have come to see the brain, … Read More
April 26, 2021
(Wall Street Journal) – Imagine pigs with human hearts or mice whose brains have a spark of human intelligence. Scientists are cultivating a flock of such experimental creations, called chimeras, by injecting potent human cells into mice, rats, pigs and … Read More
April 23, 2021
(The Conversation) – That’s ethically controversial, because these creatures could possess an ambiguous moral status: somewhere between that of humans, which we don’t tend to experiment upon, and animals, which we do. How we end up treating part-human chimeras will … Read More
April 22, 2021
(Science) – On 25 January, as France’s third pandemic wave gathered force, Christophe d’Enfert, scientific director of the Pasteur Institute, appeared on national TV with a grim duty: explaining how the venerable institute, named after vaccine pioneer Louis Pasteur, had … Read More
April 22, 2021
(STAT News) – The vagus nerve, also known as the “wandering nerve,” winds a path all around your torso, intersecting with everything from the heart to the lungs to the digestive tract. That makes it a natural target for a … Read More
April 20, 2021
(The Scientist) – The agency’s notice about the change states that the NIH will no longer convene the Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board to review new external grants and proposals using fetal tissue, but continues to require that … Read More
April 19, 2021
(The Conversation) – The recent announcement that scientists have made human-monkey embryos and cultured them in the lab for two weeks made international headlines. The technology to make animals that contain cells from other species has been available for decades … Read More
April 15, 2021
(Science) – By slipping human stem cells into the embryos of other animals, we might someday grow new organs for people with faltering hearts or kidneys. In a step toward that goal, researchers have created the first embryos with a … Read More
April 15, 2021
(Nature) – Scientists have successfully grown monkey embryos containing human cells for the first time — the latest milestone in a rapidly advancing field that has drawn ethical questions. In the work, published on 15 April in Cell, the team … Read More
April 2, 2021
(Quanta Magazine) – Early last year, the biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues offered a glimpse of how versatile living matter can be. Levin and Douglas Blackiston, a member of his laboratory at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University, … Read More
