[HN Gopher] Team builds first living robots-that can reproduce
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Team builds first living robots-that can reproduce
Author : nkotov
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-11-29 21:31 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wyss.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (wyss.harvard.edu)
| type0 wrote:
| How long would it take before military industrial complex creates
| Battletoads from this?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| At about the same time as when growing organs in test tubes
| becomes viable and restaurant grade synthetic wagyu steaks
| grown from stem cells become reality.
| marianaaaaa wrote:
| a
| marianaaaaa wrote:
| b
| Flankk wrote:
| Living robot is a terrible term. If I understand correctly,
| Xenobots are bits of organic matter that use little spaghetti
| legs to swim around. So the computer made one that looks like a
| cheese puff and somehow clumping them together is defined as
| reproduction? Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem
| that exciting.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| I have commented on this before so I will link it here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332700
|
| For xenobots to be useful, the underlying cell behaviour needs
| to be better understood and controlled. Their research appears
| interesting if you are a computer scientist or physicist. But
| for practical applications and applied biotechnology what they
| are doing is an curious gimmick at best. If they can perfect
| their understanding, then they would have basically solved half
| the puzzle of organ engineering. But right now it is no
| different from black box engineering.
|
| This is very similar to Turing's reaction-diffusion models on
| leopard spots -- great for computer modeling and popular
| science magazines, not so immediately useful if your
| grandmother gets cancer.
|
| I will admit it looks perfect to sell as a biotech startup to
| dumb SV VCs who don't do their due diligence when it comes to
| investing in applied science fields.
| seaknoll wrote:
| Did you miss this part?
|
| > "Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren,
| who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-
| grandchildren."
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Built children out of already living cells? This to me seems
| more like a golem that produces other golems on happenstance
| from living matter.
| legacynl wrote:
| It's hard to define what 'reproduction' is. I think in
| lot's of definitions this would fit. Also aren't we
| basically the same? (i.e. a collection of mindless cells,
| doing their thing, leading to the effect of human
| reproduction?)
| lxe wrote:
| Can someone help me understand what's going on here? The article
| throws around lost of nonsense, but doesn't answer the basic
| stuff.
|
| From
| https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853?ijkey=c53500b4c64445...,
| they designed (via a genetic algorithm, for some reason) the
| cheese puffs.
|
| Then created the real cheese puffs from real frog stem cells:
|
| > Pluripotent stem cells are first harvested from blastula stage
| Xenopus laevis embryos, dissociated, and pooled to achieve the
| desired number of cells. Following an incubation period, the
| aggregated tissue is then manually shaped by subtraction using a
| combination of microsurgery forceps and a 13-mm wire tip cautery
| electrode, producing a biological approximation of the simulated
| design.
|
| From https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2112672118, they put
| these hand-made cheese puffs into a sea of more frog stem cells
| (that naturally already form epidermis spheroids) which through
| their random movement clump the stem cells, helping them make
| little epidermis balls?
|
| I don't think this is replication. I think the little cheese
| balls just randomly (or maybe because they gave them cilia?) move
| about and clump stem cells together that naturally become
| epidermis balls and end up looking similar to what they designed.
| airstrike wrote:
| I found the juxtaposition of the following two quotes to be
| thought provoking at the very least:
|
| _> "It's very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it's not
| something a human engineer would come up with."_
|
| and
|
| _> These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in
| a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state
| and institutional ethics experts, "are not what keep me awake at
| night. (...)" says UVM's Bongard. "This is an ideal system in
| which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral
| imperative to understand the conditions under which we can
| control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it."_
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