The Body Electric: A Plain-Language Tour of Michael Levin's Lab

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The Body Electric — What Michael Levin's Lab Is Teaching Us About How Bodies Build Themselves

Your cells are smarter than you think

Here's the standard story of how a body gets built: DNA is the blueprint, cells follow it, and out comes a person. Michael Levin — the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, director of the Allen Discovery Center there, and associate faculty at Harvard's Wyss Institute — has spent three decades showing that this story is missing its most interesting chapter. Fittingly for someone with dual degrees in computer science and biology, he made his name early: his Harvard PhD work on how embryos decide left from right (why your heart sits on one side) was later named by the journal Nature as a milestone in the last century of developmental biology. Then he went after a much bigger question: who, exactly, is in charge of the shape?

His answer goes like this. DNA is more like a parts list than a blueprint. It specifies which proteins each cell can manufacture — the hardware. But nowhere in the genome is there a picture of a hand, a face, or a frog. The decision about what shape to build — two eyes here, one heart there, five fingers, stop growing now — is negotiated by cells collectively, and a huge part of that negotiation, Levin's lab argues, happens through electricity . Every cell maintains a small voltage across its membrane using ion channels (the same components neurons use), and cells wire themselves together through junctions that let those voltages spread and form stable patterns across whole tissues. The result is something like a very slow electrical network laid over the body — a network that stores the "target shape" the tissue is trying to reach, compares it against what currently exists, and drives cells to close the gap. Your nervous system didn't invent electrical computation; it took an ancient, body-wide trick and ran it a million times faster.

If that's true, it changes everything, because software is easier to edit than hardware. Instead of laboriously rewriting genes — the parts list — you might change what a body builds just by changing the electrical conversation: opening an ion channel here, closing a junction there. Like fixing a typo in a document instead of rebuilding the printer. The rest of this essay is four escalating pieces of evidence that this isn't just a metaphor.

The Anatomical Compiler: CAD for bodies

Put all of this together and you get Levin's long-term dream, which he calls the anatomical compiler . In programming, a compiler takes something a human understands — source code — and translates it into low-level instructions a machine executes, so the programmer never has to think about individual transistors. Levin wants the biological equivalent: you sit at a screen, draw the organ or limb you need, and the system computes which bioelectric states, delivered where and when, will convince the cellular workforce to build it — without any human ever micromanaging the millions of molecular events involved. The cells already know how to build; they proved that when they built you. The missing piece is the interface.

A first, deliberately crude step already exists. Adult frogs, like humans, cannot regrow lost legs — they just scar over. In 2022 Levin's group (with David Kaplan's bioengineering lab) fitted amputated frogs with a wearable silicone cap called a BioDome , holding a silk gel loaded with a five-drug cocktail against the wound for just 24 hours. That single day of the right early signals — suppressing scar formation and inflammation, encouraging nerve and blood-vessel growth — flipped the tissue's decision from "seal it off" to "rebuild it," and over the following 18 months the frogs regrew functional, touch-sensitive legs they could swim and stand on. Note the philosophy: nobody constructed a leg. They spent one day changing the cells' minds, then stood back for a year and a half while the collective did what it already knew how to do. A spin-out company, Morphoceuticals, is now pursuing the same approach in mammals.

Regrowing a lost hand. Correcting a birth defect before it forms. Repairing an organ in place instead of transplanting one. Honest caveats apply to all of it: most of these results live in frogs, flatworms, and dishes; the map from voltage pattern to anatomical outcome is still mostly uncharted; and scaling to human medicine is a long, expensive, heavily regulated road. But the direction of travel is one of the most quietly optimistic ideas in modern science: the body is not a machine we must dismantle to fix. It's a colony of problem-solvers, waiting for better instructions.

See: the Wyss Institute's conversation with Levin, his talk on the anatomical compiler, and Tufts Now on the BioDome leg-regrowth study.

Editing the body's memory of its own shape

If voltage patterns really carry the body's target shape,...