In the gathering of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University reside the mummified stays of a really peculiar creature. It has the shrunken head, torso and arms of a monkey, however from the waist down, it’s a fish. This weird hybrid was purchased by Moses Kimball, founding father of the Boston Museum, from the household of a sea captain. Kimball leased it in 1842 to the impresario P. T. Barnum for his well-liked American Museum in New York City. Barnum claimed it was a mermaid present in Fiji.
In truth, such artifacts, sometimes supposed on the market, had been comprised of animal components by fishermen and artisans in Japan on the time (though a number of the mermaid appears to be original from papier-mâché). Mythical hybrid beasts resembling mermaids, centaurs and chimeras testify to our enduring fascination with the plasticity of organic kind: the concept that pure organisms can mutate or be reconfigured. Both in legends and in fiction, from H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau to the 2009 film Splice, we appear inclined to think about dwelling organisms as assemblies of components that may be shuffled and rearranged at will.
But a crude stitching of elements is not going to produce a viable organism. Bodies aren’t a group of arbitrary items; a human embryo grows right into a being with the usual options of a human physique, all of the components working in synchrony. Biological types appear to have inevitable, distinctive goal constructions.
An rising self-discipline referred to as artificial morphology is now questioning that notion. It asks how, and the way far, the pure shapes and compositions of dwelling matter will be altered. The objective is to not create grotesque creatures such because the Fiji Mermaid however to grasp extra concerning the guidelines of pure morphogenesis (the event of organic kind) and to make helpful constructions and units by engineering dwelling tissue for functions in drugs, robotics, and past.
Synthetic morphology is perhaps thought-about the subsequent stage of artificial biology. The latter self-discipline has racked up spectacular achievements in retooling cells for nonnatural duties—for instance, programming micro organism to glow within the presence of pollution and different chemical compounds. Much of artificial biology includes genetic engineering to introduce networks of genes that give cells new features, resembling manufacturing enzymes to make a nonnatural molecule.
Synthetic morphology works on the subsequent degree: controlling the shapes and types into which many cells will assemble. Using the cells of multicellular organisms (like us), the know-how may permit scientists to design solely new tissues, organs, our bodies and even organisms by exploiting the large versatility and plasticity of kind and performance that appear to reside in dwelling matter. The prospects are restricted solely by our creativeness, says bioengineer Roger D. Kamm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We may design a novel organ, as an example, that secretes a specific biomolecule to deal with a illness, much like the best way the pancreas secretes insulin. It may have sensor cells that monitor markers of the illness within the bloodstream, akin to controlled-release implants already used to manage medication—however alive. Or, Kamm says, we may make “superorgans” resembling eyes in a position to register ultraviolet mild outdoors the seen spectrum.
Ultimately we will think about creating solely new dwelling beings—ones formed not by evolution however by our personal designs. “By finding out pure organisms, we’re simply exploring a tiny nook of the choice area of all attainable beings,” says biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University. “Now we’ve got the chance to essentially discover this area.” Synthetic morphology poses deep questions that problem the established order in biology: Where does kind come from? What guidelines has evolution developed for controlling it? And what occurs once we bypass them? Doing so may activate their heads our conventional notions of physique, self and species—even of life itself.
The Rules of Living Form
Thinking of dwelling matter as a substance that may be formed and engineered at will was a revolutionary concept that arose within the nineteenth century. Zoologists had lengthy regarded organic types as innate, and Charles Darwin argued that pure choice sculpts them to be tailored to their atmosphere. In the mid-1800s others, resembling Darwin’s supporter Thomas Henry Huxley, started to suspect that there was a generic type of “dwelling matter”—typically referred to as protoplasm—from which essentially the most primitive life-forms had been original.
In his 1912 guide The Mechanistic Conception of Life, German physiologist Jacques Loeb argued that life may and ought to be understood based on engineering ideas. After discovering that he may stimulate asexual copy by treating unfertilized sea urchin eggs with easy salt options, he turned satisfied that nature’s approach of doing issues with dwelling matter shouldn’t be the one approach. “The concept is now hovering earlier than me,” he wrote, “that man himself can act as a creator, even in dwelling nature, forming it will definitely based on his will.”
Around the identical time Loeb’s guide was revealed, French doctor Alexis Carrel developed methods for rising tissues in a tradition medium: a form of unformed dwelling materials. He hoped it would change into attainable not simply to protect however to develop organs outdoors the physique for transplantation when the pure ones put on out, thereby conveying the prospect of immortality.
That hasn’t occurred, however tissue tradition is now a well-established know-how used to make, as an example, artificial pores and skin for grafts. It is now routine to domesticate dwelling cells, together with these of human tissues, in a petri dish, sustaining them with the vitamins they should metabolize, replicate and thrive—a lot as we will develop colonies of micro organism or yeast.
The concept of cells because the “constructing blocks” of our our bodies may make them appear reasonably passive, like mere bricks to be stacked within the masonry of tissues. But they’re much smarter than that. Each cell is in lots of respects a dwelling entity in its personal proper, in a position to reproduce, make choices, and reply and adapt to its atmosphere. Multicellular dwelling matter concocts its personal schemes, which suggests cells will not essentially keep in the identical place or state.
This is strikingly obvious within the growth of a brand new organism—a human being, say—from a single fertilized egg, or zygote. As that single cell turns into two, 4 and finally many billions, it modifications from what appears like an unstructured ball of an identical cells to a physique with a well-defined form containing distinct tissues by which cells perform completely different roles—producing the electrically coordinated contractions of the center, for instance, or secreting the hormone insulin within the pancreas.
Scientists and pure philosophers have puzzled for millennia the place this physique plan comes from. How does the featureless blob that’s the early embryo know what to make and the place to make it? The reply, based on biology textbooks, is that the plan is contained within the cells’ DNA, encoded by genes. But this notion rapidly falls aside. Yes, all of the zygote appears to get by means of instruction is a genome, however you’ll look there in useless for any blueprint for a coronary heart or mind. The genes merely encode proteins or different molecules that may ramp their manufacturing up or down.
It’s higher to think about the molecular networks of the cell as encoding sure behaviors and tendencies, from which morphology emerges when these impulses play out amongst many cells. To perceive—and maybe finally to manage—the types of multicellular constructions, we have to determine these behavioral guidelines.
Cells produce order and kind by speaking with and responding to at least one one other. Each is bounded by a membrane studded with molecules, typically proteins. These molecules are able to receiving alerts on the cell floor and changing them into messages throughout the cell’s inner networks, sometimes ending with the activation or suppression of particular genes.
There are three foremost modes of communication for these externally derived alerts. One is chemical: a molecule arrives on the cell floor and binds to a protein receptor there, triggering some change within the receptor that initiates a signaling cascade within the cell’s inside.
Alternatively, exercise inside a cell will be altered by mechanical alerts resembling stretching of the membrane when one other cell sticks to and pulls it. Typically these mechanical alerts are “transduced”—transformed to some inner impact—by membrane proteins that alter their habits when pulled or squeezed, to confess or exclude, as an example, electrically charged ions trying to enter the cell.
The third mode is instantly electrical. Ions passing throughout a cell’s membrane could make the cell electrically polarized. That’s how electrical alerts are transmitted via coronary heart muscle to induce common contractions: the pulses journey from cell to cell by way of connections referred to as hole junctions. Such electrical signaling is a functionality shared by most cells.
Levin thinks bioelectric signaling between cells creates significantly highly effective information-processing capabilities that may affect morphology. It due to this fact represents a helpful “management knob” for functions in regenerative drugs and artificial morphology, he says. Levin, Vaibhav Pai of Tufts and their colleagues have proven that the event of neural constructions within the frog mind appears to be ruled by the voltage throughout the membranes of embryonic cells. When the researchers completely activated a key gene referred to as Notch (one of many components that induces precursor cells to change into neurons in frog embryos), mind growth was disrupted. But they had been in a position to put it again heading in the right direction by altering the membrane voltage of different cells close by: the bioelectrical sign overrode the message coming from the genes, permitting correct morphogenesis to proceed.
Morphogenesis is a delicate course of involving the interaction of knowledge on the scales of the entire organism, the genetic and molecular exercise in its cells, and all the pieces in between—a posh combination of bottom-up, top-down and middle-out signaling. If cells multiply sooner in a single a part of the embryo than one other, the growing tissue might buckle and fold. This deformation creates mechanical stresses that feed again into these cells to change sure genes on and off, differentiating the cells from others round them and directing them alongside a developmental trajectory towards a specific tissue or organ.
In one other instance, as a mass of cells grows in a fetus, these within the inside may get minimize off from the oxygen-ferrying blood pulsing down capillaries, triggering them to provide and launch chemical compounds that induce a few of their neighbors to become blood-vessel-forming cells. There was by no means any blueprint for a vascular system within the cells’ DNA; reasonably the eventual community of branching tubes is an emergent morphology produced by the principles of cell interplay and response.
“The genome specifies a mobile collective with large plasticity,” Levin says, “which executes rearrangements till the proper goal morphology is achieved.” One of essentially the most placing illustrations of the existence of such goal types is the best way a tube referred to as the pronephric duct, a precursor to the kidney, grows in newts. If cells had genetic directions telling them to assemble right into a tube, we’d anticipate greater cells to make a proportionately greater tube. In the Nineteen Forties, nonetheless, embryologist Gerhard Fankhauser examined this concept by utilizing cells with additional chromosomes that made them develop bigger than their standard dimension. He discovered {that a} tube of regular diameter and thickness developed—it simply contained fewer cells. The largest cells modified form to make the construction virtually on their very own. It was as if the cells collectively “knew” what their goal construction was and adjusted their particular person habits accordingly. Albert Einstein was fascinated by these experiments, writing to Fankhauser that “what the true determinant of kind and group is appears fairly obscure.”
An much more placing instance of this obvious “total imaginative and prescient” of multicellular constructions is present in primitive flatworms referred to as planarians. Cut a bit out of a planarian, and it’ll regrow precisely these tissues that had been eliminated, neither extra nor much less. Even a small a part of a planarian can regenerate right into a full worm with the everyday form and proportions. This capability is all too evidently missing in people—so how do planarians do it? It appears to ivolve a capability of the regenerating cells to “learn” the general physique plan: to take a peek on the entire, ask what’s lacking and adapt accordingly to protect morphological integrity. They are in a position to make use of top-down info. Levin believes this info is delivered to the cells by way of bioelectric signaling, which governs the upkeep of kind in different organisms resembling fish, frogs and people. When he and his colleagues manipulated items of planarians to change their bioelectric state, the regenerating cells produced sudden anatomies—for instance, worms with a head at every finish.
Such regenerative potential is obtainable to amphibians resembling axolotls and salamanders, which may regrow limbs and tails which have been amputated. That feat calls for two morphological capacities: the regrowing cells should be capable to become many tissue varieties, resembling pores and skin, muscle, bone and blood vessel, and people tissues must spontaneously manage themselves in the suitable approach. Amphibians hold a reserve of such versatile cells, referred to as stem cells, for restore jobs. If we’re to search out methods of imbuing our personal our bodies with regenerative powers, we have to know and grasp the worldwide guidelines governing kind.
The Plasticity of Cells
All embryos include a ball of cells which are in a position to become any of the physique’s tissue varieties, a property referred to as pluripotency. In people, nonetheless, these cells progressively lose this plasticity via a succession of transformations that differentiate them into specialised roles. It was lengthy assumed that when these embryonic cells lose their pluripotency, that versatility is gone perpetually. But in 2006 biologist Shinya Yamanaka of the University of California, San Francisco, and his co-workers confirmed that this is not so. They had been in a position to change mature, differentiated mammalian cells again right into a stem-cell-like state by injecting them with a cocktail of the genes which are lively in embryonic stem cells (ESCs), basically rewinding the clock of embryo growth. Their experiment demonstrates that the fates of our cells, and the character of our tissues and our bodies, are far much less inevitable and inexorable than individuals had thought: dwelling matter is plastic and programmable.
Cell reprogramming is now being explored for regenerative drugs. Some researchers are looking for to fight macular degeneration, a standard explanation for blindness, by reprogramming cells within the eye to help light-sensitive retinal cells. Others hope to treatment neurodegenerative ailments resembling Parkinson’s or spinal accidents by utilizing neurons comprised of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that may restore broken connections within the nerve networks.
When cells are reprogrammed, additionally they purchase new morphological knowhow. For instance, pores and skin cells reprogrammed into iPSCs which are then cultured as neurons in a petri dish may not merely develop right into a tangled mass. In the suitable progress medium, they could as an alternative attempt to change into a mind, recapitulating a number of the constructions seen in growing brains, with organized layers of cortexlike neurons and a number of the attribute folds seen in a mature cortex.
Such reprogrammed cells should not terribly good at making entire organs as a result of they’re lacking some necessary info that, in an embryo, would come from the encircling tissues. And at present such “organoids” cannot develop very massive as a result of they lack a vascular community, that means the cells within the heart finally change into starved of vitamins. To resolve that downside, researchers are on the lookout for methods to encourage a number of the cells to become blood vessels. If transplanted into mice, liver organoids will spontaneously combine with the animal’s personal blood provide.
Another demonstration of the flexibility of cells in multicellular constructions is supplied by so-called chimeric embryos, which include cells from multiple kind of organism. Because very completely different species often cannot interbreed, monstrous hybrids such because the Chimera of Greek mythology appeared biologically implausible; the one approach to make one thing just like the Fiji Mermaid was to crudely sew collectively lifeless carcasses. But on the degree of particular person cells, the species barrier is not as necessary as we’d assume. All cells communicate a lot the identical language, and people of various species appear to get alongside pretty effectively in an embryo. Scientists have created a number of chimeric animals—mosaics of cells of various species, such because the goat-sheep mix referred to as a geep—by including stem cells from one species to the embryo of one other.
The additional the evolutionary distance, the extra precarious the chimera turns into. Some researchers are actually experimenting to see whether or not “human” organs, comprised of human stem cells (both ESCs or iPSCs), will be grown in livestock animals resembling pigs and cows to create a reservoir of organs for transplantation.
All this testifies to the truth that there’s nothing fastened or inevitable about organic morphology on the degree of cells. If that appears stunning, it’s maybe as a result of we’ve got been so wedded to the blueprint image of developmental biology. But that image calls for extreme—the truth is unimaginable—overspecification of the physique plan. A blueprint may by no means, for instance, dictate how each considered one of our 86 billion neurons ought to be wired up. All evolution wanted to do was specify fundamental guidelines of cell communication and habits that, when performed out within the identified, predictable atmosphere of the womb or egg, would reliably create a particular morphology.
Perhaps that’s the most effective approach to make complicated organisms: to not program each cell to go to a specific place and change into a particular factor in a paint-by-numbers vogue, however reasonably to provide cells guidelines of interplay that allow them to determine the remaining out for themselves. Change the atmosphere, although, and those self same guidelines may produce a really completely different finish consequence. That was startlingly illustrated in latest work by Levin, Douglas Blackiston of Tufts and their colleagues. They merely broke up frog embryos into small items and left them to do what they’d in a nutrient medium. “If we give them the chance to reenvision multicellularity,” Levin says, then “what’s it that they may construct?”
Over a few days the cells clumped into little clusters that started behaving like multicellular microorganisms, sprouting cilia, hairlike protrusions that beat in a synchronized approach to propel the clusters via the fluid. These constructions, which the researchers referred to as xenobots (in reference to the Latin identify of the unique organism, the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis), will re-form their form if broken, suggesting that there’s some form of “objective” to their morphology. It was as if the genetic directions in these cells, mixed with the legal guidelines of cell interplay they help, may give rise to a totally completely different form of organism than the frogs that will develop in regular circumstances. “We have the chance to make creatures in 48 hours which have by no means existed earlier than,” Levin says. Now he’s imagining making organisms which are reconfigurable and “immortal” in that “after they die, the person cells crawl off and make their life alone and possibly rejoin once more later into one thing else.”
Morphological Engineering
Organoids, chimeras and xenobots all counsel that cells could make steady entities aside from these Darwinian evolution provides. We can choose and generate goal morphologies by design. “We can undoubtedly pressure cells to create shapes that aren’t pure,” says cell biologist Marta Shahbazi Alonso of the University of Cambridge. Working out the principles governing artificial morphology, nonetheless, is a a lot more durable activity than determining learn how to construct with blocks which have particular meeting guidelines, resembling LEGO bricks.
With cells, the blocks are themselves modified by the meeting course of. “In a easy mechanical world, you’d have items that work together with one another following a algorithm to construct extra complicated constructions,” Shahbazi Alonso says. But, she provides, the “fantastic thing about growth”—and in addition the complication—is that “the method of constructing a construction modifications the very nature of the constructing blocks. Throughout growth there’s fixed cross speak from processes that occur at completely different scales of organic group.”
Synthetic morphology, then, calls for a brand new view of engineering by which we assemble objects from their fundamental elements not in a easy assembly-line method based on a blueprint. We should exploit guidelines of interplay to allow a desired construction to emerge as if by collective settlement of the components—by recognizing that these components themselves have a form of company. Computational biologist René Doursat of the Complex Systems Institute in Paris identifies 4 classes of processes concerned in such morphological engineering: Agents can connect to at least one one other in a programmed building or assemble by way of swarmlike coalescing. Alternatively, a construction might develop by way of progress and multiplication of the elements, or it could possibly generate itself by repeating an algorithm, like that which produces the fractal types of vegetation.
The problem, Doursat says, is to search out methods of making certain dependable outcomes that won’t be thwarted by small perturbations and which are adaptive—if circumstances change, the system wants to have the ability to discover a answer that does the job. This philosophy has a lot in widespread with the best way we create cities and societies: We have some concept of what we want, however we won’t management it from the underside up. We can solely attempt to information the self-organization alongside the suitable traces.
Doursat and his colleagues have proposed theoretical schemes for constructing with micro organism on this approach, utilizing artificial genetic circuits to imbue them with interplay guidelines that can produce easy geometric parts manufactured from many cells, resembling rods and rings. Those shapes may then be assembled into higher-order constructions. Some of the earliest work on multicellular artificial biology additionally used micro organism. For instance, Frances H. Arnold of Caltech, Ron Weiss of M.I.T. and their co-workers engineered a inhabitants of micro organism with genetic circuitry that allowed every cell to sense the inhabitants density in its atmosphere and management the speed of spontaneous cell demise, protecting the inhabitants progress inside specified limits.
Kamm and Weiss, along with tissue engineer Linda G. Griffith, additionally at M.I.T., lately launched a multidisciplinary Center for Multi-Cellular Engineered Living Systems on the college, which builds on such work to create multicellular methods with particular features by design. They consider that making these dwelling methods would require a spread of approaches, together with all the pieces from top-down patterning (the place the cells are inserted into place “by hand”) to bottom-up self-organization (the place the cells are programmed to self-assemble right into a goal construction).
Suppose you have to change an artery and wish to make a easy movement valve consisting of a blood-vessel-like tube of cells that’s encircled at one level by a hoop of muscle cells in a position to contract. You may make these two shapes out of an artificial scaffold, resembling a biodegradable polymer, and seed them with the 2 cell varieties, which might colonize the related elements. That’s the top-down strategy. Or you possibly can begin with a cluster of stem cells that may be tweaked and guided to distinguish in the suitable approach whereas they transfer and coordinate with each other, finally producing that very same construction—that is bottom-up, and extra like the best way the physique builds such constructions. The first strategy could also be easier and will contain instruments resembling bioprinting, by which cells are delivered to specified places by an inkjet-style gadget. But it is perhaps more durable to maintain the ensuing construction steady. What if various kinds of cells wish to fuse or become different tissues? The bottom-up strategy, in distinction, would construct on stem cells’ skill to maintain themselves and make repairs if broken.
Kamm says we do not but have good strategies for reliably producing and predicting such outcomes. But they’re coming. One great tool is optogenetics, which is already used to review the neural foundation of habits by switching particular neurons on and off. In this strategy, scientists use genetic engineering to direct cells to make light-operated protein switches that management their electrical state. Fine laser beams can then be used to activate particular cells in a bunch and ship them alongside specific developmental trajectories. Kamm says it may additionally be attainable to selectively activate and differentiate cells mechanically (by poking them in numerous places or utilizing light-based optical tweezers to drag on them), thermally and bioelectrically (by, say, altering their membrane potentials at sure places).
Building New Life
What ought to we construct with such instruments? One objective is to create dwelling multicellular constructions that resemble however do not precisely mirror pure ones: a simplified, idealized tissue or organism, as an example, that helps to elucidate the processes that go on within the pure, extra complicated selection. Several researchers are assembling human stem cells into embryolike constructions (“embryoids”) to allow them to watch the very early phases of embryogenesis in vitro.
If grown outdoors the uterus, the embryo cells do not obtain important alerts from their atmosphere that will assist orient and information their growth. They might start to distinguish into the extra specialised varieties that will finally change into a part of tissues resembling pores and skin, blood and nerves—nevertheless it occurs in a reasonably random, unstructured approach. In 2014, nonetheless, Ali H. Brivanlou of the Rockefeller University and his co-workers confirmed that merely confining human ESCs inside small round “sticky” patches is sufficient to instill some order.
Brivanlou and different researchers are discovering methods to make embryoids ever extra like the true factor. Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues have demonstrated that in the event that they combine mouse ESCs with two different embryonic cell varieties (trophoblast stem cells and extraembryonic endoderm stem cells), they may manage themselves right into a form of hole construction like a peanut shell that resembles the central amniotic cavity of actual embryos. The cells appear to “know,” roughly, what an embryo appears like, they usually not solely manage themselves accordingly but in addition start to distinguish into the proper specialised tissues.
It’s not clear how far these embryoids is perhaps grown in vitro—however Żernicka-Goetz and others have made embryoids that can develop to the stage the place limbs and organs begin to kind. If an embryoid had been to be implanted in a womb—a process that will clearly be unethical in people however is perhaps contemplated in different animals—who is aware of what it would go on to do?
That’s not a rhetorical query. We cannot take it with no consideration {that a} artificial embryoid will in some way discover its approach onto the same old observe of embryo progress. It may pursue a unique path solely. That’s one cause for the dearth of consensus on the moral administration of those entities. Should they be topic to the identical guidelines and regulation that govern analysis with human embryos? Or are they a unique factor solely, one manufactured from human cells on a unique developmental path?
Robotic engineers are utilizing dwelling tissues as elements in in any other case standard robots. They generate behaviors that will be difficult to engineer with purely synthetic supplies and units. Kit Parker of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has collaborated with aeronautical engineer John Dabiri of Caltech and bioengineer Janna Nawroth of the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus in Germany to make a “medusoid,” a creature that appears like a jellyfish robotic. It makes use of rat muscle tissue connected to a silicone polymer to provide undulating contractions, which permit it to swim like an actual jellyfish. Parker and his colleagues additionally used rat coronary heart muscle cells in a robotic that swims by way of rippling motions modeled on these of the ray fish. By utilizing optogenetics to manage the exercise of the muscle cells, the researchers had been in a position to regulate the velocity and turning movement of the robotic so it could possibly be guided by mild via an impediment course.
Chemical biologist Adam Cohen of Harvard and his co-workers, in the meantime, have made an “engineered bioelectric tissue” that may generate electrical oscillations. The electrically lively cells of their constructions had been human embryonic kidney cells they engineered to provide ion-channel proteins, which let ions movement in or out to control the potential of the cell membrane. In a number of the cells, the researchers used genetic engineering so as to add genes encoding different ion channels, enabling optogenetic switching with purple and blue mild. By combining these cell varieties in a hoop, they made a light-activated construction that generated waves {of electrical} exercise transferring across the ring. The waves could possibly be made to journey in both path, that means these constructions could possibly be used to encode binary info. Perhaps we may finally course of knowledge in a form of dwelling pc.
Understanding the principles that govern organic morphology may open up new prospects for solely synthetic applied sciences resembling robotics. James Sharpe of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Barcelona and Sabine Hauert of the University of Bristol in England have programmed coin-sized cylindrical robots to self-assemble in swarms utilizing ideas that mimic these of dwelling cells, speaking by way of short-range infrared alerts. The swarms present a pseudobiological skill to kind strong collective shapes that may adapt to wreck and self-repair: a form of inorganic, robotic tissue.
Levin thinks all that is simply the beginning for artificial morphology. “My conjecture is that cell collectives are common constructors,” he says. Given a specific set of dwelling elements, we will make them do something that’s acceptable throughout the legal guidelines of physics.
But to try this, we’ll want a brand new mindset for engineering—one acceptable for coping with supplies that aren’t merely “good” within the conventional sense of responding to their atmosphere however which have real company. This collaboration between engineers and their supplies may entail letting go of a few of our standard classes for distinguishing machines, robots and organisms. Synthetic morphology implies that life will be remade if we loosen up the boundaries separating the pure from the synthetic.
