Planarian: The Immortal Flatworm
How one small worm defies logic and lives forever. Doesn't age. Doesn't die.
What is intelligence? How can certain organisms on our planet live forever? And I mean forever. How can we take those learnings and apply them to humans? To solve human diseases. But what about a grander vision? To take complete control of our biology. To transcend our evolution. These are some of the questions and topics I am digging into. I read these: “How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs, with Michael Levin (Ep. 112)”, “Planarian regeneration as a model of anatomical homeostasis: Recent progress in biophysical and computational approaches”, and “SpeakerSeries | Prof. Michael Levin: Planarians and Intentionality”.
Let’s get cracking.
Planarian and Its Crazy Properties
All important questions about life can be found in planarians. A flatworm. They live in ponds and slow-moving streams. Much like us, they share a few traits; they have a true brain, central nervous system, and neurotransmitters that you and I would have. They are similar to our direct ancestor. If you're picturing an earthworm, don't. It's much more than that, as you can tell from the image below.
But it’s differences are astounding. Planarian are highly regenerative, meaning it has the ability to grow again. You can cut a Planarian into different pieces and each piece will regrow to a perfect worm again. The record is something like 275 pieces.
In the 1960s this fellow named James McConell learned that you can cut off their heads and it still creates a perfect flatworm. The tail will sit there being idle, but then it regenerates — the original information is in the memory. Now, what does say to all the “Brain Marxists” out there? We’ve been saying that everything, consciousness, the soul, our identity all resides in the brain. But what if it didn’t?
What is Intelligence?
You cut off the head of one of these planarian’s. Over time it still regenerates back to a perfectly fine Planarian with a head and the correct shape. These flatworms have the ability to move learned information from tissue to tissue because as this new brain is developed by the this tail, the information that they learn has to be imprinted onto the new brain. Information is moving through the body, it’s stored outside the brain and it’s moving through the body. Mind boggling.
We humans have this tendency to think we’re special. We’re “God”. Even when we now know for a fact that we share the same buildup as other living organisms, we still think we’re above. More divine. We think that whales, dolphins and elephants are smart. But they are not as smart as us. We think dogs and cats have some form of intelligence, but they have a lesser form of intelligence than the above mentioned animals. Invertebrates such as sea stars, crabs, insects are stupid — they are most definitely not like us. Cells, the smallest unit of a living organism is not smart nor is it truly a living thing. This is what we collectively believe. This is what I’ve believed for the longest time. However, the planarian example is slowly proving to us that the question is not what’s intelligence and what’s not, it’s rather how much intelligence and which problems are they solving in their own dimension.
Cells are really clever. Oh they are clever. They are able to keep us alive for nearly a century. As mentioned in the previous post, once you provide the cell the correct hardware (which most humans have) it’s able to run autonomously. The ability to fetch energy to move and ultimately reproduce (cell division). It’s extraordinary. We’re made up of this stuff. Ultimately, we have to conclude that cells are intelligent — in their own “dimension”. As any other intelligent organism one has to ask what the reward system would be (e.g. how we domesticated dogs). If we could crack that, then maybe. Maybe we could crack it all.
Bioelectric and Control
Levin’s lab studied the work of McConell and they found that there was an electrical pattern that’s stored by the tissue in planarians — aka Bioelectricity. They can see it with certain techniques that they’ve developed. The patterns tell them how many heads should have and where the head should go. Here comes the crazy part. Their lab was able to manipulate these electrical patterns using various drugs that open and close ion channels. Your manipulating the very communication medium that cells use to control each other (and not jump ship, go haywire and become cancerous). When it’s time for them to regenerate, the cells uses this new electrical pattern and build whatever it says. If the pattern says two heads, they’ll go ahead and build two heads. Bypassing any of the genetic information (the genes are still the same and unchanged). Just pause for a second and think about that. Wild huh?
The planarian example is slowly proving to us that the question is not what’s intelligence and what’s not, it’s rather how much intelligence and which problems are they solving in their own dimension.
How Do You Apply this to Humans?
Now, humans have some regenerative capabilities. Nails for example will grow back. Livers are highly regenerative. This tells us that regeneration amongst mammals are not a crazy concept. We just suck at it. How could we change that? A signal that we can send. Some form of stimuli in these electrical patterns to get the cells to align and do the work necessary, and stop when the goal is reached.
Now that’s one part of the puzzle (learnt this just now). Let’s imagine we live in a world where we’ve cracked the language of cells and we can send stimuli (opening/closing ion channels) to get them to do what we want. Part two of this puzzle is to provide this collective of cells the right environment to grow. A protective capsule of some sort to protect these guys. If we didn’t that collective will eventually revert back to it’s original state — to cause scarring of an organ for example.
When I started I looked at this from an angle of solving all human diseases — cancer specifically first and hair re-growth from a experimental point of view (as it might be easier to do experiments and clinical trials > faster iteration cycles). However, it’s dawning on me that the long-term goal is way grander. Beyond yours and my lifetime.
Morphological freedom. Complete control over our own biology. To transcend the form and features given to us by evolution. Perhaps to truly transform ourselves to the greatest potential we can get to. A collective race that can perceive and work with time in eons rather than months and years. To truly put our energy into efforts that improve us, all of us. To maybe make the world a harmonic place. Where you wouldn’t grow and find it to be absolutely fucking crazy. Wow. What a time that must be.
Thank you for reading again. Planarian are fantastic creatures and it makes you question what intelligence truly is. I’ve learnt a lot through this and I find myself wanting to move from research to take action. That might go against the ethos of science today, sitting idly and researching and publishing a paper as the end goal. But I feel an urge to set forth a few hypotheses and somehow conduct my own experiments, testing this either from my computer (data gathering, training, AI models to do prediction work or aid in providing what tests, experiments to conduct). But also finding a lab or setting up something in my own house to start measuring the bioelectric changes in say hair loss and hair growth on an organism to understand that small piece of language.
Much to think about and will share more for the next post,
Lush