Science - What could go wrong?

[Vicus]

Harvard built It. DARPA paid for it. Nobody governs it.

Scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created something that did not exist six weeks ago: a tiny living robot with a functional nervous system that it built itself. No plug. No battery. No remote control. The little creature swims, explores its environment, and responds to drugs the way a nervous system is supposed to respond—because it has one. They call it a neurobot. To understand what that means, a bit of context is necessary, because this creature has been decades in the making.

It started in 2020, when the same Wyss Institute team created xenobots—tiny spherical structures assembled from the embryonic skin cells of Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, a species that has been a laboratory workhorse for decades. Cut a small piece of tissue from a frog embryo, drop it in a dish, and something strange happens. The cells don’t die. They heal themselves into a sphere, sprout hair-like projections called cilia across their surface, and start moving through water—with no scaffold, no genetic manipulation, and no instructions from anyone. Just cells doing what cells apparently do when removed from the body they were meant to build and then are left alone.

Xenobots could navigate, repair injuries, and collect loose cells to assemble copies of themselves. Remarkable, but their behavior was essentially mechanical—simple propulsion, basic environmental reactions, no internal control. The Wyss team wanted to know what would happen if they added one.

What They Did and How

Building a neurobot is, as one account put it, “a fiddly bit of microsurgery.” Cells from roughly 50 frog embryos are separated and kept apart for about three hours—long enough to commit to becoming neurons rather than skin. Those neural precursor cells are formed into small clumps. Meanwhile, a fresh piece of frog tissue heals itself into a sphere over about 30 minutes. During that window, researchers tuck the neural clumps inside before the tissue seals shut. Within two days, the composite heals. By day three, cilia appear on the surface, and it begins to move.

The implanted neural precursor cells differentiated into mature neurons on their own, extended axons and dendrites, formed connections with each other and with cells at the surface, and wired themselves into a functional nervous system—in a body plan that evolution never produced and nobody designed. It happened without instruction.

And guess what? The neurobots run entirely on their own biology. Multiciliated cells on their outer surface beat in coordinated waves, acting as a built-in biological thruster—no motors, no electronics, no external power. They survive for days on nutrients in their aqueous environment without any supplemental feeding.

Compared to earlier xenobots, neurobots move differently—they are more active, less predictable, tracing looping and spiraling paths. Researchers exposed them to a neuroactive drug called PTZ and they responded differently than non-neural biobots did. The neurons weren’t just present. They were shaping behavior.

Then things got stranger. Analysis of gene expression revealed unexpected activity in genes tied to visual system development—opsins, retinal cell markers—switched on despite the absence of anything resembling an eye. What those genes are producing, and whether they influence behavior, the team is still investigating.

The Human Cell Problem

The Wyss team’s next step is to replace the frog neural cells with human neural cells. A working platform for this already exists—”anthrobots,” built from clusters of human lung cells, have been moving around in labs for some time. The plan is to apply the neurobot framework to a fully human cellular context. A living machine, built from human cells, with a self-organized nervous system, that moves, responds to stimuli, and through “further conditioning and guided learning” becomes capable of adapting its behavior in programmable ways.

What could possibly go wrong?

Vicus comment. EVERYTHING!

continue: https://thehighwire.com/editorial/ha...dy-governs-it/


Extra comment:

What this article describe I saw it as TV series, where after that came artificial "meat","skin",et voila! a synthetic entity is create! with A.I pack mentality...

And that is only the "beginning" ...

I don't remember witch chapter ,but ALL this story has let me a very unpleasant vibes...
Because this TV show is from 2002! and NOW...

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1698919