Michael Levin, PhD, Director of the Forsyth Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, opens the door on the mind-bending work of his lab.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but frog and chicken embryos don't have teeth. What's a developmental biologist like you doing at a place like Forsyth?Our model systems are frog embryos, chicken embryos, flatworms, zebrafish, and salamanders – and some of them do have teeth. But basically, all clinical breakthroughs depend on understanding fundamental cellular control mechanisms. If you're interested in craniofacial patterning, you need basic developmental biology to understand why a cellgroup gives rise to a jaw and not a forehead.
All vertebrates start as a single cell, and then acquire an exquisitely complicated shape. My lab is working on the idea that if we can understand how a complex shape is generated, we can control it. This might allow us to restore a lost limb, bring a tumor under control, or correct a craniofacial birth defect.
For the last 50 to 60 years, most of biology has focused on biochemistry and genetics. We use all that – but we focus on biophysical factors. We're looking at the role of crucial electrical phenomena – the body's natural bioelectric fields.
All cells drive voltage gradients across their membranes, and they have very specific instructive functions – in terms of where cells are located, how cells move, how they differentiate into different tissue types, and how much they multiply. For example, in model systems, we can cause extra eyes to form by manipulating the potassium flow by gene therapy.
Only a handful of people in the world are looking in this direction, and this requires a strong physics and engineering background. The field is in its infancy, with major benefits still ahead of us. Here at Forsyth, we will build a critical mass of people with related expertise, from mathematical modeling to physics.
