The Frontier Research at Michael Levin’s Biology Lab

Photo by Ousa Chea

The laboratory of developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University, with its dozen or so postgrads, is a hub of ideas, experiments, and discoveries. Most exciting is the focus on cognition as a process involving the entire human organism—not just the brain—and what this implies for new ways to cure cancer and other diseases.

The “ethical imperative” to find the cause of—and relieve—pain and disease is a guiding concept for the lab’s biomedical work. Underpinning...