What Are Xenobots?
Xenobots are a new class of artifact: living machines created from biological cells but designed by algorithms. First developed in 2020 by a team including Josh Bongard, Michael Levin, and Sam Kriegman, xenobots are assembled from frog (Xenopus laevis) cells into novel configurations that exhibit behaviors no natural organism displays.
These aren’t robots in the traditional sense—they contain no metal, no electronics, no programming. They’re living tissue, yet their forms and functions emerge from evolutionary algorithms rather than natural selection. They represent a fascinating case study in emergence, agency, and the blurry boundaries between the living and the artificial.
My Involvement
I collaborate with the xenobot research team on questions about information, complexity, and collective behavior in these novel systems:
- Information processing: How do xenobots sense and respond to their environment? What kind of computation does a living machine perform?
- Emergence of behavior: How do collective behaviors arise from the interactions of individual cells?
- Evolution and design: What can evolutionary algorithms discover about possible biological forms that natural evolution never explored?
Key Questions
- What is the relationship between the morphology of a xenobot and its behavioral capabilities?
- How do information-theoretic measures relate to the functional capacities of living machines?
- Can we develop principled methods for designing biological systems with desired behaviors?
- What do xenobots teach us about the nature of life, agency, and autonomy?
Broader Implications
Xenobots raise profound questions beyond their immediate scientific interest:
- Philosophy of biology: If xenobots are living, what does that tell us about the definition of life?
- Ethics of synthetic life: How should we think about creating new life forms?
- Future applications: Xenobots can self-repair and are biodegradable—what applications might this enable in medicine or environmental remediation?
Selected Publications
- Kriegman, S., Blackiston, D., Levin, M., & Bongard, J. (2020). “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Blackiston, D., et al. (2021). “A cellular platform for the development of synthetic living machines.” Science Robotics.
- Varley, T. F., et al. (2023). “Self-organization and information processing in biological and artificial systems.”
For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar profile.