Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz – March 3, 2021
Scientists announced that they have created a ‘xenobot’; an organic robot made from a frog’s stem cells. The project raises theological concerns about creating new life forms, the exclusive purview of God, and practical concerns about what will happen when this living robot is injected into the human body.
Scientists at Tufts University’s Allen Discovery Center at the University of Vermont recently announced that they had succeeded in making organic robots made from stem cells scraped from frog embryos, separated into single cells, and incubated. The cells were cut and reshaped into specific “body forms” designed by a supercomputer.
Named xenobots for the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) that was the donor of the cells, the newly “created” robots are self-healing and are one millimeter wide, small enough to travel inside human bodies. They are multi-skilled, able to walk and swim, survive for weeks without food, living on lipid and protein deposits, though they can’t reproduce or evolve. The scientists envision injecting the xenobots into a patient where it can pick up a payload, like a medicine, and deliver it to a specific place inside a patient.
In a clear burst of hubris, the researchers declared the xenobots to be “entirely new life-forms…never seen in nature.” They claim this is the first time science “design[ed] completely biological machines from the ground up.”