I highly recommend this video from Levin. It was my introduction to his work.
What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
One fascinating thing about this work is that we have a subjective "interface" to the "technology" already. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that one can engender e.g. limb regrowth or bone-shaping using some kind of guided meditation.
Recall that the "3-Minute Mile" was a psychological, not physical, barrier. I think we're faced with a similar situation here: the only thing preventing us from learning to regrow limbs is the common belief that it's impossible. I find it curious that the very idea of researching limb and organ regeneration is obscure in the first place. Why is that so unthinkably far out but e.g. self-driving cars are taken seriously?
The linked video in the grandparent post argues pretty convincingly that the body might know exactly that, actually.
The key insight seems to be that you can hack the (as the research put it, by analogy) software of a set of cells and let the hardware (DNA, cell mechanisms) worry about exactly how to do what you told them to do, so rather than, say, figuring out how to read DNA and tell what kind of organism will come out of it such that we can start adding or removing bits here and there (very, very hard), you can instead screw around with inter-cell signaling to hijack functionality that the cells already have, but just aren't using, to get them to do new things.
I thought there were several "holy shit" moments in the video. The cancer thing—yikes. Reconnect genetically-broken, actively dangerous cells to the inter-cell communication network and they stop acting crazy, while still having messed-up DNA? That's a surprising result, and a powerful demonstration of what the technique can accomplish (may not be therapeutically useful for a bunch of reasons I can think up, but it still seems like a notable, surprising result)
Another was the sticky "memory" of a modified organism, that is, the worm that'd had its tail cut off then been instructed to make a second head there instead, and then had that cut off and... grew a head again, without further prompting, demonstrating that body layout and gene expression is some combination of DNA and a kind of cell-memory or cell-state across the whole organism, not something driven entirely deterministically by DNA alone.
The part about tricking worms into growing heads for 100-150 million-year separated evolutionary relatives, complete with the correct-for-the-other-species brain, was nuts. The "instructions" are still there, just dormant, and if you confuse the cell-memory (if you will) of what it's supposed to be it'll sometimes decide to be the wrong species. WTF.
Even cooler, perhaps, are eyeless cave fish redeveloping eyes quite quickly after a few generations in the light. It seems like a lot of things are like that. When we look at the fossil record it looks like things evolve in leaps and bounds rather than more gradually over time. Maybe that's because organisms are more built with prefabs rather than from scratch.
Cells think.
There's no a prior reason (I can see) to disallow that humans and other multicellular life forms are the "art" of microbes. (We are Solaris) It seems to me that we are the products of intelligent design, not (necessarily) of the intelligence of God, but of the intelligence of the biosphere itself.