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A team of American scientists has for the first time created “living machines”, built with a few hundred animal cells from designs proposed by a supercomputer. The researchers, funded by the US Department of Defense, believe that their “reprogrammable organisms” could have medical applications and environmental restoration of contaminated sites. “It seems that these biobots they are a third kind of animated matter: they are not robots, nor are they strictly organisms. I think these biobots they will force biologists and philosophers to rethink our definitions of life and what a machine is,” says one of the authors, Josh Bongard of the University of Vermont.
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