The two simplest to use were skin cells and heart muscle cells and the ethics behind it are really sound. You take one day old frog eggs but there’s nothing in that egg, there aren’t neurons in there and it can’t feel pain. A lot of times they are thrown away before they develop into anything. Doug developed all the biology methods to build robots out of cells, which are simple enough that I can follow them without previous biology training, and we then asked how we could get this robot to do what we wanted it to do.

That’s where an AI comes into this, it’s like a collaborator and design tool. It offers up all these different ways to put these cells together to create a robot that does what you want; walking, for example. It’s very much like using Lego blocks, but the Legos are cells and tissues.

The computer puts the cells together in random ways and determines which of these configurations does more or less of what we want the robot to do. As you can imagine, a random conglomeration of cells is probably not going to do what you want. Some won’t move at all, but some might fall down, which is a little closer to walking or moving along. The computer takes those good designs, modifies them and deletes the bad designs.