How Frog Embryos Inspired The Last Word

Tjaša Ferme: Hey, theatre, science and innovation fans. This is Tjaša Ferme, your podcast host for Theatre Tech Talks: AI, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Tune in.

In today's conversation, I'm speaking with Fareeda Pasha, who is a media consultant, a business consultant, a playwright, and a fantastic actor. She's wearing so many hats and we're talking about her last play, The Last Word, which was commissioned and produced by Science in Theatre Festival.

I hope you'll enjoy this conversation. Hi, Fareeda Pasha, I am so excited that you're here with me to talk about xenobots and anthrobots and other crazy things that most people don't actually know about. This was in the scope of Science in Theatre Festival, and you were paired with scientists Michael Levin from Tufts that runs his own laboratory. Like I said, this was based on research of xenobots and anthrobots. Can you tell me a little bit about the science itself in your own words? And then also about the process, how did this actually work and how did this actually come about?

Fareeda Pasha: Sure. Dr. Michael Levin and I chatted about his research, I want to say in March or April was our first conversation, and I really didn't know what to expect. I had perused a couple of articles that were sent my way and he'd sent some blog posts that he'd written about his own thoughts about the applications or implications of this research.

And what I took away were, I think, what any layperson would take away. The points I took away were what Dr. Levin researches is a field in synthetic biology, which is essentially biology that doesn't necessarily follow nature's path of a design of what it should be. So we're taking things that are living and then we're designing them into other forms or beings without manipulating necessarily their genome. So we're seeing what other forms they can take. And that in itself was really fascinating to me.

And a question might be, well, why would you change the form? If I want to regrow my arm, can't you just make that the plan and regrow what was already there or replace an organ that was already there? And I think what's really cool about synthetic biology and what Dr. Levin explained is that, what if our cells can take forms that are even better than what we have naturally? So what if our human plans or the designing synthetic biologist plans, what if that plan is a better plan than what exists? And of course that's subjective, but if that plan is, “Hey, I'm going to create an army of your own cells, it's going to be your own genome so that your body won't reject it, and that army of cells can go to any tissue in your body and heal lesions," that's pretty amazing, none of my current cells seem able to do just that.

So Dr. Levin and his cohort first started to research this in frogs, and they discovered xenobots, “xeno” being other species and “bot” being essentially not a naturally occurring form. They're not technically robots in that there's machinery in them. The machinery is living actual cell material that existed on some creature.

Now what's really cool is that the frog cells are going on living and growing and reproducing and turning into this army of cells that can do all these tasks like clean up or make themselves bigger, reproduce, swim around, and the actual frog from which they came could be dead. It could be long gone, it could have died a long time ago. And so you have a scenario where something is living with the genome of the thing that it came from, and that creature has died. So what is the line between life and death? If someone made one of these synthetic organoids out of my cells and I passed away, would I actually be dead? Because my genes that came from me while I was alive are still living and living out some mode of expression that was locked inside my body.

So that is a very long answer to what some of this research was. But turns out what Dr. Levin and his colleague, Dr. Gizem Gumuskaya, discovered was that this applies also to human cells. So you can take human cells, epithelial tracheal cells for example, and they don't do much for the first week, and then suddenly they flip inside out and start swimming around and doing things that these cells have never done, that the person from whom these cells came never knew that that could happen. And so that discovery is kind of mind-boggling. Where's the line between life and death? What are my cells capable of? And what am I capable of that I don't even know about because I'm locked into my idea of my biology and my body?

Tjaša: So many things come to mind. I mean, one of them off the top of my head is also Michael Levin is a huge proponent, believer into freedom of embodiment. And this feeds a little bit to what you were talking about, how nature kind of left us somewhere randomly and not exactly optimal. That's what he believes, and he believes that it might be better for us to be able to breathe underwater and have a tail and have a few tentacles growing out of our head. And he thinks that all of these things are possible, that it's possible to grow all these organs, to aid us in basically shifting climate or whatever else happens in our natural environment, or technical environment could be. What's your personal opinion on that?

Fareeda: I don't know that I have a resolved opinion about it. I'm very curious about the ideas of freedom of embodiment, meaning that the bodies that we have you could see as the good enough bodies that evolved to carry out whatever task we're meant to carry out. Nobody as far as I know has figured out the meaning of life so I'm not going to purport to know what the answer to that is.

But I totally accept that, it's kind of like in psychology they have the idea of the good enough mother that came out maybe a couple decades ago, so you don't need the ideal caretaker to be a healthy human being, you need a good enough caretaker who will provide for you and give you certain resources and nurturing. But this idea of this optimal mother or parent that's going to exist somewhere that will develop you to your utmost, it's not necessary to be a healthy human being to have that optimal caretaker.

In the same way, is there such a thing as an optimal body? And that's where I feel like the debate and the trickiness around freedom of embodiment can come in. Is my optimal body the one that I was born with and who's to say that that's not true? Or is my optimal body whatever I want it to be personally as a subjective human? Or is it what society needs that body to be? And then where are we drawing the boundary at society? So the ethical and kind of moral questions that arise from freedom of embodiment are fascinating and certainly could be their own multiple plays written about this idea of, is my body a curse? Is it a blessing? Is it a good enough vessel that I can expand on? Is it a building block for my imagination? Is it a building block for the state's imagination? And who gets to make those decisions? I certainly don't have these answers, but wow, what cool conversations you can imagine Michael and I had.

Tjaša: Yeah, this is really exciting. The way I understood freedom of embodiment is that it's basically the body you choose, the body you want to have, the body that seems optimal in your own imagination for the needs that are maybe true and based in reality and circumstance or maybe just imaginary. But also what you're saying that, yeah, the moral implications of this. What if I want a body that looks like one big crab or maybe a scorpion's tail, and then whenever I get pissed off, I start shooting poison into people's behinds? Obviously that's problematic for other humans who cannot consent to this.

So yeah, and this a perpetual human question, where does my freedom end and your freedom begins? And what's the intersection between the boundaries of humans living together, species living together? And yeah, I guess then that also applies to, I don't know, our co-living with pets and co-living with animals and how much we damage them just by our own boundaries interfering with their own natural environments.

Fareeda: Yeah, you're giving me another play idea, which is, so it's what if it were illegal to live forever because you would be consuming resources preventing other beings? What if our planet founded saturation point and life it could sustain and you cannot replace your body parts and live beyond X number of years, even if biology allows you to? I feel like those types of questions, while they're far into the future, are not that far into the future because of the way our planet is right now. I think it's something worth discussing and thinking about when we think about the limited resources that we have and how much waste a single being creates.

I also feel like just the ethical implications of not allowing people to age. I think of this whenever I watch British TV, I'm like, "Oh, they allowed all these people to age. This is what it looks like when you allow people to age," and this stigma around getting older. And certainly most human beings want to avoid pain and illness, and I'm one of those beings and completely subscribe to that. And at the same time, if we're spending most of our collective resources on end of life care in this country, we spend an enormous amount versus some countries in Western Europe, let's say, don't spend as much on end of life care because they have a sort of philosophy that at a certain point it's your time to go. And again, who gets to make that decision and when does that become morally kind of disgusting and reprehensible? I really don't have the answers to these questions, but it's interesting how culture plays into it.

Tjaša: Totally. I mean, in your new play where it's illegal to live forever, I really want to see a case at the court and who's representing planet Earth, who are the creatures that all of a sudden come out and basically enforce this law? These elementals, this earthly beings, what do they look like?

It feels like a question that's in the ether: what do we owe the youth and what do we owe the elderly? And what is our duty as beings in terms of our life on this planet and its length and our ability to extend beyond biology?

Fareeda: I feel like it's the children because now we're seeing cases, I am not a legal expert, but I've at least read about a couple of cases where younger folks are suing governments for pollution and for essentially taking away their right to clean air. And at a certain point, if we're insisting on aging populations that may require more care and more resources, could the younger generation kind of rise—this is just my imagination at work.

And I'm sure some other science fiction person has explored this or is exploring it, but it feels like a question that's in the ether: what do we owe the youth and what do we owe the elderly? And what is our duty as beings in terms of our life on this planet and its length and our ability to extend beyond biology? Which you and I are already doing as well as most people who are alive on earth are beyond the point where our body naturally starts to decompose. So I think it's a really interesting question, and now maybe I'm writing this play in my head and figuring out this court case where the babies sue the centuries-old people.

Tjaša: Yeah, there's the youth of Montana, which I think that they actually won the case. And then I think that also Puerto Rico has sued fossil fuel companies because, I mean, this all was predicted, do you know what I mean? Decades in advance. It's just human greed. And obviously they're just at such a juncture or such a geographical location that actually the consequences of the fossil fuels really have terrible implications on their climate and on their weather and just natural disasters. It's interesting that they're suing as a country because it seems like every two years their infrastructure is completely destroyed because of natural disasters, which are human-made.

Fareeda: Which are human-made. Our life has an impact on the people around us, so how much freedom do we have over those bodies and our embodiment? That goes back to the question you were asking. And how much should we have? And the answer to both of those questions is: I have no idea.

Tjaša: But one of the cases that Michael talked about, and I think this is the research that Gizem was performing, was that one of the experiments where it actually started to work, the anthrobots, programmable human cells, was that they cut a neural lesion and wanted to see what basically these anthrobots would do. And they came in the next morning or in the middle of the night and saw basically that the anthrobots stitched the tissue.

Fareeda: Yeah, yeah. It was incredible, so that this little army of your own cells could then stitch together tissue that has nothing to do with those original cells, which I think were tracheal cells now going into neural tissue and stitching it up. It's sort of like what Gizem and Michael and their colleagues discovered was that we have these secret Peace Corps volunteers hidden amongst ourselves and under the right conditions, we can kind of let them assemble and gather and decide what their mantra is going to be. And if it's like, "We fix stuff," and then we just allow them the conditions to do that, it's pretty incredible what our own cells are capable of.

Tjaša: That's amazing. Okay, so you talked to Michael and you talked to Gizem about their research. And then besides this incredible research, how were you inspired, how did you start to weave a story?

Fareeda: So I really knew that there were a couple of moments that I wanted to keep in from the discovery itself, and one of those moments is in the play, kind of the moment of discovering that this anthrobot thing was going to work. And that particular story that Gizem shared in, I think, our first call, our only call that we had before I wrote the play was a thirty-minute Zoom call.

And it was something that she was really moved to share, and I felt really moved when she was sharing it, because inside that seed was the “never give up, just keep on going, you never know what discovery is around the corner.” And in a time of despair, of global carnage, of worry, I feel like science is this ray of hope. As much as it can kind of be scary or worrisome, it is providing this ray of hope of here are people who are dedicated to finding us health, wellness, solutions to our problems, ease for our burdens. So that particular aspect of discovery and that moment of discovery and hope was something I wanted to keep in.

And Michael and I discussed our own parents and their kind of health issues that were going on, and that was an aspect that I wasn't conscious that I wanted to put into the story, but I know that it was in the soup somewhere. And then all of a sudden I really didn't know how I was going to get into the story. I knew there was going to be a scene with talking frogs, that had to be in there somewhere, and I knew that I wanted people to leave this play feeling hopeful, feeling inspired. I've never gone into a writing process with that kind of goal in mind, I think in previous plays it's been I want people to think about this subject differently or just have a good time or enjoy themselves or enjoy my writing, or I want a certain actor to feel really excited about this role, but this was a play where I really thought about having the audience feel hopeful and moved by what was happening.

And I feel like that as an anchor really helped all these other parts of the story come together because there's a lot of story for one act, for forty-five minutes, there's a lot of story. And I don't know that I consciously could have strung that together in any way, I think this kind of conscious goal and then letting my subconscious figure some of this stuff out and letting the play tell itself to be was really the way forward.

And the first thing that I wrote from this play was the opening of the play where Mary has written this new story after not writing for twenty years, she starts to write a new story, and it's a story about discovery and the world being in a precarious place and then having this moment of discovery. And that came absolutely out of nowhere, I had not planned it, I had not thought about it. It really felt like a story that exists in the ether somewhere that just wanted to find a place to go and I happened to have an open window in my mind that day.

And it just evolved from there. This play happened very quickly. It was a lot of thinking and then in terms of writing, it maybe was three days of actual writing and then maybe another day or so of rewrites before the cast came on, and then maybe another few hours of rewrites. Which is not to say that it's any better than plays that take longer to create, but I think just the pressure behind it had built up so much, there was so much that wanted to break free in terms of this story. And the character of Mary, who is a storyteller, was very helpful because I felt like I could really listen to her stories and just write them down.

Tjaša: Yeah, so this first piece that you wrote is basically a story that Mary's currently writing and it's somewhat unfinished, and it's interesting, I don't know, the way you spoke about it. It just sounded like there's an entity up in the sky and open day and it was a sunny day, and that entity just dropped a ladder. This little idea climbed down and basically poured itself through your computer on a page. But it's interesting that this is how it started. And oftentimes when you write, I find this for myself, is that you start on something really ethereal and somewhat obscure. And even through that, through allowing that to manifest, to come down and take place, even though you're maybe judge-y of it or whatever, through allowing that, then the story occurs, something that's relationship based and has a future and a past and a present. But it's funny how these things work, right?

Fareeda: It really is. And I'm very much an equal opportunity inspirationalized person in the sense that I'm not proud of where inspiration comes from. I don't need to sit in a retreat far away and meditate for twelve hours a day and only take that inspiration, even though that is a form of how I might get a seed of an idea or let it grow, or only take a quiet walk or only sit in a noisy cafe.

One of the stories that ended up in this play, the story that is the kind of children's book, thanks to also a note that was given about the first draft I got from somebody who'd read the first draft and given me feedback was, "Hey, maybe this story that Mary tells at this children's book reading when we go into this flashback could be a different story."

And the place that I got inspired to write the particular story that ended up in the play is I was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, which I do almost every day, and one of the clues was the Ship of Theseus or something, and I had no idea what that was in terms of philosophy. It's a philosophical, I'm not going to use the right word, but philosophical kind of almost like a koan, a puzzle, which is if there's a ship, Theseus' ship and you replaced it plank by plank with other pieces of wood, you replaced each plank of wood, would it be the same ship or is it a different ship? So of course I Googled that and then I Googled that there's an actual temple through Wikipedia, there's some actual temple in Japan where every twelve years they rebuild that temple bit by bit.

And so the inspiration came from the New York Times crossword and my older brother who had written a children's book in Korean when he was teaching himself Korean way back when, about a frog named Ribbit that tripped on a puddle. And I was like, "Okay, so I have a frog and I have this temple." And I can trace I feel like I have a lot of interest in where inspiration comes from for me and for lots of other creative people, I just find that an interesting subject so maybe I have 20 percent visibility into what went into that pot, and then I know that there was just other stuff that’s in the ether. There’s what my eyeballs are picking up when on a walk or snippets of conversation. I also had voiced a children’s book in August, and there was a lot of repetition, which I guess helps kids feel more at ease so that they can go to sleep more easily and so that made its way in.

So inspiration is happening all the time, and it’s how it combines and informs something hopefully useful that kind of makes the difference. But yeah, I’m not proud in terms of where, I will take inspiration from literally anywhere.

Tjaša: No, that's beautiful and very practical, just like, I don't know, it's talking to you, it's coming to you, go for it, grab it, it's yours, do you know what I mean?

Our only tools to figure out what's going to work out are our curiosity and intuition. And those are two forces I work really hard to cultivate in myself, my curiosity and my intuition, and they pretty much never fall short.

Fareeda: Follow your curiosity, yeah. That's something Michael and I talked about a lot and Gizem as well, that scientists and artists are curious human beings, and we don't know which ideas are going to work out. We actually have no idea. And our only tools to figure out what's going to work out are our curiosity and intuition. And those are two forces I work really hard to cultivate in myself, my curiosity and my intuition, and they pretty much never fall short. At the very least, I find an interesting question that's interesting to me, and there's always more questions to ask. It's an endless list.

Tjaša: Yeah, it's endless. Can you tell us the synopsis of the story? What actually happens in the script or in the play?

Fareeda: Yeah, so this reclusive writer's son recruits a young scientist to essentially perform an experiment to try to extend his mother's life so that she can finish her last book, her new last book. I think that's probably the synopsis in terms of what happens in the play, it's the story of trying to find a treatment in some way for this woman's illness so she can finish her last book. And then in another sense, it's really a play about three very isolated people because of their circumstances and personalities who are looking for connection and inspiration and hope, and this is their journey to find that in spite of their crippling life circumstances and disappointments.

Tjaša: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of the characters is kind of loosely based on the real-life case of a scientist that you met in this process, is this right?

Fareeda: Yeah, that's right. So the character of Aisha Khan, who is the scientist in the play, is really based on Gizem Gumuskaya, who is I think the first author and discoverer of anthrobots. So there were aspects of her personality that absolutely made it into that character and actual things that she told me about the process, actual aspects of the science. And actually something Gizem and I spoke about in our interview was her enjoyment of science fiction and how she took inspiration from science fiction or how it stretched her imagination growing up. And so that played in to the idea that the character of Aisha was inspired by Mary's science fiction writing early on. So yeah, there's a lot of Gizem in that character, and then there's a lot of me probably. I think there's a little bit of me in all of the characters. I don't know if that's narcissistic or practical, but it may be both. That's the reality.

Tjaša: No, it is. It's inevitable. I mean, you write what you know and you know different aspects of yourself.

Fareeda: Yeah, I think something acting has taught me is that we do have freedom of embodiment when it comes to acting in terms of we're allowed to embody anything and become anyone, maybe despite the strictures of modern day casting norms and political correctness. In its maybe purest form, there is no stricture in terms of who or what you can be. And the art of acting is saying, "I'm going to become something that I'm not right in front of your eyes, like magic." And I feel like that is really similar to what the cells are doing in their most pure form is they're just becoming whatever they want to be in that moment, in this kind of playful way.

Tjaša: Right, right, yeah. It's being open, being playful, being non-deterministic of what you can be or what you can't be, but just allowing and opening yourself up for, I don't know, I don't know. I'm so spiritual, let the spirit speak through you. I always think that it's something grander than just your own psyche or your own cells figuring out what to do in the moment, I do feel like that acting and art in general and everything that has to do with inspiration, that it is in some way spiritual and connected with other worlds. And maybe it is that just our definition of our everyday life seems to be so strict and stripped of other worlds, but I do think that it's an influx and intertwining of different dimensions that happens in these kind of times of writing or acting or creating anything really, can be a painting or can be directing. All of it kind of pulls from other worlds simultaneously.

Fareeda: Absolutely. And I think part of that goes to the question, are these other worlds or do we just exist in this entirely connected experience that we then dice up into other worlds? It goes to the question, there isn't such a thing as Eastern and Western medicine or science, somebody draws a line somewhere, a human being draws a line somewhere and says, "This is Eastern and that's Western,"—it's all medicine. Similarly with creativity, somebody draws a line and says, "This is art and this is science," and maybe there are some things that are extremely representative of both categories, and then at a certain point those things blur. I cannot find the particle that is New Jersey versus New York when I cross the Hudson River, I don't know which particle is which.

And I think what you see reflected in the play are these moments of sort of serendipitous crossover between worlds that should not be communicating, and that could be different characters who might hear thoughts happening when somebody else is off-stage or sharing a dream amongst different characters, having one share an actual dream cycle, these sort of serendipitous events which seem strange and then at the same time have been documented if not in their exact representation in the play, the kind of thrust or velocity of those spooky interactions at a distance, those have been documented in some ways and they don't fit into the neat categories that exist today.

And I find that fascinating. I feel like there are so many discoveries that are the noisy kid in class that can't sit still, and they're just screaming for our attention, but we want everything to sit still and fit. But sometimes those turn out to be the most interesting kids and they might have the most interesting ideas.

Tjaša: True, true, yes, yes. Oh my God, I love it. I love that we brought spooky action and distance and inspiration and other worlds being just like the worlds that are always here anyways, I love that we brought this in at the end of our conversation. I love it. Thank you so much, Fareeda, this was so enlightening and so mind-blowing, and I can't wait to hear and see more of your plays and anything else that you create.

Fareeda: Thank you so much, Tjaša. I'm really grateful for this festival. I'm grateful to have been put in touch with Michael and Gizem and to learn about this research, which inspired me so much and gave me hope. And to have just the resources to make a play. It's like getting lab funding, it's like somebody is willing to take a chance on your idea and perform an experiment. And the thing with theatre as opposed to film is that it's an experiment every night. Every single night is a new experiment, you're just running it again. So thank you so much.

Tjaša: Thank you. That was awesome.

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