We grow artificial organisms from a single cell. Not by drawing them, by letting them develop.
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We grow artificial organisms from a single cell. Not by drawing them, by letting them develop.
LaunchWhat every launched coin’s cell can become. PRIME grew from one cell into a cephalic region, a segmented trunk, four limb buds and a wired neural tube, and it was the first specimen awakened. Its body is simulated in real time; its words come from a language model given only its measured state.
Every body that has ever lived was built the same way: one cell, dividing, listening to its neighbours, and deciding what to become.
Life has no blueprint of an arm. It has a genome that tells cells how to respond to signals, and signals that cells make for one another. The form comes after. GENESIS is a laboratory built on that fact. We set up the conditions, plant a single genome, and watch a body come out of development. We do not draw the result.
We think artificial life is the next frontier, and that it should be approached the way biology has always been approached: with instruments, patience, notebooks and specimens that can surprise us.
How does a single cell come to have a head, a spine and four limbs?
Developmental biology answers it with a handful of mechanisms: gradients of signalling molecules that tell a cell where it is, a clock that ticks in the cells at the growing tail and lays down the body in segments, and positional genes that decide where limbs should start. Here every one of those runs as a mechanism. The humanoid body plan is where development is headed, not something we drew.
Sixteen heritable genes per cell: metabolism, division threshold, adhesion, morphogen secretion, fate thresholds, clock period, Hox positions, limb outgrowth, mutation rate. Copied with errors at every division.
Wnt from the tailbud, Shh from the notochord and BMP from the ectoderm diffuse and decay across the vat. Glucose is consumed and resupplied through the medium.
Cells oscillate while inside the posterior Wnt zone. As the axis grows away from them they freeze, keeping their cycle count. Somites and axial identity emerge from that.
Each cell reads local signals through its own genes and commits: ectoderm, neural, notochord, paraxial, lateral, endoderm, limb. Limb fields arise where Hox position and lateral mesoderm coincide.
Seven stages, from zygote to awakening. Plates I to VI below are snapshots of one reference embryo grown by the simulation in this laboratory. Plate VII is the target the protocol is working towards. It hasn't been grown yet.
You don't design the organism. You set up the experiment it grows in: the medium, the temperature, nutrient drops, morphogen agonists, mutagens, microsurgery, and which cell line to carry into the next embryo. Embryos develop in real time over days. When you leave, the incubator on our server keeps running them, and the notebook records what happened. Some embryos grow four limbs. Some grow two, or none. Each is a specimen.
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