The quest for a “communication device” that tells cells to regenerate the body

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The quest for a “communication device” that tells cells to regenerate the body

Once upon a time, a flatworm’s head exploded in a Petri dish — not an especially uncommon occurrence in biological research. But what happened next mystified developmental biologist Michael Levin, who runs the Allen Discovery Lab at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.   The flatworms, called planaria, had been swimming in a solution of barium chloride, a nasty chemical they had never encountered before in their 500 million years of evolu…