Chris Fields

In the 2014 paper with Chernet and Levin, tumorigenesis is read through gap junctional communication. The authors place this in a view of cancer as a developmental disorder, in which cells fall out of step with the body's patterning controls¹. Lucifer Yellow passes through gap junctions and labeled dextran does not, so cells with only the dye showed open communication². The paper also reports a two-stage quantitative model of the links between membrane voltage, gap junctional communication and tumor formation. Its interactive code is hosted on Fields's research site.

Fields and Levin (2020) asked whether regeneration recapitulates phylogeny, using planaria as a model of body-axis specification. They describe a treatment of cut fragments with β-catenin RNAi, the gap-junction blocker octanol, or a depolarizing ionophore. It produces two-headed worms with dose-dependent penetrance³. Some worms that look normal after octanol treatment keep producing two-headed progeny in plain water. Ionophore treatment can reverse this, which the authors take to show that the memory of the two-headed form is bioelectric⁴.

Fields and Levin (2022) proposed a framework built on hierarchical Bayesian active inference. It generalizes the idea of a space in which an agent acts and defines intelligence as competency at navigating that space⁵. Later authors used it. Grodstein and colleagues cite it for the idea that flexible action toward a collective goal state can define intelligence⁶. Pio-Lopez and colleagues cite it when they treat morphogenesis as the behavior of a collective cellular agent in anatomical morphospace⁷.