The Line Was Never That Sharp: Third-State Cells and What Our Ancestors Already Knew

ANCESTRAL WISDOM · SCIENCE MEETS SPIRIT · PUBLIC HEALTH

In biology, life and death have always been considered two distinct states. That sentence opens nearly every article written about third-state cells, and it is worth stopping on the word always.

Always where? Always for whom?

Because in the traditions that raised many of us, that binary was never the settled fact it is presented as. It is a Western scientific assumption, roughly four centuries old, now quietly coming apart in laboratories in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Washington State. And the thing coming apart is something the elders in our communities never assembled in the first place.

What the Research Actually Found

Start with the science, plainly, because it is genuinely remarkable and it deserves to be reported accurately.

In 2020, a team at the University of Vermont and Tufts — Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard — published a method for building what they called reconfigurable organisms. They took cells from the animal cap of an African clawed frog embryo (Xenopus laevis), used an evolutionary algorithm to design a shape, and assembled the cells into it. The resulting millimeter-scale constructs — nicknamed xenobots — moved, pushed objects, and healed themselves when cut. No genetic modification. No synthetic scaffolding. Ordinary frog cells, removed from the body plan they were built for, doing something no frog has ever done.

A follow-up paper in Science Robotics in 2021 showed xenobots navigating narrow channels, working collectively without any signaling between them, and carrying molecular recorders that logged where they had been. Later that year, the same group reported something stranger still: kinematic self-replication. Xenobots shaped like a C would sweep loose cells in their environment into piles, and those piles would assemble into new xenobots, which would then do the same. Not growth. Not division. A form of reproduction with no precedent in the vertebrate body.

Then, in 2024, Gizem Gumuskaya and colleagues published work in Advanced Science on anthrobots — the human version. Adult human lung epithelial cells, cultured in extracellular matrix and then released into a low-viscosity environment, spontaneously self-assemble into motile spheroids between 30 and 500 microns wide. They swim using cilia on their surface. Placed on a scratched sheet of cultured human neurons, they crossed the gap and the neurons healed. Nobody designed that behavior. Nobody instructed those cells. They were lung cells. Lung cells do not do this.

Two mechanisms appear to be doing the work.

• ‣  Bioelectric signalling — the ion channels and pumps in cell membranes act as a kind of circuitry, carrying pattern information about what to build.
• ‣  Cellular plasticity — the capacity of a differentiated cell to abandon its assigned job and take up another.

Separately, and just as strikingly, researchers have been documenting what genes do after an organism dies. In 2017, Alexander Pozhitkov, Peter Noble, and colleagues published a time-course study in Open Biology tracing gene transcripts in mice and zebrafish for up to 96 hours postmortem. Over a thousand genes did not simply decay — their transcripts became more abundant after death, in waves, some peaking at 24 and 48 hours. Stress response. Immunity. Inflammation. Development. Genes associated with embryogenesis switching on in a body that has stopped. A 2018 Nature Communications study using human tissue from the GTEx project found comparable postmortem transcriptional activity in people, varying tissue by tissue.

In 2024, Noble, Pozhitkov, Levin and colleagues gathered these threads into a paper in Physiology proposing that we may need a third state — a condition that is neither the organism’s life nor its simple absence, in which cells given nutrients, oxygen, and the right signals reorganize into something with functions the original body never had.

Whose Boundary Is Blurring

Every article on this subject reaches for the same phrase — these cells blur the boundary between life and death — and then stops, as if blurring were the discovery.

But a boundary can only blur if you drew it sharp to begin with.

The Kenyan philosopher and theologian John Mbiti spent his career describing a temporal architecture that Western thought had no shelf for. In African Religions and Philosophy, he sets out two dimensions of time: Sasa, the living present that stretches backward into personal memory and forward into the immediate reachable future, and Zamani, the vast ocean of collective time. When a person dies in this framework, they do not exit into nothing. They move into the ranks of what Mbiti called the living-dead — physically gone, still present in Sasa, still named at meals, still consulted, still owed something. Only when the last person who knew their face is gone do they pass fully into Zamani.

That is not a metaphor for grief. It is an ontology. It holds that a person’s participation in the world does not end at the moment their heart does — a continuity we have traced elsewhere in what science is learning about inherited memory.

The specifics differ by tradition, and we want to be careful not to melt distinct peoples into one convenient “African view.” Among the Akan of Ghana, as Kwame Gyekye documents, the nsamanfo — the ancestors — remain morally active members of the lineage, capable of being pleased or offended by the conduct of the living. Among the Yoruba, the egúngún masquerade is not a costume representing an ancestor; in performance it is understood as the ancestor’s return, the lineage made visible and given a voice in the affairs of the compound. These are different cosmologies with different mechanics. What they share is a refusal of the flat line.

So when a researcher says the boundary is blurrier than we assumed — we hear a room being furnished that was already furnished. Not a rebuke to the science. Just a note about who got there first, and how long they had to sit in the dark being called superstitious while they waited.

How Communities Have Always Held the Threshold

The BaKongo cosmogram — the dikenga dia Kongo — maps existence as a circle divided by a horizontal line. Above is nza yayi, the visible world of the living. Below is nsi a bafwa, the world of the ancestors. The sun moves across the circle in four phases — birth, peak life, sunset-death, and the dark journey below before rising again — and death is not the end of that circuit. It is the moment the sun touches the water. The crossing begins there, not stops.

We say this not as decoration but as instruction, because it shapes how our communities have always practiced death — as something communal, not something outsourced. Among the Yoruba, the dying are surrounded by family, prayer, and the invocation of ancestors; in the period immediately after death, the community washes the body, sings, and speaks to the spirit directly, guiding it. The BaKongo practice of drawing the cosmogram at the grave is an act of orientation: we are showing you where you are in the journey. You have crossed the water. You are now below the line. Rise again.

Compare that to what Western medicalization did to dying: moved it out of the home and into the institution, handed the body to strangers under fluorescent light, made the most significant crossing of a life into something that happens in isolation. If third-state biology is right that something persists and keeps processing in the hours after clinical death, then the practices our communities never abandoned — washing, singing, sitting with the body, speaking to what is still, in some real sense, present — were never sentiment. They may be exactly correct.

What This Does and Does Not Mean

To be exact about what this does and does not claim:

We are not saying third-state cells are evidence of an afterlife. They are not. A cluster of ciliated lung cells swimming across a petri dish tells us nothing about the soul, nothing about what waits, nothing about whether your grandmother hears you. Anyone selling you that reading is selling you something.

We are also not saying our traditions needed this. The egúngún did not become more true in 2020. Mbiti’s living-dead were not waiting on peer review.

What we are saying is narrower and, we think, more useful. Western biology inherited a hard binary between living and dead, treated it as a description of reality rather than a working assumption, and used it for centuries to sort the world’s knowledge into science and superstition. That binary is now failing on its own terms, in its own laboratories, by its own instruments. Our people were never invested in it.

Science and spirit are not rivals here. They are two languages describing one world. The tradition is the mother tongue. The research is the second language — and we need the second language, because that is the one spoken in clinics, in school boards, and in the rooms where funding decisions get made.

Whose Bodies

Here is where we want to slow all the way down, because the standard version of this paragraph is written in a voice that has never had anything taken from it.

The usual line is: consent from donors will be essential. Essential going forward. As though consent were a best practice we are adopting, rather than a wall built after a flood.

Anthrobots are grown from human lung epithelial cells. Somebody’s lung. So the question is not the abstract one — should we get consent? The question is the specific one this country has spent a century refusing to answer straight: whose bodies have been available without asking, and whose have not?

In 1951, a thirty-one-year-old Black woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins for treatment of cervical cancer. During her care, cells were taken from her tumor without her knowledge and without her permission. She died that October. Her cells did not. The HeLa line became the most widely used human cell line in the history of biomedicine — polio vaccine development, in vitro fertilization, cancer research, COVID-19 vaccine work — and it built an industry. Her children grew up without health insurance. For decades the family was not told, and when they were told, they were not consulted.

That is not ancient history the field has moved past. The Lacks family fought for recognition into this century. In 2013 the NIH negotiated an agreement with them, giving family representatives seats on the panel that governs access to HeLa genome data — the first arrangement of its kind. In August 2023, on what would have been Henrietta Lacks’s 103rd birthday, her descendants reached a settlement with a biotechnology company over its commercial use of her cells. Seventy-two years. That is how long it took, and it took the family’s own persistence to get there.

Running alongside that story: from 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service ran a study at Tuskegee on 399 Black men with syphilis. The men were not told what they had. They were not treated, even after penicillin became the standard of care in the 1940s. Forty years. It ended in 1972 not because the science concluded, but because a reporter published it.

Modern research consent — institutional review boards, the requirement to tell a person what is being done to them — exists in substantial part because of what was done to those men and to that woman. Every consent form in every clinic is a monument to a harm.

So when we discuss third-state cell research, “respect for donors” is not the ethical frontier. The frontier is: who is being asked, who is being recruited, who is being compensated, and who will be able to afford the therapy at the end of it. If anthrobots become a real regenerative medicine — and they may — the communities whose tissue and whose trust built the foundation of American biomedicine should not be the last ones in line for the benefit. That is the ethical question. Everything else is procedure.

What It Could Become

The near-term applications are real and worth naming without inflating them. Anthrobots grown from a patient’s own tissue would carry that patient’s immune signature, which is why researchers are interested in them as vehicles for delivering drugs to a specific site. The neural-repair result — biobots crossing and closing a wound in a sheet of neurons — is the finding that has drawn the most attention, and it is early. These constructs biodegrade within weeks, which is a safety feature and a limitation at once.

All of it is preliminary. None of it is in a human body. We would rather say that plainly than let a hopeful sentence do work it hasn’t earned. Our communities have been promised breakthroughs before.

Where This Leaves Us

We think often about what it means that a discipline which spent centuries calling our cosmologies primitive is now publishing papers that say, in careful hedged language, the line may not be where we thought.

We don’t say that to gloat. There is no victory in it. What we take from it is a working instruction for how Ubuntu Village does its work — in Kenya, in Uganda, in Nigeria. When a community tells us something about how healing works in their context, that is data. It may not be in a journal yet. It is still data. Our job is not to translate people out of their own knowledge; it is to stand next to it with whatever second language is useful, so that knowledge can travel into the rooms where resources are decided.

Death as transition rather than terminus. Ancestors as participants rather than memories. Continuity as the default rather than the exception.

Biology is arriving. There are chairs already set out.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.

References

Primary Research

1. Kriegman, S., Blackiston, D., Levin, M., & Bongard, J. (2020). A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms. PNAS, 117(4), 1853–1859.
2. Blackiston, D., Lederer, E., Kriegman, S., Garnier, S., Bongard, J., & Levin, M. (2021). A cellular platform for the development of synthetic living machines. Science Robotics, 6(52), eabf1571.
3. Kriegman, S., Blackiston, D., Levin, M., & Bongard, J. (2021). Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms. PNAS, 118(49), e2112672118.
4. Gumuskaya, G., et al. (2024). Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells. Advanced Science, 11(4).
5. Pozhitkov, A. E., Neme, R., Domazet-Lošo, T., Leroux, B. G., Soni, S., Tautz, D., & Noble, P. A. (2017). Tracing the dynamics of gene transcripts after organismal death. Open Biology, 7(1), 160267.
6. Ferreira, P. G., et al. (2018). The effects of death and post-mortem cold ischemia on human tissue transcriptomes. Nature Communications, 9, 490.
7. Noble, P. A., Pozhitkov, A., Singh, K., Woods, E., Liu, C., Levin, M., Javan, G., Wan, J., Abouhashem, A. S., Mathew-Steiner, S. S., & Sen, C. K. (2024). Unraveling the Enigma of Organismal Death: Insights, Implications, and Unexplored Frontiers. Physiology, 39(5).

Philosophy and Tradition

8. Mbiti, J. S. (1969; 2nd ed. 1990). African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann.
9. Gyekye, K. (1987). An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme. Cambridge University Press.
10. Drewal, H. J. (1978). The Arts of Egungun among Yoruba Peoples. African Arts, 11(3).
11. Olupona, J. K. (2014). African Religions: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Research Ethics and History

12. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About the U.S. Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.
13. National Institutes of Health. The NIH–Lacks Family Agreement.
14. Collins, F. S., & Hudson, K. L. (2013). Family matters. Nature, 500, 141.
15. NPR (August 1, 2023). Henrietta Lacks’ family reaches settlement over use of her ‘stolen’ cells.

Related Reading

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