Josh Bongard

"These are novel living machines,They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

"The downside of living tissue is that it's weak and it degrades. That's why we use steel. But organisms have 4.5 billion years of practice at regenerating themselves and going on for decades. And when they stop working—death—they usually fall apart harmlessly."

"These xenobots are fully biodegradable,when they're done with their job after seven days, they're just dead skin cells."

"We sliced the robot almost in half and it stitches itself back up and keeps going,And this is something you can't do with typical machines."

"There's all of this innate creativity in life,We want to understand that more deeply—and how we can direct and push it toward new forms."

"We all learned in high school biology that frog DNA encodes frogs and human DNA encodes humans. It seems that’s not the case, Whatever genes are doing, it’s more complicated than that."

"In xenobots, the shape … dictates what a xenobot is going to do. It dictates whether it’s going to replicate, how it replicates [and] what it’s going to look like."