In December 2009, evolutionary biologist Michael Travisano was debating with his future postdoc William Ratcliff what to do next in their lab at the University of Minnesota (UMN), Twin Cities. They had just seen a talk on slime molds that delved into what it meant to be a multicellular organism. Under certain conditions, some of these single-cell amoebas can coalesce into masses of millions of cells that act in a coordinated fashion, as if a whole organism.
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