Can you grow an organ inside a computer , and would it teach you something biology alone cannot? Computational biologist Yaki Setty describes how agent-based models of stem cell development can reconstruct the pancreas, the C. elegans gonad, and even parts of the brain from first principles, revealing emergent properties that no single experiment could predict. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Yaki Setty joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to present his approach to synthetic organ development using autonomous agent-based modeling. Each cell in the simulation is defined by biologically justified state diagrams , covering differentiation, proliferation, movement, and environmental sensing , with every parameter traceable to published experimental data. The environment is modeled as ...