The Cell Does Not Belong to the Organism

Basal Cellular Autonomy, Organismal Integration, and a Relational Ontology of Cancer

Joaquim Santos Albino
Independent Researcher — HibriMind / SOMATHEON
Conceptual Preprint · Version 1.0 — Pre-Levin Conceptual Baseline · 27 July 2026
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21627077

A cell may be materially part of an organism, functionally dependent on it, and deeply shaped by its history without having its biological identity exhausted by that organism.

Research Position

The expression “the cells of an organism” appears to describe an elementary biological fact. Yet its possessive form can silently combine three different claims: that cells materially compose the organism, that they are functionally integrated within it, and that their biological identity is ontologically exhausted by it.

The first claim is descriptive. The second is experimentally tractable. This article challenges only the third.

The organism is real. Its coherence is not an illusion, and multicellularity cannot be reduced to an accidental collection of isolated cells. Organisms coordinate reproduction, suppress conflict, distribute labour, regulate boundaries and stabilise collective trajectories. But integration does not necessarily amount to possession. A higher-order living whole may constrain and organise cellular possibilities without being their absolute ontological source.

This is the central hypothesis of the preprint The Cell Does Not Belong to the Organism. It is a relational ontological proposal, not an experimental discovery and not a clinical theory. Its purpose is to ask what changes when material inclusion and functional dependence are no longer confused with the complete determination of cellular identity.

Life Does Not Begin at Fertilisation

Fertilisation makes the distinction immediately visible. Egg and sperm are already living cells. Their fusion does not create biological life from non-life; it establishes a new organismal continuity through the reorganisation of living systems that existed before it.

This is not a claim about personhood, moral status or legal protection. It is a narrower biological statement. A new organismal trajectory can begin while cellular life remains continuous through transformation.

The gametes do not remain unchanged. Their specialised organisations are profoundly reorganised, and a new developmental regime emerges. Yet the life of the cells involved was not conferred retroactively by the organism that follows. Organismal identity changes across the transition; cellular life crosses it.

Fertilisation therefore exposes a historical relation rather than an absolute hierarchy. The organism is not the origin of life in its cells. It is a new integration achieved through them.

The Cellular State as an Episode

A differentiated cell is often described as though its observed state revealed what the cell essentially is. Reprogramming and transdifferentiation complicate that picture. They show that at least some stabilised cellular identities can be displaced under defined interventions. This does not imply unlimited plasticity. It means that the state currently observed may not exhaust the cell’s biologically accessible state-space.

The paper introduces the term cellular episode:

A temporarily stabilised realisation within a biologically constrained possibility-space.

“Episode” does not mean fleeting. A cellular state may remain stable for the lifespan of an organism and still be historically produced rather than ontologically final. Nor does the term suggest an unrestricted power to become anything. Cellular possibilities are bounded by material architecture, genomic integrity, epigenetic history, metabolism, developmental competence and environmental relations.

The distinction is therefore between the state currently realised, the states accessible under viable transformations, and the states that remain biologically impossible.

This formulation extends a methodological principle already present in the SOMATHEON framework: an observed state should not be confused with a complete trajectory. Availability is not integration, and the present configuration does not by itself disclose the full architecture of accessible, dominant and recoverable states.

Organismal Integration Without Ontological Possession

The alternative to organismal possession is not cellular sovereignty. No cell exists independently of energy, matter, boundary conditions or relational context. The cell is never an isolated metaphysical atom.

The organism can instead be understood as a temporally stabilised, higher-order regime that coordinates, constrains and enables cellular activities into a viable collective organisation. It changes what cells can do, which signals become meaningful, which behaviours are suppressed and how local processes contribute to collective persistence.

But the organism is not external to the cells it coordinates. It is enacted through their relations and through their exchanges with extracellular structures, symbionts and environments. This prevents two symmetrical reductions:

• Upward reduction: the organism is nothing but a collection of independent cells.
• Downward reduction: cells are nothing but components whose identity is completely supplied by the organism.

The proposal is relational: organisms are achieved integrations of living processes, while cells are participants whose capacities are shaped by those integrations without necessarily being created by them.

Basal Cellular Autonomy

The paper names this retained dimension basal cellular autonomy:

The context-dependent capacity of a living cellular unit to maintain, regulate and realise biologically meaningful states that are not conceptually exhausted by the identity of the higher-order organism in which it is currently integrated.

The qualifications matter. Autonomy is not environmental independence. It is not isolation. It is not the absence of organismal constraint. It is graded, multidimensional and relational.

A cell may depend on a surrounding tissue while retaining regulatory capacities that can be redirected under another viable organisation. Some capacities may disappear after separation; others may remain latent; some may emerge only through new collective relations. The empirical question is not whether the cell is “free”, but how its possibility-space changes when the constraints that stabilised its former role are altered.

Work on xenobots and anthrobots makes this problem unusually visible. Xenobots were experimentally constructed from embryonic Xenopus laevis cells. Anthrobots self-assembled from adult human tracheal epithelial cells into motile multicellular structures; in vitro, assemblies promoted repair across scratches in cultured human neural cell sheets.

These experiments do not demonstrate resurrection, clinical biobots or a new biological kingdom. They support a narrower inference: the realised role of a cell within its source organism does not necessarily exhaust the behaviours available to it in another viable organisation.

Cancer as Inter-Scalar Dissociation

The consequence for cancer is precise. Cancer should not be equated with cellular autonomy, as though healthy cells possessed none and malignant transformation suddenly created it. If basal regulatory capacities are already present, cancer may instead involve a pathological reconfiguration of how those capacities are constrained and coordinated across scales.

The paper proposes the term inter-scalar dissociation:

A condition in which local biological coherence is maintained or amplified while compatibility with higher-order organismal coherence declines.

A tumour is not simply chaos. It can sustain organised metabolism, niche construction, clonal selection, vascular recruitment, immune modulation, spatial structure and collective invasion. Local viability and organisation may intensify precisely while the viability of the organism is compromised. The pathology is not necessarily an absence of order. It may be order whose scale of reference has shifted.

This does not reduce cancer to a cell-intrinsic story. Tumours depend on stromal, immune, vascular, mechanical and metabolic environments. Tissue architecture and microenvironment can restrain or promote malignant behaviour. Context-dependent phenotype does not erase genetic or epigenetic alteration; it shows that molecular lesions do not act outside relational organisation.

The framework therefore distinguishes at least three levels: cell-intrinsic regulatory organisation, local multicellular and microenvironmental organisation, and organism-level functional coherence. A tumour may become less compatible with the organism while developing new dependencies and forms of coordination at its own scale.

Autonomy and dependence are not opposites when they refer to different relations.

What This Hypothesis Changes

The proposal does not replace genetics, epigenetics, metabolism, immunology, developmental biology or tumour-microenvironment research. It asks how those mechanisms sustain or disrupt biological individuality across scales.

It also produces a research programme:

• map cellular possibility-spaces under controlled changes in signalling, geometry, mechanics and multicellular composition;
• identify which organismal constraints suppress, permit or stabilise particular cell-level behaviours;
• measure local coherence and organism-level function separately rather than assuming they vary together;
• test contextual reversibility without generalising from one model or state;
• compare the behavioural repertoires of reconfigured cellular collectives with those of their source tissues;
• distinguish organismal death, tissue viability, cellular death and post-organismal reorganisation.

The framework would lose explanatory value if “basal cellular autonomy” could not be operationalised more precisely than existing concepts such as plasticity, homeostasis and context dependence, or if cross-scale variables added no predictive or experimental value to established models. A new term is justified only if it makes previously hidden distinctions measurable.

Limits and Non-Claims

This is a conceptual synthesis and hypothesis. It does not claim that every cell retains broad plasticity, that cells from dead organisms routinely form new entities, that death is reversible or that cancer can generally be normalised by changing context. It does not establish a formal “third state”, and it does not imply that clinical biobots are currently available.

The title is deliberately strong but technically narrow. “Does not belong” rejects ontological exhaustion. It does not reject physical inclusion, causal dependence, developmental history, organismal individuality or ethical responsibility.

Author’s Ontological Note

The function or state observed in a cell should not be confused with its purpose or essence. It can be understood as one realised episode among several biologically possible states, stabilised by relational, historical and contextual conditions. The organism participates in selecting and stabilising those episodes, but it need not exhaust the cell’s biological identity.

This position does not replace mechanism with metaphysics. It makes the inferential movement explicit: observation identifies what happened; biological interpretation proposes how it happened; ontology asks what kind of individual, relation or scale must be assumed for that explanation to remain coherent.

Provenance: A Pre-Levin Baseline

Version 1.0 records the conceptual state reached on 27 July 2026, before a systematic study of Michael Levin’s theoretical corpus.

The immediate reflection was prompted by public discussion of xenobots, anthrobots and the proposed “third state”, connected to experimental or interpretive work involving Levin and collaborators. Those results were not unknown and are cited transparently. However, the present synthesis was not constructed through a systematic engagement with Levin’s theoretical frameworks or terminology.

The conceptual instruments used here—trajectory rather than isolated state, accessibility and recoverability of states, integration versus availability, multilevel coherence, and pathology as regulatory reorganisation—were already present in the author’s SOMATHEON and Non-Pathological Medicine projects.

This DOI therefore preserves a T0 baseline. Subsequent comparison with Levin’s work belongs to the separate LIMEN research project. Later convergence, divergence or reformulation will not be projected retrospectively into this record.

Conclusion

The organism is not diminished by refusing to treat it as the ontological owner of its cells. It becomes more biologically precise: a real, achieved and continuously maintained integration of living processes.

A cell can be materially part of an organism, functionally dependent on it and deeply shaped by its history while retaining possibilities not exhausted by its present role. Fertilisation exposes continuity across changes in organismal identity. Reprogramming exposes the non-finality of some stabilised states. Reconfigured cellular collectives expose capacities realised outside native anatomy. Cancer exposes the possibility that coherent organisation at one scale can become incompatible with coherence at another.

Organismal integration should not be confused with ontological possession.

Under this view, cancer is not first the birth of cellular autonomy. It is a candidate disorder of how basal cellular autonomy is constrained, coordinated and made compatible with a higher-order living whole.

Cite and Access the Preprint

Canonical record:
Santos Albino, J. (2026). The Cell Does Not Belong to the Organism: Basal Cellular Autonomy, Organismal Integration, and a Relational Ontology of Cancer (Version 1.0 — Pre-Levin Conceptual Baseline). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21627077

The complete preprint, editable source, evidence matrix and publication metadata are available in the Zenodo record.

Selected References

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7. Gumuskaya, G., et al. (2024). Motile living biobots self-construct from adult human somatic progenitor seed cells. Advanced Science, 11(4), 2303575. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202303575
8. Noble, P. A., et al. (2024). Unraveling the enigma of organismal death: insights, implications, and unexplored frontiers. Physiology, 39(5), 313–323. https://doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00004.2024

Editorial note: This HibriMind article is an editorial presentation of the canonical English-language preprint. The Zenodo record preserves Version 1.0 and its full reference list as the pre-Levin conceptual baseline.