The Levins were not quite as indulgent when Michael, like the rest of the country, got swept up in the Pac-Man craze. Levin begged his father for the game, to no avail. If he wanted to play Pac-Man, Benjamin told his son, he’d have to build it himself. Michael decided to do just that.

Night after night, he perched in front of his TRS-80, which he hooked up to an old black-and-white TV. The computer had no long-term memory. The day’s work would vanish every time he shut it down, so Michael meticulously transcribed everything he did in an 8.5 x 11-inch spiral notebook. When he next sat down to work, he first had to re-enter everything he’d done previously. He was 11 years old.

Within six months, Michael had created a working facsimile. His Pac-Man moved through a maze, chomping dots and escaping ghosts. Unlike the commercial edition, the maze in Levin’s version was different in every game; what’s more, the ghosts never clustered together, making them harder to avoid. It was a challenging game but, after all his efforts, Michael spent little time playing it. He realized it was the creative process that had been driving him, not the end product.

Michael’s interests extended beyond computers. In 1981, soon after the Levins moved to Swampscott, a neighborhood just north of Boston, he turned a small room on the second floor into a makeshift biology laboratory. Levin used it to explore such questions as the line between life and death, which he investigated by chilling snails and insects in his parents’ freezer.

But to satisfy his ambitions he had to look beyond what was available locally. Aside from some electrical parts available at Radio Shack, he couldn’t find any of the equipment he wanted. He found the solution at his local library, in a reference book that contained details of a company that provided science materials to high schools and colleges. Levin knew that a random teenager living in suburban Boston wouldn’t be allowed to buy lab equipment and formaldehyde-preserved rat’s and sheep’s brains, so when he called he identified himself as a representative of the imaginary “Saint Augustine School of Science.” The employee who took his order only wanted one more piece of information: a reference number for the order. “I had no idea what that was, so I’d say, ‘Um, seven?’ says Levin. It worked.

Levin’s closeness with his parents, and the lengths they went to indulge his curiosities, continued throughout high school. The summer after his sophomore year, Michael, Benjamin and Luba travelled across North America to Vancouver for Expo ’86, a World’s Fair. Father and son wandered into a local bookstore, where Michael chanced upon The Body Electric, co-written by an orthopedic surgeon named Robert Becker.

Becker had held a senior position at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Syracuse, New York, but he was also something of a crank. He’d been an early and vocal proponent of the theory that power lines cause cancer and, in The Body Electric, argued for a link between electromagnetic fields and a grab-bag of other conditions, including Reye’s syndrome, Lyme disease, Legionnaire’s disease, AIDS and genital herpes. His own research went largely unfunded, Becker implied, because of the meddling of “politicians, military leaders, and their lap dog researchers.” As the Los Angeles Times put it in a review, “so many of his proposals for study met with rejection, and he feels the knowledge to be gained from his work is so critical for human survival, that Becker is submitting his thesis to the public.” The Times went on to note that Becker “sometimes sounds paranoid”.

Despite these eccentricities, the book is one of the few comprehensive texts on the role of electricity in regeneration. In the first 200 pages, Becker describes forgotten experiments from the early twentieth century that suggest electricity can spark the regrowth of body parts. In one notable study, scientists used electrical currents to prompt a small freshwater animal called a hydra to regrow a head in place of a tail.

The scientific establishment had a hard time separating this research from Becker’s claims about links between electromagnetic fields and extra-sensory perception, as well as his suggestion that admittances to mental hospitals were linked to solar flares and magnetic storms. Seventeen-year-old Michael Levin did not. He was transfixed by the description of bona fide scientists exploring the very questions he’d been asking himself. (In his home lab, he’d been applying currents to protozoa to see if this would make the single-celled organisms grow more quickly.) According to Becker, electrical currents played an even more profound role in animal development than Levin had ever imagined.