Science
Dozens of patients file suit against former OB-GYN and Cedars-Sinai, alleging misconduct
Thirty-five women are suing a Beverly Hills obstetrician-gynecologist, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and other medical practices where the doctor worked, alleging decades of sexual and medical misconduct that the health facilities enabled and concealed.
The lawsuit, filed late Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that Dr. Barry Brock had, for years, made lewd and unsettling comments to patients; groped their breasts and genitals during medically unnecessary exams, sometimes without gloves; and engaged in “female genital mutilation” by giving women unneeded sutures, among other reported misconduct.
The suit also alleges the longtime physician denied caesarean sections to patients who needed them.
Brock has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing or sexual misconduct, saying he had never touched a patient inappropriately or made sexually suggestive or harassing remarks.
The longtime OB-GYN said in a statement Tuesday that the allegations in the lawsuit were false and outrageous, calling them “flat-out lies, made up events that never happened, exaggerated and fabricated statements, and worse.”
Attorneys “have made it seem as if I was grooming patients even by just speaking to them, insanely claiming that suturing a patient after childbirth is genital mutilation, and saying that my standard vaginal exams and pap smears were ‘sadistic,’” Brock said.
He said that patient records and witnesses “will help me prove the truth of what happened here.”
Cedars-Sinai said in a statement Tuesday that the kind of behavior alleged about Brock, who is no longer practicing medicine at its facilities, is “counter to Cedars-Sinai’s core values and the trust we strive to earn every day with our patients.”
“We recognize the legal process must now take its course, and we remain committed to Cedars-Sinai’s sacred healing mission and serving our community.”
The doctor is also facing an accusation before the Medical Board of California, where he is accused of committing “repeated negligent acts.” According to the official complaint, Brock failed to give a patient enough pain medication while treating her for a miscarriage, and failed to properly clear material from her uterus, among other accusations.
In a statement, Brock said the events outlined in the accusation were not an accurate description of his treatment of the patient and that some allegations were “completely inconsistent with my practices.”
For instance, Brock said he could not imagine refusing to address severe pain suffered by a patient. “Based on what I know of my care and treatment of this patient,” he said, “I will successfully defend my treatment as being within the standard of care.”
Brock, 74, said he had been an attending physician at Cedars-Sinai since the early 1980s, and had never before faced an accusation from the medical board.
He left its physician network in 2018 but retained hospital privileges at Cedars-Sinai while working in private practice at Rodeo Drive Women’s Health Center and Beverly Hills OB/GYN, which were also named as defendants in the lawsuit. Both organizations had yet to respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
In July, Cedars-Sinai said it had suspended Brock’s hospital privileges after receiving “concerning complaints” from his former patients. A few months later, his hospital privileges were terminated.
At that time, a spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai said that privacy laws prohibited the medical center from confirming the existence of any patient complaints or disciplinary action taken against Brock before this year.
The lawsuit alleges that both patients and medical staff reported concerns about Brock to Cedars-Sinai long before the complaints that led to the termination of his hospital privileges.
Cedars-Sinai administrators received “ample and repeated warnings” about his misconduct and abuse of patients through past lawsuits, as well as complaints to the state medical board and to the health system itself, the lawsuit alleged. Yet the medical center and other defendants continued to “expose more unsuspecting female patients to a known serial sexual predator,” the suit alleged.
Plaintiffs are represented by a legal team that includes Anthony T. DiPietro, an attorney who has also represented patients of convicted sex offender Robert Hadden, formerly a gynecologist at Columbia University, and Mike Arias, who like DiPietro has represented patients of former USC gynecologist George Tyndall.
The complaint details allegations from 35 former patients ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s. Some saw Brock only once and refused to see him again, while others were treated by him repeatedly over a period of years. The timing of their care ranges from the mid-1980s to this year, according to the complaint.
Nearly a dozen patients alleged unnecessary suturing or crude comments about it: Brock told several plaintiffs he inserted an “extra stitch” in their perineal areas to make them “tighter” after childbirth, the lawsuit said.
In one instance, according to the lawsuit, Brock said, “I’m going to sew her up virgin-tight” in front of a woman’s husband and parents after childbirth. In another, Brock told a woman that she had not suffered any tearing, but told her husband, “Don’t worry, dad, I’ll throw a stitch in there for you,” and proceeded to suture her without her consent, the lawsuit alleged.
Some suffered ongoing pain or urinary complications after “this barbaric and entirely unnecessary form of female genital mutilation,” the lawsuit said. Doctors for one patient described the stitching as “the equivalent of a female circumcision,” the lawsuit said.
Brock told The Times that he performed perineal suturing only if there was a laceration, and that if he did so, “there was always consent.”
The lawsuit also included allegations of violent and threatening behavior. One former patient alleged that Brock “violently thrust” a speculum into her vagina, opened it and “proceeded to pump the instrument in and out of her, simulating intercourse.”
The woman said she reported the experience and other concerning encounters with Brock to an executive at Rodeo Drive Women’s Health Center, where Brock worked at the time. No action was taken against him, according to the lawsuit.
Brock told The Times that he had never forced in a speculum and called the claim about simulating intercourse “complete nonsense” that “appears to be a tricky lawyer way to make an appropriate medical exam seem like an assault.”
In the lawsuit, two women alleged that he forced them to feel his erection. One said he had “proceeded to rub his erect penis against her hand” while she was alone with him in an exam room, the lawsuit said.
Another alleged that while she was in labor, Brock walked in and put her foot on his erection, then grabbed her foot again when she tried to move it away.
Brock, in his statement, said he had “NEVER NEVER told any patient to touch me in any way,” nor touched patients inappropriately, and had never had an erection during an exam.
The lawsuit also alleged that Brock forced patients to undergo sensitive physical exams even after they refused. A decision to do a pelvic or breast exam should be a shared one between a physician and a patient, the lawsuit said, and “such invasive procedures should never be performed without the patient’s knowledge, understanding, and consent.”
In one case, the lawsuit said, Brock pulled down the pants of a woman who refused a vaginal examination in front of her daughter and “was so aggressive that [the woman] immediately ran out of the room in tears.”
Brock, in his statement, denied ever pulling down the pants of a patient and said that if a woman wanted to refuse a Pap smear or pelvic examination, that would be her right. He also said he always wore gloves to protect himself and patients during pelvic exams.
Another patient alleged that Brock ignored her when she said a breast exam was unnecessary. Instead, the complaint alleges, he unhooked her bra, squeezed her breasts and told her, “You have perfect breasts. Does your husband tell you that?” She was one of five women who said he removed their bras without consent before touching their breasts, according to the complaint.
Other patients alleged that Brock refused to leave the room as they undressed or denied their request for a hospital gown, requiring them to go through examinations naked.
Brock told The Times that he either leaves the room when a patient undresses or, if a patient in a hurry requests it, turns while they change behind a curtain, and “there never would be a case where a gown was not provided upon request.” He said if a patient turned down a breast exam, he would not perform one.
The doctor added that on a few occasions when a patient had not removed their bra before putting on a gown, he had assisted a patient in unclasping it for a breast exam. “This was not done for any improper purpose and was done that way so the patient did not need to take off the gown,” Brock said.
In the lawsuit, many patients described sexual remarks: One said Brock told her that her vagina looked “ripe” and peppered her with invasive questions, such as asking whether her partner would ejaculate on her body during sex, according to the lawsuit. Several patients noted that while examining the women’s genitals or breasts, Brock commented on how “lucky” or “happy” their partners must be, the suit said.
Brock denied making such remarks. “I have never spoken those words,” he said.
The lawsuit alleges that Cedars-Sinai was repeatedly informed about concerns with Brock. One patient who saw him between 2011 and 2013 reported his behavior to office staff and asked to switch to a different doctor, according to the lawsuit. Another who saw him in 2018 and 2019 informed her regular physician, who was also affiliated with Cedars-Sinai, about his actions, the suit said.
Another former patient, herself an employee of Cedars-Sinai at the time, filed a formal complaint with the medical center after a 2017 prenatal appointment in which Brock allegedly groped her breasts “under the guise of medical care” and made inappropriate comments to her and her husband, according to the suit.
Though she was told there would be consequences for Brock — who was in Cedars-Sinai’s physician network at the time — she heard nothing more from the medical center, the complaint states.
The lawsuit said another patient who tried to report misconduct to Cedars-Sinai earlier this year was initially told that the medical center wouldn’t take action because the doctor was in private practice.
She then contacted Beverly Hills OB-GYN, which had referred her to Brock after her usual physician was unavailable. When she received no response after sharing her experience, the woman lodged a formal, written complaint with Cedars-Sinai by email, according to the suit. It was only then, the lawsuit said, that her complaint was taken seriously and Brock had his hospital privileges suspended.
A Cedars-Sinai spokesperson told The Times in September that the hospital system had terminated clinical privileges for Brock after an investigation and reported the matter to the state medical board.
Brock, however, said he had surrendered his privileges without any “fact finding” or “hearing on the merits” of the allegations under investigation. In August, he had informed patients he would retire at the end of the month due to the “uncertainty of how long this process will take.”

Science
Will personal firefighting devices help or hurt in future wildfires?

Patrick Golling yanked the pull cord, and the Honda engine roared to life. Seconds after it began sucking water out of his father’s pool, a powerful stream erupted from an agricultural irrigation nozzle fixed atop a bright red pole a few feet away, connected with a fire hose.
In a minute flat, the system meticulously jerked across the landscape, drenching the ravine in 50 gallons of water. The demonstration on a hot July afternoon left the blackened sticks below the property — once trees before the Palisades fire ripped through — dripping with chlorinated water.
The contraption is the brainchild of Golling and Arizona engineer Tony Robinson. After a TV interview where Golling discussed a cobbled-together version of the tech that he says saved his father’s home from the Palisades fire, Robinson cold-called him, and Realize Safety was born.
Now, the two talk of ambitious visions where entire neighborhoods living amid California’s rugged brush-covered landscapes band together to create a community defense network of automated firefighters.
Realize Safety’s defenders use an agricultural irrigation nozzle to spray 50 gallons of water per minute on surrounding vegetation.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Their system is the latest entrant in a growing group of often-expensive, high-tech sprinkler systems designed to protect homes in high fire hazard areas. But while a blue-ribbon commission after the January fires recommended L.A. adopt exterior sprinkler technology, some fire officials warn there’s limited evidence that these elaborate and flashy systems work.
Instead, they say the systems distract from less-glamorous but proven measures to protect homes, such as brush clearance and multipaned windows, while encouraging residents to risk their lives by staying back during an evacuation to protect their homes.
“Good solutions don’t pop up overnight,” said David Barrett, executive director of the Los Angeles Regional Fire Safe Council. “There is no silver bullet.”
Especially for a vicious blaze such as the Palisades fire. Given the extreme weather conditions — winds over 80 mph, incredibly dry vegetation — there was very little firefighters, let alone home defense systems, could do, Barrett said.
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve got in your pool,” he said. “Nothing is going to stop an urban wildfire from progressing if it’s wind-driven — sorry. That’s the end.”
Asked whether the system saved his father’s home, Golling did not mince words: “Absolutely.”

Patrick Golling of Realize Safety adjusts the nozzle on one of the company’s defenders.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
After Golling got word of a fire developing in the Palisades on Jan. 7, he immediately thought of the gas pump and irrigation sprinkler system his father had bought just months before to protect his home in the Palisades Highlands. Golling rushed to his father’s house and spent the next two days deploying the system throughout the neighborhood, putting out spot fires that threatened the development. Golling said firefighters encouraged him to keep up the work as they struggled to contain monster blazes one neighborhood over.
As the smoke settled, most of Golling’s neighborhood remained standing.
But little data exist on the effectiveness of home defense sprinklers.
Wildfire researchers often use large datasets of destroyed and standing homes after devastating fires to compare the success of the various home hardening strategies they used. But scientists have yet to identify and analyze fires where sprinkler systems were widely used.
Some anecdotal evidence has suggested that these systems provide some protection. An analysis of the 2007 Ham Lake fire in Minnesota found that of 47 homes identified with functioning sprinkler systems, all but one survived. Meanwhile, only about 40% of the 48 homes without the systems remained standing after the fire.
Typical home defense sprinkler systems work by drawing water from utility systems, and using it to wet the exterior of a house and create — at least theoretically — another barrier from fire. Realize Safety’s goal is to prevent the fire from even reaching the house by dousing nearby vegetation in water and creating a mist to dampen any embers that could ignite the home. To do it, they’re tapping into an underutilized source of water: pools.
Barrett said that, without a doubt, firefighters could put pool water to better use than these systems. Firefighters, he said, already have all the equipment they need to utilize pool water, and all residents have to do is install a clear sign out front letting firefighters know they have a pool.
But as Golling looked at the view of the Palisades from his father’s backyard in early July, he counted eight destroyed homes with still-full pools.
“We think — that had they had a system in place like the one we’re talking about — they could have saved their homes,” Golling said.
Utility water sources are not designed to handle large-scale urban fires. During the Palisades fire, the chief engineer for the city’s water utility told The Times that the system saw four times the normal water demand for 15 hours straight.
It’s in part why, when an independent 20-member Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire-Safe Recovery recently issued dozens of recommendations for rebuilding and recovery, it called for prioritizing additional water storage capacity in neighborhoods and encouraging the development of standards for and the installation of systems that draw on water stored in pools or cisterns, with external sprinklers to douse homes.
Using a 20,000-gallon pool, Realize Safety’s system can run for over six hours straight. And unlike many traditional water defense sprinklers, it is not dependent on the house having electricity and access to utility water systems.
Reliability is paramount for Robinson, who has spent much of his engineering career working on airplanes and satellites — where failure is synonymous with catastrophe.
The same is true for wildfire defense. In the Ham Lake fire, the researchers also counted nine residences where home defense sprinklers failed. Eight of them burned.

Realize Safety’s system pulls water from residential pools, a widely untapped source of water during urban fires.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
In the quest for reliability, Golling and Robinson have made significant improvements on the unwieldy system Golling used in January (where, after some time, the generator cart rattled itself straight into the pool it was drawing water from). With a sturdy generator cart and sprinklers that are firmly anchored into the ground, the two are confident that residents can trust it long after they’ve evacuated.
But Barrett credits success stories such as Golling’s not to specific technology, but instead to the dangerous practice of ignoring an evacuation order to protect a house. He worries systems such as Realize Safety’s — that essentially give residents all the tools they need to try their hand at firefighting instead of evacuating — could encourage more people to stay behind, as Golling did.
“The problem with that is people then stay behind putting their lives and the lives of firefighters at risk, when they’re not trained in firefighting,” he said.
A comprehensive 2019 study from fire researcher Alexandra Syphard found that, in previous Southern California wildfires, a civilian staying behind to protect a house reduced the chance of a home burning by 32% — more than every other factor studied, including defensible space, concrete roofs and even the presence of the fire department at the property. (The study did not evaluate the effectiveness of sprinkler systems, which were not widely used in the fires analyzed.)
However, fire officials across the state — in no unclear terms — strongly discourage this practice. It endangers human life, and when a manageable fire fight suddenly becomes unmanageable for a homeowner, rescue efforts can redirect essential resources that are desperately needed elsewhere.
Some fire safety advocates also worry flashy and unproven tech could distract from well-tested home-hardening methods, such as clearing flammable debris from the yard and roof.
Barrett recalled visiting a house about a year ago to inspect the resident’s home-hardening efforts and provide feedback.
“The person had spent $50,000 on a sprinkler system, but he had overgrown branches hanging onto his roof and the rain gutters were all full of needles,” he said. Barrett’s blunt personal assessment: “This house is going to burn down.”
“Chopping those branches and clearing the needles out would have cost $1,000 or less,” he said.
Golling and Robinson say they’re focused on providing the cheapest, most reliable tech they can. They see their home defenders as another, relatively affordable, tool in the arsenal to increase the odds their customers’ homes survive a fire.
A fully operational, autonomous system starts at $3,450, which Golling said is cheaper than what he spends on defensible-space lawn maintenance in some years.
“We did the brush clearance. We have the water pump. We’re going to do the ember-resistant vents and home hardening,” Golling said. “You’ve got to really do it all.”
Times staff writer Ian James contributed to this report.
Science
National suicide prevention hotline plans to stop offering LGBTQ+ youth counseling. Queer advocates in L.A. wonder what's next
Amy Kane was filled with dread when she heard that the national suicide prevention lifeline would stop offering specialized crisis intervention to young LGBTQ+ Americans and end its partnership with the West Hollywood-based Trevor Project.
With the service set to end July 17, Kane, a therapist who identifies as lesbian, believes the Trump administration is sending a clear message to queer Americans: “We don’t care whether you live or die.”
Since it launched in 2022, more than 1.3 million queer young Americans struggling with a mental health crisis have dialed the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which gave them the option to press “3” to connect with a specialist trained to address their unique life experiences. As the largest of seven LGBTQ+ contractors, the Trevor Project alone handles about half of all volume from queer callers to the 988 line.
The government’s decision is yet another broadside from an administration whose actions have left queer public health advocates and providers reeling, including at the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center, where Kane serves as director of mental health services.
Under pressure from the Trump administration, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles sent letters to families in early June saying it planned to suspend its healthcare program for transgender children and young adults in late July. The LGBTQ Center and other groups have demanded that the hospital reconsider.
Around the same time came the news about the 988 line and the Trevor Project, a nonprofit founded in 1998 by the makers of the Academy Award-winning short film “Trevor” — about a teen who attempts suicide — to address the absence of a major prevention network tailored to the needs of queer youth.
“So much has been thrown our way in the last five months,” Kane said. “It’s across the board. It’s not just mental health. We see what’s happening with gender-affirming care, dramatic cuts in research for HIV and STIs. … What’s next?”
Given L.A.’s status as a haven for LGBTQ+ people — the first permitted Pride parade took place in Hollywood in 1970 — Kane wonders whether the recent moves are an attempt to intimidate and punish Californians for being so welcoming.
Terra Russell-Slavin, left, denounced cuts to LGBT health funding as public health care becoming political as Rep. Laura Friedman, center, and Craig Thompson, CEO of the David Geffen Health Center look on at the APLA Health, Michael Gottlieb Health Center in West Hollywood last month.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The threats aren’t just coming from Washington. Kane said that she and other leaders had to lobby state legislators recently to preserve funding for a queer women’s preventive-healthcare program offered through the L.A. LGBTQ Center that was to be revoked due to a state budget shortfall. For now, the program has been given a temporary reprieve.
“It used to be this idea of, ‘Oh yeah, that’s in the red states, but I’m safe in California’ — it doesn’t feel that way anymore,” Kane said.
Staff members at the Trevor Project are scrambling to figure out how to save the jobs of about 200 counselors who are paid through the federal contract, including raising private funds to make up for the unexpected shortfall, said Mark Henson, interim vice president of advocacy and government affairs. The news couldn’t come at a worse time, given that calls nationwide are on pace to top 700,000 in 2025. That’s up from 600,000 in 2024, a spokesperson said, citing metrics from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Another 100 crisis counselors are employed and paid separately by the Trevor Project itself. They will continue taking calls through the project’s own 24/7, free crisis line, one of several options that local LGBTQ+ organizations offer. Los Angeles County’s Alternative Crisis Response has a 24/7 helpline at (800) 854-7771 that also provides culturally sensitive support services.
But Alex Boyd, the Trevor Project’s director of crisis intervention, said he isn’t sure how his organization can make up for the loss of the nationwide visibility and federal support that the 988 partnership affords them.
LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers, according to the Trevor Project. Its 2024 survey found that in California, 35% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered taking their own lives and that 11% of respondents had attempted suicide in the previous year.
In defending the decision to stop working with the Trevor Project at a House budget hearing in May, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that while Trump supports the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in general, “We don’t want to isolate different demographics and polarize our country.”
The big question, Boyd said, is will young LGBTQ+ Americans who already feel shunned or misunderstood still trust a suicide prevention line that no longer offers counselors they can easily relate to?
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work when it comes to people in emotional and mental distress, Boyd said.
He fears the worst.
“The fact that such a significant amount of our capacity for impact has now been stripped away — there is no operational way in order to navigate through a moment like this that doesn’t result, in at least the short term, in a loss of life.”
Counselors at the Trevor Project hear the anguish over the anti-LGBTQ+ backlash in the voices of young callers seeking help through the lifeline, Boyd said. “The statements we are hearing are: ‘Our government doesn’t support me. The government is actively erasing my experience from the national conversation.’ ”
“Increasingly, the biggest thread that we see from young people reaching out to us is this idea that it is already difficult to be a young person in the world — this is another layer that we’re adding onto children’s lives,” Boyd said. “They’re coming to us saying they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to navigate through more years of this before they get some level of autonomy and agency and find some sense of safety.”
Along with a host of executive actions signed by the president, thousands of bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community have been introduced in state legislatures, in cities and in school districts in California and around the country, including calls to ban books that mention same-sex relationships and gender identity, remove the Pride flag from government buildings and kick trans athletes off of sports teams.
Adding to the strain on the queer community, Trump’s self-described “Big Beautiful Bill,” recently passed in both houses in Congress, cuts public health funding for low-income Americans who receive Medicaid. LGBTQ+ Americans are twice as likely to rely on Medicaid to receive their health care than other Americans, said Alexandra Curd, a staff policy attorney at the national advocacy group Lambda Legal.
Over 40% of nonelderly U.S. adults living with HIV depend on the federal program for their healthcare needs compared to 15% for the general population, according to KFF. Many recipients rely nonprofit organizations funded by federal grants to get HIV and STI screenings and receive HIV prevention medications such as PREP and PEP, Curd said.
Because of the Medicaid cuts and the prospect of increased difficulty in accessing preventive care and emotional support, “We’re going to possibly be seeing rising infections rates for HIV,” she said.
Curd said a recent spike in HIV rates among Latino men could only worsen. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have cited a lack of adequate funding, racial bias, language barriers and mistrust of the medical system among the reasons that gay and bisexual Latino men account for a disproportionate percentage of new HIV cases.
Lambda Legal’s help desk has already received more requests for assistance with health care, employment and housing discrimination in the first half of 2025 than in all of 2024, with the most pressing need coming from trans and nonbinary callers.
One piece of good news for L.A. came recently when Rep. Laura Friedman (D–West Hollywood) announced that the Trump administration had restored more than $19 million in federal grants for HIV and STI prevention and tracking that were earmarked for the L.A. County Department of Public Health but slashed by the CDC. Friedman said she and others spoke out against the cut were able to secure an extra $338,019 in federal funding for the new fiscal year starting June 1.
But it’s hard for healthcare organizations to celebrate given that vital funds for mental health and HIV programs were targeted in the first place.
Manny Zermeño, a behavioral health specialist at the Long Beach office of another queer community service organization, APLA Health, senses the distress in his clients. “There is fear, sadness and also with those feelings, it’s natural to have some anger and confusion,” Zermeño said.
The L.A.-based nonprofit focuses on providing free and affordable dental, medical, counseling and other services for queer people 18 and over. It was founded in 1982 as AIDS Project Los Angeles. Back then, a small team of volunteers worked a telephone hotline in the closet of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbians Community Service Center, fielding calls from panicked residents seeking answers about what was then a fatal disease for which there was no treatment.
The organization operated the first dental clinic in the U.S. catering to AIDS patients out of a trailer in West Hollywood. After movie star Rock Hudson announced he had AIDS in 1985, the organization galvanized support among Angelenos by hosting the first-ever AIDS Walk fundraiser at Paramount Studios, according to its website.
Kane and leaders of other community organizations in L.A. said they would rally once again, this time to assist the Trevor Project.
“All of us who have boots on the ground — you’ll literally have to drag us out by our ankles in order to not provide care to our community,” Kane said. “I don’t believe that queer kids will not have access to resources, because we won’t allow it.”
Science
Cyborg jellyfish could help uncover the depths and mysteries of the Pacific Ocean

For years, science fiction has promised a future filled with robots that can swim, crawl and fly like animals. In one research lab at Caltech, what once felt like distant imagination is becoming reality.
At first glance, they look like any other moon jellyfish — soft-bodied, translucent and ghostlike, as their bell-shaped bodies pulse gently through the water. But look closer, and you’ll spot a tangle of wires, a flash of orange plastic, and a sudden intentional movement.
These are no ordinary jellies. These are cyborgs.
At the Dabiri Lab at Caltech, which focuses on the study of fluid dynamics and bio-inspired engineering, researchers are embedding microelectric controllers into jellyfish, creating “biohybrid” devices. The plan: Dispatch these remotely controlled jellyfish robots to collect environmental data at a fraction of the cost of conventional underwater robots — and potentially redefine how we monitor the ocean.

Caltech graduate student, Noa Yoder, a graduate student is one of the members of a team developing cyborg jellyfish, using a device made up of a container filled with sensors and two electrodes that attach to the jellyfish’s muscles.
“It fills the niche between high-tech underwater robots and just attaching sensors to animals, which you have little control over where they go,” said Noa Yoder, a graduate student in the Dabiri Lab. “These devices are very low cost and it would be easy to scale them to a whole swarm of jellyfish, which already exist in nature.”
Jellyfish are perfect for the job in other ways: Unlike most marine animals, jellyfish have no central nervous system and no pain receptors, making them ideal candidates for cybernetic augmentation. They also exhibit remarkable regenerative abilities, capable of regrowing lost body parts and reverting to earlier life stages in response to injury or stress — they can heal in as quickly as 24 hours after the removal of a device.
The project began nearly a decade ago with Nicole Xu, a former graduate student in the Dabiri Lab who is now a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research has demonstrated that electrodes embedded into jellyfish can reliably trigger muscle contractions, setting the stage for field tests and early demonstrations of the device. Later, another Caltech graduate student, Simon Anuszczyk, showed that adding robotic attachments to jellyfish — sometimes even larger than the jellyfish themselves — did not necessarily impair the animals’ swimming. And in fact, if designed correctly, the attachments can even improve their speed and mobility.

The device allows the scientists to pilot the jellyfish through ocean waters and record measurements of pH, temperature, salinity, etc.
There have been several iterations of the robotic component, but the general concept of each is the same: a central unit which houses the sensors used to collect information, and two electrodes attached via wires. “We attach [the device] and send electric signals to electrodes embedded in the jellyfish,” Yoder explained. “When that signal is sent, the muscle contracts and the jellyfish swims.” By triggering these contractions in a controlled pattern, researchers are able to influence how and when the jellyfish move — allowing them to navigate through the water and collect data in specific locations.

These cyborg devices offer a cheaper (and more sustainable) option for marine research, making it more widely accessible for anyone looking to study the ocean.
The team hopes this project will make ocean research more accessible — not just for elite institutions with multimillion-dollar submersibles, but for smaller labs and conservation groups as well. Because the devices are relatively low-cost and scalable, they could open the door for more frequent, distributed data collection across the globe.
The latest version of the device includes a microcontroller, which sends the signal to stimulate swimming, along with a pressure sensor, a temperature sensor and an SD card to log data. All of which fits inside a watertight 3D-printed structure about the size of a half dollar. A magnet and external ballast keep it neutrally buoyant, allowing the jellyfish to swim freely, and properly oriented.
One limitation of the latest iteration is that the jellyfish can only be controlled to move up and down, as the device is weighted to maintain a fixed vertical orientation, and the system lacks any mechanism to steer horizontally. One of Yoder’s current projects seeks to address this challenge by implementing an internal servo arm, a small motorized lever that shifts the internal weight of the device, enabling directional movement and mid-swim rotations.

Unlike most marine animals, jellyfish have no central nervous system and no pain receptors, making them ideal candidates for cybernetic augmentation.
But perhaps the biggest limitation is the integrity of the device itself. “Jellyfish exist in pretty much every ocean already, at every depth, in every environment,” said Yoder.
To take full advantage of that natural range, however, the technology needs to catch up. While jellyfish can swim under crushing deep-sea pressures of up to 400 bar — approximately the same as having 15 African elephants sit in the palm of your hand — the 3D-printed structures warp at such depths, which can compromise their performance. So, Yoder is working on a deep-sea version using pressurized glass spheres, the same kind used for deep-sea cabling and robotics.
Other current projects include studying the fluid dynamics of the jellyfish itself. “Jellyfish are very efficient swimmers,” Yoder said. “We wanted to see how having these biohybrid attachments affects that.” That could lead to augmentations that make future cyborg jellyfish even more useful for research.
The research team has also begun working with a wider range of jellyfish species, including upside-down Cassiopeia jellies found in the Florida Keys and box jellies native to Kona, Hawaii. The goal is to find native species that can be tapped for regional projects — using local animals minimizes ecological risk.
“This research approaches underwater robotics from a completely different angle,” Yoder said. “I’ve always been interested in biomechanics and robotics, and trying to have robots that imitate wildlife. This project just takes it a step further. Why build a robot that can’t quite capture the natural mechanisms when you can use the animal itself?”
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