We Are Electric- Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
Summary Sally Adee, a well-published science and technology journalist, writes her first book about a major shift she has been witnessing in biology, and it all has to do with electricity. She opens the book with a brief history of what we know about electricity and how we discovered what we do know. Spoiler alert: it includes a lot of frogs. The main thing she wanted to highlight was that during the beginning of research into electrical phenomena, the field quickly branched into two directions. One branch focused on what was called animal electricity, while the other focused more on non-animal electricity. At this early stage of research, neither branch had reliable tools to conduct empirical science. There was a high degree of speculation in both fields, but with the breakthrough of the first battery, this quickly changed, at least for non-animal electricity. Suddenly, there was a reliable way to create, measure, and distribute this mysterious energy. When it came to animal electricity, there were no such tools to reliably create results, yet the claims held an intuitive weight and were picked up by many scientists and many more quacks. Eventually, there were so many scandals involving wild, unsubstantiated claims that the whole field of animal electricity was dismissed as pseudoscience. Technology kept improving, and eventually, measurement tools got precise enough to handle the tiny charges created by biological organisms, vindicating much of the early animal electricity scientists. However, their theories about how electricity actually worked in the body were correct only in the broadest sense. Much of the theories had to be thrown out or reworked in the one step forward, two steps back investigation of science. So what does this promising approach to biology offer us? Quite a bit. Scientists have utilized it for a while to stimulate hearts with pacemakers or calm down brains with epilepsy. Beyond this, being able to manipulate our electrome (as Adee calls it) holds tantalizing promises of faster wound healing, limb regeneration, reversing cancer, and slowing aging. The catch is that the system is much more complicated and interconnected than any of man-made electronics. Adee explains that instead of simple positive-negative wires exchanging electricity in our body, we utilize charge differentials in chemicals themselves. Each cell in your body acts like a little battery with the capacity to become more negatively or positively charged than its surroundings. Each cell also has ion channels that allow specific molecules in or out, depending on the state of the overall system. The takeaway here is we have only relatively recently begun to realize the role that electrical charges play in the nervous system. Now, we are discovering that this same mechanism for communication extends through every cell in your body. At this point, we don’t know enough to manipulate these distributed electrical systems precisely, but being able to do so looks like the biggest hurdle between us and a medical revolution. ...