"Between puffs on his pipe, he told me in a businesslike way, about his experiments involving animal magnetism and electric currents in the brain and in bone.
He said his goal was the regeneration of missing limbs.
"When people lose an arm or a leg," he said, "I want to be able to
treat them so they grow a new one."
"Is that possible?" I asked.
"Why not? If you grew an arm the first time, why not a second time?"
The following Sunday there was an article about him in the newspaper. The headline said, "Human transistors - A Medical Adventure," and the photos showed him measuring the voltage from a salamander and
doing other scientific things.
The article said that he and Dr. Bachman worked on "a journey into hitherto unknown areas involving the electric fields within living organisms."
According to the article, they had discovered that "billions of tiny transistors operate in our bodies' bones and nerves to flash out signals for growth," which was a "discovery that could have unprecedented
implications for curing human ailments."
Electrons, Nerves And VoltageIn his first publication he had described the similarity between the neuroanatomy of salamanders and the pattern of voltages that he measured on their skin.
His next paper had reported on experiments in which he amputated salamanders' limbs and
measured the voltage at the amputation sites; there was a big change immediately after he cut off the limb, but the voltage returned to normal as the limbs regrew.
For comparison purposes, he had also amputated the limbs of frogs, which don't regenerate their limbs, and found the pattern of voltage change was quite different from that in the salamander.
He had concluded that the nervous
system of the salamander somehow regulated limb regeneration, and that the frog didn't regenerate because its nervous system couldn't make the proper electrical signal.
In a paper published in Science, he had presented evidence that a flow of electrons in nerves gave rise to the voltage that controlled the regeneration.
In a paper in Nature he had concluded that the brain was like a
battery and the nerves were like wires; some types of nerve cells carried the current away from the brain and other types formed a return path to the brain.
In a second paper in Science........he reported that bone emitted electrical signals when it was bent or squeezed.......
I asked him, "How did you get the idea that magnetic fields and electricity have anything to do with nerves and
bone?"The Body Knows How To Heal ItselfHe said, "The thing that impressed me most was that the body knew how to heal itself........but nobody knew how that happened, and nobody was even studying it.
What the biochemists did was cut out tissue, dissolve it, and then study the chemicals it contained.
They didn't seem to realize that they had destroyed the organization of the tissue, which was something really important.
Human limb regeneration seemed so impossible that everyone considered it unscientific to even discuss the subject. Then, the year I finished my residency the Russians launched Sputnik.
Do you remember Sputnik, about 10 years
ago?"
"I sure do."
"Well, after Sputnik suddenly there was a lot of money available for science. One of the things the government did was to start translating Russian science journals. One day a truck drove up here and deposited a load of them at our library.
I came across an article that described the use of electricity to make tomato
plants grow faster.
That started me thinking about electricity and life." "
Click here to read more.Lloyd BurrellElectricsense******Please DO NOT reply to this message******** Comments are welcome here http://www.electricsense.com/?p=8199
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