Physics in the 19th century explored electricity and magnetism, and in the early 20th century showed that atoms were made up of electrons, protons and neutrons that interacted via electricity and magnetism. Since then, chemistry built on this world view, and this led to exploration of chemical bonds and materials. Building on this, in the middle of the 20th century, cells were shown to have their characteristics influenced by proteins (DNA and RNA and others); note that this view ignores the bottom up view of physics and chemistry of the importance of electricity and magnetism.
The human body is made up of roughly fifty trillion cells; these cells are specialized into skin, bone, blood, muscle, neuron et al. Each of these cells has an electric potential from the outside of the cell to the inside of the cell wall of roughly fifty to seventy millivolts. The electric potential of each cell allows the cell to function, to take in nutrients and to give off waste products. The human body has a major electromagnetic field centered around the heart driven by the motion of electrons in heart muscles. In short, the human body is indeed electric, but this is not the view of modern Western medicine, which has chosen to focus on the biochemistry, genetics and genomics of the cell, and all but ignored the electromagnetic aspects of cells and the human body as a whole. Here we look at this road not taken.
It is important to realize that the human body regenerates itself every second of every day: all the cells of skin are completely regenerated within months, and the skin is the largest organ in the body. Tens of thousands of cancer cells are killed every day. When we get cut and bleed, the body naturally seals the wound and heals it. The intent here is to stimulate the body to do what it does naturally, to heal itself, by using electricity to stimulate biological processes.
Interest in electricity and biology is thousands of years old. Anteros, a former slave of the Roman emperor Tiberius, had stepped on an electric fish at the beach and found relief for his gout; in seventeenth-century Europe, “medical electricity” was used to treat impotence and other ailments. In the nineteenth century, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani had argued for the existence of an inherent “animal electricity,” showing that touching the end of a frog’s severed nerve to the outside of one of its muscles completed a circuit, making the muscle twitch. This phenomenon, called galvanism, became a plot device in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
In the twentieth century, the reality of bioelectricity or bioelectromagnetics began to come into focus. In 1909, it was discovered that larval salamanders regenerate faster when electricity courses through their aquarium water; in the following decades, researchers measured distinct bioelectrical patterns associated with development and wound healing. Eventually, biologists came to understand that electricity is integral to cellular life. Cell membranes are studded with tiny valves known as ion channels, which maintain the cell’s negatively charged interior and positively charged exterior by allowing charged atoms called ions to flow in and out. Some ion channels open or close in response to the voltage outside, leading the cell to change its behavior in response to electrical signals and thereby creating a feedback loop. Cells employ the bioelectric system as a kind of intercellular internet; they use it to build intricate and expansive communication networks that control the transcription of genes, the contraction of muscles, and the release of hormones. Many drugs target ion channels, using them to treat arrhythmia, epilepsy, and chronic pain.
Harold Burr at Yale in the 1930s, author of the book The Fields of Life, observed that the fundamental units in nature are electrons, protons and neutrons, and they interact via electromagnetism. Atoms are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons, and biological cells are made up of atoms: where is the underlying electromagnetic control of cell biology? If these mechanisms were understood, it might make possible root cause diagnosis of disease, and offer the potential to change the electromagnetic field so that the cell can heal itself, which happens very often when young but starts to break down with age, so the body would rejuvenate itself, not just heal itself! In 1932 his observations of neuro-cellular proliferation in the amblystoma led him to propose "An Electro-Dynamic Theory of Development" for which he is now most widely remembered. In 1935 he published (with F. S. C. Northrop) "The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life" and (with C. T. Lane) "Electrical Characteristics of Living Systems". Burr is noted for his use of the voltmeter to detect the electric potential of the body, first reported upon in his 1936 paper (with C. T. Lane and L. F. Nims) "A Vacuum Tube Micro-voltmeter for the Measurement of Bio-electric Phenomena". Burr proposed the term "L-Field" for the bio-electric fields of living systems. Burr's book, The Nature of Man and the Meaning of Existence (1962) was an attack against materialist philosophy. In the book Burr wrote there is order in the universe, unity in the organism and man is endowed with a soul
Robert Becker carried out a variety of experiments after World War II into the 1970s involving electromagnetism and its impact on the cell. Becker was curious how creatures like salamanders could regenerate whole body parts after being dismembered, resulting in multiple salamanders from one original salamander: why can not other creatures do this? Becker wrote or coauthored a number of books (The Body Electric, Cross Currents: The Perils of Electropollution, Electromagnetism and Life) but gradually gave up doing research because his peer reviewed research proposals were turned down because in part they did not involve pharmacology, which is where the bulk of funding has gone. As an aside, for decades MIT has received the majority of its annual funding from pharmacology sources. The first part of the book The Body Electric discusses regeneration, primarily in salamanders and frogs. Becker studied regeneration after lesions such as limb amputation, and hypothesized that electric fields played an important role in controlling the regeneration process. He mapped the electric potentials at various body parts during the regeneration, showing that the central part of the body normally was positive, and the limbs were negative. When a limb of a salamander or frog was amputated, the voltage at the cut (measured relative to the central part of the body) changed from about -10 mV (millivolts) to +20 mV or more the next day—a phenomenon called the current of injury. In a frog, the voltage would simply change to the normal negative level in four weeks or so, and no limb regeneration would take place. In a salamander, however, the voltage would during the first two weeks change from the +20 mV to -30 mV, and then normalize (to -10 mV) during the next two weeks—and the limb would be regenerated. Becker then found that regeneration could be improved by applying electricity at the wound when there was a negative potential outside the amputation stub. He also found that bone has piezoelectric properties which would cause an application of force to generate a healing current, which stimulated growth at stress locations in accordance with Wolff's law. In another part of the book The Body Electric Becker described potentials and magnetic fields in the nervous system, taking into account external influences like earth magnetism and solar winds. He measured the electrical properties along the skin surface, and concluded that at least the major parts of the acupuncture charts had an objective basis in reality.
Michael Levin, who emigrated from Russia to the United States, and has coauthored numerous papers and several books (Ahead of the Curve: Hidden Breakthroughs in Biology, Volumes 1 and 2) and built up a successful lab at Harvard before being poached by Tufts University, continues this tradition at the highest level. Paul Allen, cofounder of MicroSoft, awarded a significant grant to Michael Levin so he would not spend time soliciting funding, Allen would provide funding. Two popular science articles on the work of Michael Levin a decade apart, one entitled It’s Electric: Biologists Seek to Crack Cell’s Bioelectric Code in 2013, and another a decade later 2023, entitled Is Bioelectricity the Key to Limb Regeneration gives a flavor of his work. There is one website for his laboratory, and a second website for more philosophical and early stage concepts. He is also co-editor of the technical journal Bioelectricity.
Modern Western medicine is viewed as reactive medicine, not preventive medicine, in that the bulk of the monies and resources are tied into pharmacology and drug discovery as well as biomechanical surgery for things such as human hips and knees. Preventive medicine, by its very nature, would prevent the need for drugs or surgery, and as such is the arch enemy of reactive medicine. Some estimate that the human body can be subject to over 25,000 distinct disease causing entities, while modern pharmacology has been able to produce drugs that can deal with roughly 250 of these entities, or, roughly ONE PERCENT. What about the other NINETY NINE PERCENT?
Two examples illustrate what startups are doing in bioelectricity. Calmare Therapeutics uses bioelectricty to treat chronic pain; electrodes are attached on either side of the pain area, and electricity passes through modulated in a variety of ways; evidently (no one knows) this overloads the brain, and the brain stops monitoring this pain area for months at a time before a new treatement is need. The only treatment for chronic pain is opiates that destroy hunger so the patient starves to death or commits suicide. Reactive medicine is the medical care activation and initiation in response to an adverse disease case presentation, injury, acute condition, or symptom. On the other hand, preventive medicine tries to implement medical practices that are designed to reduce, revert or even avoid the causes of disease. BEMER markets a mat that contains an array of electromagnets that are pulsed to torque the electrons in red blood cells as well as the electrons in the muscles controlling blood flow, to stimulate flow of blood and hence increase the flow of nutrients to cells and the removal of waste products from cells. The human body typically contains 75K miles of capillaries and veins, with 3/4 in microcapillaries where blood flow decreases as you age.
Our goal here is to encourage others to think outside the conventional mindset box of modern Western medicine, and to recreate the medicine found in Star Trek, the television show in different incarnations as well as associated movies. Star Trek medicine had two basic components, an electromagnetic wand that was able to determine energy imbalances that led to the root cause of a medical condition, and a regeneration chamber, that induced regeneration of defective portions of the human body within hours.
There are early stage examples of both diagnostic technologies and regenerative technologies today. Here we cite some examples from a non exhaustive survey.
In diagnostic technologies, look at Quantum iNfinity, a hardware software product from Quantum Life that includes a variety of electronic hardware and software products for detecting energy imbalances that may be precursors to illnesses.
In curative technologies, a commonly cited technology is based on broadcasting electromagnetic energy in different frequency bands, and each malady or disease is sensitive to a different frequency band and will be treated if illuminated. An early proponent of this was Royal Rife who developed the Rife Machine that purported to do this. Cosmonauts at the International Space Station use this technology according to reports from Russia
US astronauts at the International Space Station use a pulsed electromagnetic wave technology to stimulate blood flow (there are roughly 100,000 miles of veins, arteries and capillaries in the human body, and 75,000 miles of those are in microcapillaries in extremities such as fingers and toes) licensed from the European company BEMER. Here is a video showing the potential impact of pulsed electromagnetic energy on blood flow in veins and arteries and capillaries in the human body.