Introduction: The Promise of the Art
21
interested integrity that lets each living thing marshal its responses to
eat, thrive, reproduce, and avoid danger by patterns that range from the
tropisms of single cells to instinct, choice, memory, learning, individ-
uality, and creativity in more complex life-forms. The problem of when
to "pull the plug" shows that we don't even know for sure how to
diagnose death. Mechanistic chemistry isn't adequate to understand
these enigmas of life, and it now acts as a barrier to studying them.
Erwin Chargaff, the biochemist who discovered base pairing in DNA
and thus opened the way for understanding gene structure, phrased our
dilemma precisely when he wrote of biology, "No other science deals in
its very name with a subject that it cannot define."
Given the present climate, I've been a lucky man. I haven't been a
good, efficient doctor in the modern sense. I've spent far too much time
on a few incurable patients whom no one else wanted, trying to find out
how our ignorance failed them. I've been able to tack against the pre-
vailing winds of orthodoxy and indulge my passion for experiment. In so
doing I've been part of a little-known research effort that has made a
new start toward a definition of life.
My research began with experiments on regeneration, the ability of
some animals, notably the salamander, to grow perfect replacements for
parts of the body that have been destroyed. These studies, described in
Part 1, led to the discovery of a hitherto unknown aspect of animal
life—the existence of electrical currents in parts of the nervous system.
This breakthrough in turn led to a better understanding of bone fracture
healing, new possibilities for cancer research, and the hope of human
regeneration—even of the heart and spinal cord—in the not too distant
future, advances that are discussed in Parts 2 and 3. Finally, a knowl-
edge of life's electrical dimension has yielded fundamental insights (con-
sidered in Part 4) into pain, healing, growth, consciousness, the nature
of life itself, and the dangers of our electromagnetic technology.
I believe these discoveries presage a revolution in biology and medi-
cine. One day they may enable the physician to control and stimulate
healing at will. I believe this new knowledge will also turn medicine in
the direction of greater humility, for we should see that whatever we
achieve pales before the self-healing power latent in all organisms. The
results set forth in the following pages have convinced me that our un-
derstanding of life will always be imperfect. I hope this realization will
make medicine no less a science, yet more of an art again. Only then can
it deliver its promised freedom from disease.