140
The Body Electric
All vertebrates except mammals have nuclei in their red blood cells.
In mammals, these cells go through an extra stage of development in
which the nucleus is discarded. The resulting cells are smaller, can flow
through smaller capillaries, can be packed with more hemoglobin, and
thus can carry oxygen and carbon dioxide more efficiently. Nucleated
erythrocytes are considered more primitive, but even in these the nu-
cleus is pycnotic—shriveled up and inactive. The DNA in pycnotic nu-
clei is dormant, and such cells have almost no metabolic activity; that is,
they burn no glucose for energy and synthesize no proteins. If you had to
choose a likely candidate for dedifferentiation and increased activity, this
would be the worst possible choice.
In our series of slides the red cells went through all their develop-
mental stages in reverse. First they lost their characteristic flattened,
elliptical shape and became round. Their membranes acquired a scal-
loped outline. By the third day the cells had become ameboid and
moved by means of pseudopods. Concurrently, their nuclei swelled up
and, judging by changes in their reactions to staining and light, the
DNA became reactivated. We began using an electron microscope to get
a clearer view of these changes. At the end of the first week, the former
erythrocytes had acquired a full complement of mitochondria and also
ribosomes (the organelles where proteins are assembled), and they'd got-
ten rid of all of their hemoglobin. By the third week they'd turned into
cartilage-forming cells, which soon developed further into bone-forming
cells.
I wasn't happy with this turn of events. How could we reconcile what
we saw with the well-documented findings of Pritchard, Bowden, and
Ruzicka? I'd expected evidence for the semiconducting electrical system
I'd been investigating, a concept that was already strange enough to
keep me out of the scientific mainstream. I would have been happy if the
electrical measurements had fit in with straightforward changes in the
periosteal cells. The difference between them and erythrocytes was cru-
cial. Periosteal cells were closely related precursors of bone cells; blood
cells couldn't have been further removed. They couldn't possibly have
built bone without extensive job retraining on the genetic level. These
bullfrogs were bringing us up hard against a wall of dogma by showing
us metaplasia—dedifferentiation followed by redifferentiation into a to-
tally unrelated cell type. The process took place in some of the most
specialized cells
in
the frog's entire body,
and it
looked as though the
electric field set the changes in motion while at its strongest, about an
hour after the fracture.
Our next move was a respectful letter to Dr. Pritchard asking if there