82
The Body Electric
Unpopular Science
None of these things had the slightest relevance to life, according to
most biologists around 1960. A major evaluation of American medicine,
financed by the Carnegie Foundation and published in 1910 by the re-
spected educator Abraham Flexner, had denounced the clinical use of
electric shocks and currents, which had been applied, often over-
enthusiastically, to many diseases since the mid-1700s. Electrotherapy
sometimes seemed to work, but no one knew why, and it had gotten a
bad name from the many charlatans who'd exploited it. Its legitimate
proponents had no scientific way to defend it, so the reforms in medical
education that followed the Flexner report drove all mention of it from
the classroom and clinic, just as the last remnants of belief in vital elec-
tricity were being purged from biology by the discovery of acetylcholine.
This development dovetailed nicely with expanding knowledge of bio-
chemistry and growing reliance on the drug industry's products. Pen-
icillin later made medicine almost exclusively drug oriented.
Meanwhile, the work of Faraday, Edison, Marconi, and others liter-
ally electrified the world. As the uses of electricity multiplied, no one
found any obvious effects on living creatures except for the shock and
heating caused by large currents. To be sure, no one looked very hard,
for fear of discouraging a growth industry, but the magic of electricity
seemed to lie precisely in the way it worked its wonders unseen and
unfelt by the folks clustered around the radio or playing cards under the
light bulb. By the 1920s, no scientist intent on a respectable career
dared suggest that life was in any sense electrical.
Nevertheless, some researchers kept coming up with observations that
didn't fit the prevailing view. Although their work was mostly con-
signed to the fringes of the scientific community, by the late 1950s
they'd accumulated quite a bit of evidence.
There were two groups of dissenters, but, because their work went
unheeded, each was largely unaware of the other's existence. One line of
inquiry began just after the turn of the century when it was learned that
hydras were electrically polarized. The head was found to be positive,
the tail negative. I've already mentioned Frazee's 1909 report of sala-
mander regeneration enhanced by electrical currents. Then, with a clas-
sic series of experiments in the early 1920s, Elmer J. Lund of the
University
of
Texas
found
that the polarity of regeneration in species
related to the hydra could be controlled, even reversed, by small direct
currents passes through the animal's body. A current strong enough to