Lightning in our cells
The Promise of Animal Electricity
In 1791, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani made his discovery of what he called 'animal electricity' known to the world. For more than a decade, Galvani had been experimenting with electricity, particularly its effects on living tissue. This led him to the conclusion that animals had their own "innate electricity", originating from the brain and distributed throughout the body via the nervous system. He did this when he attempted (and largely failed) to refute the claim that the Italian Alessandro Volta had invented the instrument which he called a pile – today known as an electric battery.
At around the same time, the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer developed his own theories about animal magnetism. Mesmer's core claim was that all bodies contain a kind of magnetic fluid. Manipulating this fluid would be the key to curing neurological and psychological disorders. He might even be able to make his magnetized ('biologized') subjects dance like puppets!
In 1803, Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini visited London to defend the concept of animal electricity in front of Aldini's opponents. In one performance, he electrified a decapitated dog, with the Prince Regent in the audience. As the highlight of his visit, he performed galvanic experiments at the Royal College of Surgeons, on the body of a man who had just been hanged for murder. It was a gruesome affair ('The jaw of the deceased criminal began to tremble, the adjacent muscles were terribly contorted, and one eye actually opened.'). Aldini was vilified in the conservative press as the latest buffoon trying to fool the public with the idea that electricity meant life. But Aldini also had many supporters, even among the relatively staid fellowship of the Royal Society. He was in fact sponsored by the Royal Humane Society given the raised possibility that his experiments might offer a way to revive drowned sailors.
It is generally believed that Mary Shelley, famous for her novel Frankenstein (1817), was aware of and quite inspired by Aldini's experiences. After all, Shelley's genre-making science fiction story featured a dead body brought to life with the help of electric current.
Two Hundred Years Forward
Some scientists believe that we will soon be able to profile the electrical properties of the body, just as we have profiled the human genome over the past 20 years: the human 'electrome', so to speak.
The interface between quantum biology and molecular biology is, in any case, likely electricity. All human perception, thought, and movement is controlled by electricity. The idea that electricity and the human body are an unhappy, Frankenstein-like marriage is clearly at odds with contemporary middle-school biology. Bio-electricity seems to be the reason why our cells can communicate with each other. On this model, we have, unconsciously, built a global communications infrastructure.
Beyond Science Fiction
In essence, every process that keeps us alive can be traced back to an electric field generated somewhere in the body. Your only chance of existing as a coherent whole is through the mediation of electromagnetic fields.
In a sense, you yourself are a large electric field: an extensive electric field complex that holds your atoms together, with parts of you using electric fields to talk to other parts of you. The electric charge of a single cell can, as calculations show, reach 30 million volts per meter. This is equal to the strength of a lightning bolt.
Bio-electricity is not the kind of electricity that makes our lamps and refrigerators work. The latter is based on electrons: flowing negatively charged particles. The human body, including the brain, runs instead on movements of mostly positively charged ions of elements such as sodium, potassium, and calcium. This is how all signals move within the brain, indeed, between every body part that engages in tasks of perception, movement, and cognition.
We have climbed from macabre experiments and early nineteenth-century science fiction to the conviction that bio-electricity forms the core of our abilities to think, communicate, and move. It also plays a major role in how our cells tell each other that the systems they are in are healthy – and whether they are healthy at all.
