We Are Electric by Sally Adee

Author:Sally Adee [Adee, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

All your batteries

In the decades Borgens spent fighting his battle, other researchers rapidly populated the periodic table of all the other cells that respond to ultra-weak physiological electric fields.

Colin McCaig set out to build an unassailable body of evidence that nerves and muscles aligned themselves under a weak electrical field. He realised he needed to bolster his case for sceptics, and that he could do so by showing that the so-called ‘physiological field’ did the same thing in other kinds of bodily tissue. He recruited Ann Rajnicek – Robinson’s estranged protégé – and Min Zhao, who had studied with China’s top trauma surgeon, to move to Scotland and join his lab at the University of Aberdeen. Together, they set out to demonstrate that bioelectricity had profound effects everywhere in the body. What else could be dragged around by a cathode?

Pretty much anything, as it turned out. The same subtle fields Borgens had tried to recruit to heal wounded axons – and which Poo had found guiding those spinal neurites – also coaxed crawling behaviours out of skin cells, immune cells, macrophages, bone cells, and just about anything else they got their hands on.

Zhao in particular was shocked by the sheer power these electric fields could exert. Arriving at McCaig’s lab, he had expected a predictable series of events to unfold: as usual in science, he would put in some time characterising yet another interesting factor among so many others, in yet another complex biological process. Sure, the work would be ‘important’ – but, he suspected, not thrilling or actually that consequential. It wasn’t going to change the world. That’s how it normally is in biology; there are too many factors involved to ever neatly pinpoint the overarching importance of a single one. This was especially true of wound healing, a farrago of interlocking growth factors, cytokines, and other contenders: ‘Everyone has their favourite molecule and they can show that it plays a significant role,’ he says. But when Zhao turned on the electricity for a healing experiment, the results blew them all out the water.

Zhao was stunned. A tiny electric field held veto power over the influence of any other growth factor or gene or anything else people had previously assumed to account for wound healing.37 The cells did what the electrical fields told them to do, no matter what else competed for their attention.38 This is the hallmark of an epigenetic variable. ‘That was when I realised we were working on something far more important than other people, even myself, had expected,’ Zhao told me.

To his consternation (and McCaig’s and Rajnicek’s), no one else was interested in their findings. As evidently disruptive as their work was – for better tissue repair, for understanding of embryonic development, you name it – among other electrophysiologists it went largely ignored.39 Electricity doesn’t do that. Many scientists looked at it with the distaste normally reserved for homeopathy.

The Aberdeen dream team, however, was undaunted. They pressed on. They had only seen the first glimpses of why these fields were important.

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