Electrome Dreams

It is well understood that our bodies have a genome containing the DNA instructions responsible for our development and function. But few would say that they also have an “electrome”—or cellular electric system—of equal importance. Yet this is the case that Sally Adee makes in her scintillating, at times vexing book We Are Electric.

“Every one of the 40 trillion cells in your body is its own little battery with its own little voltage,” she writes. Biologists have long known that the bioelectricity generated by cells is responsible for communication between the brain and the nervous system. As she points out, you can think of the nerves that the current travels through as “the telephone wires that help the brain’s command center communicate with your muscles to operate your limbs.” Yet bioelectricity isn’t confined to our nervous system:

Over the past couple of decades it has become clear that these signals are pressed into service by every cell in your body, not just those that govern your perception and motion.

According to Adee, everything from our skin, bones, and teeth to our organs and blood is electric—and decrypting our bioelectric code could have remarkable implications for our health. But “the scientific knowledge of the electrical underpinnings of life is now scattered across a wide range of disciplines, many of which think the others are peddling poppycock.”

It is rare indeed to encounter an argument that so fundamentally challenges one’s preconceptions about how living things work. And yet it seems that evidence supporting Adee’s hypothesis has been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

The eighteenth century saw a contest of ideas about how electricity is generated. On one side stood the acclaimed Alessandro Volta, an independently wealthy professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia in Lombardy who believed that electricity was generated when dissimilar materials—for example, different kinds of metals—came into contact. On the other was Luigi Galvani, a devout Catholic from a merchant family in the Papal States, a region of Italy not known for progressive science. Galvani taught anatomy at the University of Bologna and at Bologna’s Institute of Sciences. Adee describes him as an “uptight bumpkin,” but he had a fundamental humanity about him, too. He welcomed female lecturers and gave preferential treatment to the poor, especially women, in his medical practice.

Galvani believed that electricity was generated by living, or at least recently living, things—and that, in Adee’s words, “the stuff in lightning” might be “the same mechanism by which God had given breath to man and all other creatures.” How to test this hypothesis?

“Frogs have been through a lot over these past 200 years,” Adee tells us, and their fate was sealed when Galvani chose them as his experimental subjects. They were ideal for this purpose because their nerves are easy to locate and their muscular contractions, which continue for up to forty-four hours after their death, are easy to see. Galvani’s laboratory was at times festooned with decapitated, disemboweled, and bisected frogs hanging from wires attached to their nerves. A jolt of electricity or even a hand touching one of the wires would create a gruesome pantomime of frog corpses executing demi-pliés. Eventually Galvani realized that the frogs’ legs would flex even when quite distant from any electrical current. This led him to believe that the current causing the muscles to twitch must come from within the corpse itself—and the concept of “animal electricity” was born.

When Volta heard about Galvani’s conclusion, he was at first enthusiastic but soon executed a volte-face when he realized that his own theory of electricity might explain Galvani’s observations if, for example, different metals had been used in the wires, or if contact between wire and flesh could generate a current. The dispute was inspirational: so many scientists started experimenting, Adee quips, that Europe began to run out of frogs. Galvani tried to make the legs jump without wires and eventually managed to do so by connecting a frog’s muscle to its nerve. Using only the basic surgical tools of the day, he achieved something astonishing that other savants had difficulty replicating.

Volta soon had a riposte: nerves and muscles are different, so maybe, as with different metals, electricity was conjured into being by their proximity. Undaunted, Galvani connected the right and left sciatic nerves of a frog. The muscles still twitched. Shockingly, this unassailable disproof of Volta’s theory went almost unnoticed by the scientific community, eclipsed by Volta’s invention of the voltaic pile—the first battery, made from two different metals and cardboard disks soaked in brine. Despite the fact that nobody understood electricity in Volta’s day, his battery clearly worked, transforming electrical studies—and indeed physics and chemistry—because it allowed electricity to be stored and dispatched at will.

The sidelined inheritors of Galvani’s tradition nevertheless soldiered on. Forty years later the Italian physicist Carlo Matteucci made a battery of his own—out of a pile of dissected frog’s thighs. Just as in a conventional voltaic pile, the more thighs were stacked atop one another, the greater the electric current generated. Then a Monsieur La Grave of the Parisian Galvanic Society created his version, composed of layers of human brain, muscle, and fabric moistened with salt water.

It was the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, however, who pioneered the next real breakthrough. So dedicated was he to Galvanic studies that he turned his Berlin flat into a “frog kennel” and, to avoid accidentally introducing any external source of electricity into his experiments, bit his frogs in half rather than use a knife, eventually almost blinding himself with the toxins present in frog skin. His great achievement was to directly detect the electric current that courses through frogs’ nerves. “I have succeeded in restoring to life in full reality that hundred-year-old dream of the physicist and physiologist, the identity of the nerve substance with electricity,” he proclaimed.

But even such discoveries were eclipsed by the advances in the physical sciences unleashed by Volta’s battery. And the mainstream Galvanic tradition was already running off the rails, for Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini, who had a flair for showmanship, had inherited the family research project. In the early nineteenth century the bodies of convicted criminals were sometimes given to doctors to dissect, allowing Aldini to perfect the art of electrically stimulating corpses. In 1803 he was invited by the Royal College of Surgeons in London to demonstrate on the body of the newly hanged murderer George Forster. Aldini attached wires to the corpse’s ears, running current from a voltaic pile, and the jaw began to quiver. Then Forster’s left eye opened so he appeared to give a ghastly, lewd wink. One observer, a Mr. Pass, was so disturbed by what he saw that he promptly went home and died.

Aldini had also learned that if he inserted wires into a corpse’s rectum, the reaction was so strong that he could almost give the deceased “an appearance of reanimation.” At one demonstration in Italy, he managed to get the corpse of a deceased criminal to raise its arm and point an accusing finger at the audience, several of whom fainted. Across Europe, others began experimenting à la Aldini, and some even began to experiment on themselves. That German colossus of science Alexander von Humboldt became so infatuated with the anal probe that he undertook what the scholars Stanley Finger and Marco Piccolino have called an “almost unimaginable” experiment: he electrically stimulated the lower regions of his own fundament, with mixed results, before finally forcing the probe so high that a bright light appeared before his eyes.^*

The Humane Society of London soon became interested in Galvani’s work—not, as one might think, to intervene on behalf of traumatized audience members or accidental victims of self-experimentation, but because Aldini had announced that he was experimenting with reviving the dead. His work focused on those who had drowned, asphyxiated, or died of apoplexy, all of which can lead to a suspension of indicators of life, such as breathing, but not necessarily death itself. Defining death had become important to the Humane Society because, Adee writes,

before the wide availability and awareness of reliable methods of resuscitation, burials could be a pretty hasty affair, and more than one unfortunate had found themselves waking from a comatose or cataleptic state (or just a deep and drunken sleep) inside a little box under six feet of earth…. (In one especially grisly case, this fate befell the same poor woman twice.)

Galvani’s name entered the English language as early as 1802, through words such as galvanize—“to stimulate by means of a galvanic current.” But “to galvanize” quickly came to have a far broader meaning. During the American Civil War, for instance, captured Confederate soldiers who accepted freedom on the condition that they swear an oath of allegiance to the United States and enlist in federal military service were called “galvanized Yankees,” implying that they were both jolted into action and somewhat insincere.

Even before the nineteenth century, the quacks had gotten in on Galvanism, with “galvanic” cures being offered for every conceivable malady. For example, the sexually or reproductively challenged could rent a “Celestial Bed” in James Graham’s Temple of Hymen in London, where they could take in “electrical vapors.” Or they could buy a special aphrodisiac, the “Electrical Ether,” in the temple gift shop. So great was the discredit that quackery shed upon the idea of animal electricity that the medical and scientific establishments came to view the entire field as fantasy—which meant that, until very recently, the suffering of the frogs was largely in vain.

But the concept of animal electricity would not go away, and the electrification of cities in the early twentieth century offered a small opening for the practitioners of electromedicine. As the number of accidental electrocutions rose, the American cardiologist Albert Hyman began to treat victims of it with an electric current that could trip the heart out of cardiac arrest and back into a regular rhythm. Aldini’s dream of resurrecting the dead was, in a partial manner, being realized. But for the treatment to work, the needle conveying the current needed to be plunged into the heart at precisely the right location. A slight deviation meant death. In the early 1930s the American Medical Association condemned Hyman’s work as belonging “with miracles.” But by the 1950s defibrillators (which use an electric current to shock a stalled heart back into rhythm and can be applied to the outside of the body) were becoming available. Today they are commonplace and save many lives.

There is something about electromedical research into the brain that attracts the oddest people. The primary tool used to investigate this area today—the electroencephalogram—was invented in the 1920s by the German psychiatrist Hans Berger, who, according to Adee, was originally “determined to find the psychophysiological basis for mental telepathy.”

By the 1960s the concept of the brain as a computer and the presentation of clinical problems as ones that might be solved by electrical means combined to give the field a high profile, including through the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to treat depression and other mental illnesses. Adee doesn’t discuss ECT, but she does describe a case that gained wide publicity at the time: a patient of Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University who sought treatment for his sexual attraction to other men. Heath implanted an electric stimulator in the pleasure center of the man’s brain, then gave him unlimited access to heterosexual pornography. The treatment worked almost too well, for the patient stimulated himself so prodigiously that he had to be disconnected from the current, despite his “vigorous protests.” Predictably enough, the “cure” proved equivocal. The patient did go on to establish a long-term heterosexual relationship. But he never stopped seeing other men.

In the 1960s, with ideas of robots proliferating in sci-fi books and TV shows, the prospect of controlling an organism via a brain implant became irresistible. José Delgado, a Spanish neurophysiologist at Yale, implanted an electrode into the brain of a fighting bull, in an area “involved in everything from movement to emotion.” Armed with nothing more than a transmitter, he entered a bullring with the beast. As the enraged bull charged toward him, Delgado hit a button, and the bull skidded to a sudden halt. This spectacular demonstration, which was caught on film, helped ensure that his book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society was a hit when it was published in 1969.

Clinicians continue to experiment with electric brain implants, and the promotional showmanship, in the form of TED Talks, TV interviews, and podcasts, continues. Adee also mentions Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which in 2023 received FDA approval to conduct early human trials of its brain implant technology—a form of “neural lace” that could connect brains with computers. The Trump administration’s recent firings of staff at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FDA—including in the office that oversees the Neuralink trials—are alarming. How can the administration justify cutting medical research when, as Adee shows, fundamental issues in biology and medicine remain so poorly understood?

In 2015, Adee reports, researchers claimed to have implanted electrodes that allowed an autistic teenager to speak for the first time, and ongoing research is focused on, among other things, implants to treat depression. The most well-publicized cases, however, concern the use of electromedicine to repair damaged spinal cords, including by using a device called an oscillating field stimulator (OFS), invented by Richard Borgens, a professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue University. Perhaps these cases are so popular in the media because they offer a miraculous vision, raising the lame from their wheelchairs and beds before the eyes of the viewer.

Yet there is also solid theory behind the OFS device. The electric field it generates is thought to coax severed nerve ends to grow toward each other and eventually fuse. Doctors once told Brandon Ingram, a teenager who had injured his spinal cord in a car crash in 2002, that he would never walk again. But after fifteen weeks of treatment with an OFS implant during a clinical trial at Purdue, he regained some sensation and movement and was able to take a few steps by using his abdominal muscles to control his legs. After the success of the trial, the OFS was hastily commercialized—then suffered a string of setbacks, never receiving FDA approval. “Only fourteen people have ever benefited from it,” Adee writes, “and after years of having its development blocked at every turn, the company tasked with bringing it into the world went bankrupt.”

You may have guessed by now that Sally Adee is both a true believer in electromedicine and a lover of a good anecdote. She is also an eminent science and technology writer with extensive access to academics, and this combination makes We Are Electric a great read. But its reliance on anecdote, and its occasional errors, leaves one wondering just how real the prospects for electromedicine are.

“Until between the ages of seven and eleven,” Adee claims, “if you lose the tip of your finger, you’ll probably regenerate it in full.” This is followed by an anecdote told to her about a student from the Philippines who had had four fingers on one hand “chopped off above the knuckle.” Too poor to afford a doctor, the family kept the wounds wrapped, wet, and clean, and voilà—“they all grew back perfectly.” The story is striking but prompts many questions, not least being what kind of injury could remove all four fingertips so precisely. The more important problem, though, is that fingertip regeneration can occur at any age, as long as the proximal nail matrix remains intact.

The claimed influences of the “electrome” are so multifarious that at times We Are Electric is hard to follow, but one central theme concerns the importance of electric fields for how our bodies are oriented. Ever since the discovery of the structure and function of DNA in 1953, the assumption has been that it determines the shape of our bodies. But Adee says that there are no genes specifying two eyeballs, or that they go on the front of the head, nor any genes for “two legs, two arms, this far apart.” And the genome can’t tell left from right. Electric fields, she claims, achieve much of this instead.

Research into the subject dates back to the 1930s, when Yale’s Dr. Harold Saxton Burr was studying variations in the electric fields generated by the human body. He asked the women working in his lab to allow their electric fields to be monitored, and to his surprise he discovered that for twenty-four hours every month, there was a large voltage increase.

A lucky coincidence established that the spike coincided with ovulation. A young woman working in his lab had to have an ovary removed. She allowed Burr to monitor her electric field and delayed her surgery until the spike was detected. When the excised ovary was examined, it was found to have a recently ruptured follicle—a sure sign of ovulation. According to Adee, Burr’s findings have not been replicated, but there is no doubt that the electric field generated by human eggs spikes upon fertilization. And as soon as a sperm touches an egg, it triggers an immense electric current that prevents other sperm from entering the egg, as well as initiating cell division. From the moment of conception on, electric fields play a vital part in fetal development.

In the early 2000s the American researchers Michael Levin and Ken Robinson showed that proton pumps, which control hydrogen and potassium levels, gather on one side of a fertilized egg, so hydrogen ions can enter only from that side. This creates a voltage. When they added potassium or proton channels on the other side of the egg, the development of the embryo was scrambled. Studies using electrosensitive dye in developing frog embryos revealed that a ghostly electric anomaly in the form of two eyes and a mouth flashes across the cell mass prior to cell differentiation. A few days later, in the place where this electrical premonition appeared, two actual eyeballs and a mouth start developing. Researchers were able to show that if the electrical current is altered, the embryo will not develop normally. Clearly there is something important here. But how the electrical current works and what medical applications there might be for it remain unanswered questions.

Work continues. Dr. Min Zhao has shown that during wound healing, the electric field generated by nearby cells holds “veto power” over any growth factor or gene. The cells do what the electric field dictates, regardless of other influences. And two metastudies have demonstrated that stimulation with an electrical current can halve wound healing times. Yet results are inconsistent, in part because nobody really understands how electricity helps wound healing.

It turns out that every tissue type generates its own distinctive voltage. Fat cells generate around −50 millivolts relative to their surrounding extracellular fluid, skeletal muscle −90, and skin cells −70. Stem cells, however, are at nearly zero. These electrical fields are important in controlling a cell’s destiny.

Cancer cells emit an unmistakable electrical signal. Astonishingly, this appears to have been known since the 1940s, when the gynecologist Louis Langman of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan used Burr’s ovulation-detecting technique to help bolster the success of his artificial insemination program. He recorded anomalous signals among 102 of the thousand or so women he was treating. Surgery revealed that ninety-five of these had cancer, many at such an early stage that there were no symptoms. When the surgeries to remove cancerous cells were successful, the women’s electrical currents returned to normal. If the current remained anomalous, then either some part of the tumor remained, or it had metastasized. “It’s hard to evaluate any of these experiments nearly eighty years after the fact,” Adee writes. “But to all appearances, it sure seems like a potentially reliable, non-surgical way to detect malignancy was discovered…and then got memory-holed.”

Hostility to electrotherapy seems both unfair and biased. Recently the world has fallen in love with stem cells for what Adee describes as “their unique ability to turn into many other kinds of cells.” Stem cells are commonly used in treatments for blood cancers and other ailments, and bioelectric researchers have been exploring their use in the field of regenerative medicine, which encompasses such areas as implant and transplant medicine, prosthetics, and tissue engineering. There have been some unfortunate consequences of experimental stem cell therapy—for example, one woman who had olfactory stem cells injected into her spine to help heal a spinal cord injury ended up growing “the precursor to a nose in her spine,” while another who had stem cells injected into her eyelids ended up growing bones in her eyelids that clicked every time she blinked. But stem cell therapy has not been as thoroughly criticized as electrotherapy, and in fact has the support of the new US secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in March 2025 hosted a roundtable on reducing regulations on stem cell research.

Despite the hostility of the scientific establishment, some electromedical stalwarts persist, among them Mustafa Djamgoz at Imperial College London, who has championed the idea that electric fields are decisive in whether cancers metastasize. He points out that while genes may determine whether you develop cancer, they’re not what kills you. It’s the metastasizing tumors that do. As a result of his research, ion channel drugs are being investigated. Ion channels are gateways that help determine a cell’s voltage. It turns out that cancer cells use a special ion channel that is normally present only in fetuses and that supercharges cell multiplication. Today the whole field of ion channel research is growing explosively.

Nonetheless, the attitude of most researchers toward electromedicine is, according to Adee, summed up in a query on a rejected grant application: “Does anyone really believe this shit anymore?” Adee’s slightly chaotic book may not be the sharpest tool for carving away such dismissive attitudes, but it should give us all pause. Some 2,500 years ago Plato said, of the application of science to medicine, that if the problem is complex,

we must determine the number of its parts, and in the case of each of these go through the same process as applies to the simple whole; how and on what does it produce an effect, and how and by what is an effect produced on it?

The trouble with electromedicine may simply be that it is so devilishly complex that we are not yet able to see many of its most important parts, let alone evaluate them.