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This is a good place to mention "The Body Electric", by Robert Becker and Gary Selden. https://bookshop.org/books/the-body-electric-electromagnetism-and-the-fo
by ncmncm 4y ago
This is a good place to mention "The Body Electric", by Robert Becker and Gary Selden.
https://bookshop.org/books/the-body-electric-electromagnetism-and-the-foundation-of-life/9780688069711 https://bookshop.org/books/the-body-electric-electromagnetis...
Becker's lab was, for decades almost uniquely in the US, permitted to engage in research on effects of electromagnetic fields and currents on living systems.
I say "permitted" because it was career death to even mention it, most places. To this day, the official standards for exposure to E-M radiation admit possible effects only of heating, but Becker was able to profoundly alter growth and, crucially, regeneration patterns via sub-nanoamp electric currents.
I have no idea how or why the stricture was applied elsewhere, but Becker's free hand appears to have been a product of his employment by the US Veterans Administration, which would have liked for him to discover a way to regenerate veterans' and servicemen's severed limbs, so he did not depend on grants from the usual sources such as NSF and NIH, which must have kept a tight rein.
In 1987 I sneaked into a presentation at a conference in Szeged, Hungary, where an American biologist presented results of electromagnetically stimulating beetle larvae to grow 4x normal size. She remarked she had been unable to present such results at any US conference.
- nervousvarun 4y agoFascinating...were there details on the adult beetle? Did it retain the "enhanced" size/live a normal life etc.?
- ncmncm 4y agoI am lucky to remember this much 25 years later. That, and miles and miles of sunflowers between Budapest and Szeged.
- machiaweliczny 4y agoI can recommend getting familiar with Michael Levin work also. https://youtu.be/-Bwq1oOST7w https://youtu.be/-Bwq1oOST7w
- ncmncm 4y agoThank you, this completely changed my conceptions of what it means to be human and to be alive. I will be sending this around to everybody.
- archhn 4y agoWhy do so many scientists tend to be utterly dogmatic when new research challenges their fundamental assumptions? Their close mindedness terrifies me because they are increasingly relied on in decision making -- like vaccines, for example. I thought science is centered around an admission of infinite ignorance? At any moment we can be made aware of new information that completely changes our understanding of the world because the truth is not hardwired into us. They are more and more looking like a clergy caste for the post-God state.
- ncmncm 4y agoAs Max Planck said, science advances one funeral at a time. Each one had to wait for a previous generation to die to cement their own advance.
- archhn 4y agoIncidentally, I remember young Kirkegaard writing that he didn't want to pursue science because each scientist is like a corpse that just fecundates the soil of science for the next generation--paraphrasing. That's why he went into the study of eternal things.