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The Body Electric
the same changes in normal blood cells outside the frog. If this didn't work,
then I probably had spent the last seven years "collecting stamps"—
accumulating facts that were interesting but, in the end, trivial.
I calculated the amount of current that would produce the fields I'd
found. I came up with an incredibly small amount, somewhere between
a trillionth and a billionth of an ampere (a picoamp and a nanoamp,
respectively). Again I thought there must be some mistake. I didn't see
how such a tiny current could produce the dramatic effects we'd seen,
so, figuring that even if my numbers were right, more juice would sim-
ply hasten the process, I decided to start with 50 microamps, a current
level that would be just shy of producing a little electrolysis—the break-
down of water into hydrogen and oxygen.
I designed plastic and glass chambers of various shapes, fitted with
electrodes of several types. In these chambers we would place healthy red
blood cells in saline solution and observe them by microscope while the
current was on.
I set up the experiment in a lab across the street from the medical
center, where there was available one of the inverted microscopes we
would need to observe the cells through the bottoms of the chambers,
where most of them would settle. I put a young technician named Fred-
erick Brown in charge of the long grind of watching the cells hour after
hour at different current levels and field shapes in the various chambers.
We began in the summer of 1966. Fred was to enter medical school that
fall, and I figured two months would be more than enough time! He
was to run one test batch of frog blood each day and report to me the
next morning as to what he'd found.
It didn't start well. Nothing had happened after six hours of current.
We couldn't increase the amperage without electrocuting the cells, so
we ran it longer. Still nothing happened. In fact, the cells started dying
when we left them in the chambers overnight. We decided to lower the
current, but I still didn't believe in the absurdly low values I'd calcu-
lated, so I told Fred to drop the amperage only a little bit day by day.
He and I stared at a lot of blood cells over those two months, all stub-
bornly refusing to do anything. Finally, two days before Fred had to
leave, we'd gotten the current down as far as our first apparatus could
go, and well within the range I'd calculated—about half a billionth of
an ampere. At eleven that morning he called me excitedly and I rushed
across the street.
With
the room darkened
and
the
microscope
light
on,
we saw
the
same cell changes as
in
the
blood
clot, first
at the negative electrode,
then at the positive electrode, and finally spreading across the rest of the