The Ticklish Gene
149
the surrounding muscles during cautious use, in accordance with Wolff's
law. Repair of surrounding tissues lessened and then stopped the peri-
osteal injury current. As a result the electrical field returned to normal,
shutting off the cellular activities of healing.
When we'd finished this series of experiments, I was sure this was the
most important piece of work I would ever do, and I was determined to
get it published as a major article, not just a short note. Luck was with
me. On several speaking engagements during the previous two years I'd
been able to talk at length with Dr. Urist. He was enthusiastic about
our findings, and since he was the editor of one of the major orthopedic
journals—Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research—I submitted our re-
port there. The editorial board published it uncut, and I was pleased to
use Dr. Pritchard's statement at the 1965 bone-healing workshop as an
epigraph. To me it's still the most satisfying of my publications.
This was the first time the control system for a healing process had
been worked out in such detail. Except for the less conclusive account
Dave and I had presented to the New York Academy of Sciences three
years before, it was also the first really incontrovertible proof of de-
differentiation and metaplasia.
These were hardly new ideas, of course. Dedifferentiation had often
been proposed during the previous four decades as the simplest explana-
tion of blastema formation, and a great deal of evidence for it had been
amassed. Elizabeth Hay had even published an electron microscope pho-
tograph of a blastema cell that hadn't despecialized completely and still
contained a piece of muscle fiber. Nevertheless, the idea was dismissed
by most of the biologists who wielded influence in grant review commit-
tees and universities.
Today, however, dedifferentiation is no longer a dirty word. In part,
this is because Dave and I devised a way to produce it artificially, which
could be repeated by anyone who cared to. Art Pilla, an electrochemist
working with Andy Bassett in New York, was the first to confirm our
method. I'm happy to have been able to play a major role in this hard-
won advance of knowledge.
Even more important, this was the first work of mine that led directly
to a technique that helped patients—electrical stimulation of bone heal-
ing (see Chapter 8). Meanwhile, our results led to another major ques-
tion: Couldn't the currents we'd found be used artificially to stimulate
other types of regeneration? We decided to see if we could bring limb
regrowth a step closer to humans by trying to induce it in rats.