The Embryo at the Wound 61
I began my work just after the first few Sputniks, during the "missile
gap" flap. Alarmed by the unforeseen triumphs of Russian technology,
which we'd considered primitive, the government hastily began translat-
ing every Soviet scientific journal and distributing copies free to federally
funded research centers. Suddenly, the medical library at the VA Medi-
cal Center in Syracuse, where I worked, began receiving each month a
crate of Russian journals on clinical medicine and biology. Since no one
else was much interested, this bonanza was all for me.
I soon made two discoveries: The Russians were willing to follow
hunches; their researchers got government money to try the most out-
landish experiments, ones that our science just knew couldn't work. Fur-
thermore, Soviet journals published them—even if they did work. I
particularly enjoyed Biofizika, the Soviet journal of biophysics, and it
was there I encountered a paper on the "Nature of the Variation of the
Bioelectric Potentials in the Regeneration Process of Plants," by A. M.
Sinyukhin of Lomonosov State University in Moscow.
Sinyukhin began by cutting one branch from each of a series of
tomato plants. Then he took electrical measurements around the wound
as each plant healed and sent out a new shoot near the cut. He found a
negative current—a stream of electrons—flowing from the wound for
the first few days. A similar "current of injury" is emitted from all
wounds in animals. During the second week, after a callus had formed
over the wound and the new branch had begun to form, the current
became stronger and reversed its polarity to positive. The important
point wasn't the polarity—the position of the measuring electrode with
respect to a reference electrode often determines whether a current regis-
ters as positive or negative. Rather, Sinyukhin's work was significant
because he found a change in the current that seemed related to reparative
growth. Sinyukhin found a direct correlation between these orderly elec-
trical events and biochemical changes: As the positive current increased,
cells in the area more than doubled their metabolic rate, also becoming
more acidic and producing more vitamin C than before.
Sinyukhin then applied extra current,
using small batteries,
to a
group of newly lopped plants, augmenting the regeneration current.
These battery-assisted plants restored their branches up to three times
faster than the control plants. The currents were very small—only 2 to 3
microamperes for five days.
(An ampere
is a standard unit of electric
current,
and
a
microampere is one
millionth of an ampere.) Larger
amounts of electricity killed the cells and had no growth-enhancing
effect. Moreover, the polarity had to match that normally found in the
plant. When Sinyukhin used current of the opposite polarity, nullifying