70
The Body Electric
"It's not here in the research office. It's downstairs in the hospital
director's office." Now that was really strange. The director almost never
paid any attention to the research program. Besides, his office was big
enough to hold a barbecue in.
It was a barbecue, ali right, and I was the one being grilled. The
director's conference room had been rearranged. In place of the long,
polished table there was a semicircle of about a dozen chairs, each oc-
cupied by one of the luminaries from the hospital and medical school. I
recognized the chairmen of the departments of biochemistry and phys-
iology along with the hospital director and chief of research. Only the
dean was missing. In the center was a single chair—for me.
The spokesman came right to the point: "We have a very grave basic
concern over your proposal. This notion that electricity has anything to
do with living things was totally discredited some time ago. It has abso-
lutely no validity, and the new scientific evidence you're citing is worth-
less. The whole idea was based on its appeal to quacks and the gullible
public. I will not stand idly by and see this medical school associated
with such a charlatanistic, unscientific project." Murmurs of assent
spread around the group.
I had the momentary thrill of imagining myself as Galileo or Gior-
dano Bruno; I thought of walking to the window to see if the stake and
fagots were set up on the lawn. Instead I delivered a terse speech to the
effect that I still thought my hypothesis was stoutly supported by some
very good research and that I was sorry if it flew in the face of dogma. I
ended by saying that I didn't intend to withdraw the proposal, so they
would have to act upon it.
When I got home, my fury was gone. I was ready to call the director,
withdraw my proposal, apologize for my errors, stay out of research,
quit the VA, and go into private practice, where I could make a lot
more money. Luckily, my wife Lil knows me better than I sometimes
know myself. She told me, "You'd be miserable in private practice. This
is exactly what you want to do, so just wait and see what happens."
Two days later I got word that the committee had delegated the deci-
sion to Professor Chester Yntema, an anatomist who long ago had stud-
ied the regrowth of ears in the salamander. Since he was the only one in
Syracuse who'd ever done any regeneration research, I've always won-
dered why he wasn't part of the first evaluation. I went to see him with a
sense of foreboding, for his latest research seemed to refute Singer's nerve
work, on which I'd based my proposal.
Using a standard technique, Yntema had operated on very young sala-
mander embryos, cutting out all of the tissues that would have given