260
The Body Electric
California has found that magnetic fields modulated at about the same
frequency can be used to change the behavior of monkeys in several
important ways, which are described more fully in the next chapter.
The Cole and Graf theory also suggests how the spark of life turned
itself off. The currents driving the discharges would have ceased as the
atmosphere gradually became depleted by escape of the lighter gases and
by incorporation of the ammonia and methane into organic compounds.
As this happened, the ionosphere would have gradually descended, be-
coming disconnected from the Van Allen belts. The ionospheric currents
would have become too small to couple to the earth's core, and the
atmospheric cavity too small to resonate at the core's prescribed fre-
quency. At that point, the plug was pulled, but life was well on its way.
Aside from competition from more advanced creatures, the loss of the
energy source would explain why we see today no remnants of the transi-
tional forms still emerging from inanimate matter.
This solid-state theory of life's creation is more than an exciting pic-
ture of our birth in a shower of sparks. It leads us to another of biology's
great mysteries—the evolution of nervous systems—by a sensible se-
quence of steps. First there would have been a crystalline protocell trans-
mitting information directly through its molecular lattice. As the first
cells developed, we can envision chains of microcrystals, then chains of
organic polymers transmitting information in the form of semiconduct-
ing currents. Although the exact mechanism of electron passage through
living tissue is far from clear, nearly all organic matter exhibits
piezoelectricity and all the other hallmarks of semiconduction. Further-
more, in a series of experiments during the 1970s, Freeman Cope, a
Navy biophysicist building on Szent-Gyorgyi's work, has found evidence
of superconduction at room temperature in a variety of living matter.
Currents briefly induced in superconductors have been known to flow for
many years without decay, but the phenomenon has heretofore been at-
tained only near absolute zero. Although Cope's work is still preliminary
and uncorroborated, he has found electromagnetic data consistent with
superconduction in E. coli bacteria, frog and crayfish nerves, yeast, sea
urchin eggs, and molecules of RNA, melanin pigment, and the enzyme
lysozyme.
Whatever the exact details of the conducting system, the first multi-
cellular organisms probably had networks of cells that were much like
the first single cells. Later, these network cells would have specialized
for their DC-carrying duties,
linking into syncytia to avoid the high
resistance of intercellular junctions. Somewhere along the line a central
processing center and information storehouse would have developed. At