Life's Potentials
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override the creature's normal polarity could cause a head to form where
a tail should have reappeared, and vice versa. Others confirmed this dis-
covery, and Lund went on to study eggs and embryos. He claimed to
have influenced the development of frog eggs not only with currents but
also with magnetic fields, a conclusion that was really risque for that
time.
Stimulated by Lund's papers, Harold Saxton Burr of Yale began put-
ting electrodes to all kinds of creatures. Burr was lucky enough to have a
forum for his work. He edited the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine,
where most of his reports appeared; few other journals would touch
them. Burr and his co-workers found electric fields around, and electric
potentials on the surfaces of, organisms as diverse as worms, hydras,
salamanders, humans, other mammals, and even slime molds. They
measured changes in these potentials and correlated them to growth,
regeneration, tumor formation, drug effects, hypnosis, and sleep. Burr
claimed to have measured field changes resulting from ovulation, but
others got contradictory results. He hooked up his voltmeters to trees for
years at a time and found that their fields varied in response not only to
light and moisture, but to storms, sunspots, and the phases of the moon
as well.
Burr and Lund were handicapped by their instruments as well as the
research climate. Most of their work was done before World War II and,
even though Burr spent years designing the most sensitive devices possi-
ble using vacuum tubes, the meters were still too "noisy" to reliably
measure the tiny currents found in living things. The two scientists
could refine their observations only enough to find a simple dipolar dis-
tribution of potentials, the head of most animals being negative and the
tail positive.
Burr and Lund advanced similar theories of an electrodynamic field,
called by Burr the field of life or L-field, which held the shape of an
organism just as a mold determines the shape of a gelatin dessert.
"When we meet a friend we have not seen for six months there is not
one molecule in his face which was there when we last saw him," Burr
wrote. "But, thanks to his controlling L-field, the new molecules have
fallen into the old, familiar pattern and we can recognize his face."
Burr believed that faults in the field could reveal latent illness just as
dents in a mold show up in the jelly. He claimed to be able to predict
all sorts of things about a person's emotional and physical health, both
present and future, merely by checking the voltage between head and
hand. His later writings were marred by a son of bioelectric determin-
ism and a tendency to confuse "law and order" in nature with that