74
The Body Electric
the current of injury wasn't due to dying cells, which were long gone by
then. Moreover, the opposite polarities indicated a profound difference
in the electrical properties of the two animals, which somehow would
explain why only the salamander could regenerate. The negative poten-
tial seemed to bring forth the all-important blastema. It was a very
significant observation, even though the facts had scrambled my neat
THE CURRENT OF INJURY IS MORE THAN A SIDE EFFECT
Dr. Yntema agreed and urged me to write up a report for publication,
but first I jumped ahead with another idea. I took a new group of frogs,
amputated one foreleg from each, and every day applied negative current
to the stump from a small battery. I dreamed of being the first to get
complete regrowth in a normally nonregenerating animal; I could almost
see my name on the cover of Scientific American. The frogs were less
interested in my glory. They had to hold still for up to half an hour with
electrodes attached. They refused, so I anesthetized them each day,
something they tolerated very poorly. Within a week my Nobel Prize
had turned into a collection of dead frogs.
For some time I'd been scouring the dusty stacks of the medical li-
brary for previous work on bioelectricity, and how I found a paper writ-
ten in 1909 by an American researcher named Owen E. Frazee.
He
reported that electrical currents passed through the aquarium water in