144
The Body Electric
electricity, far less than anything a human could feel even on the most
sensitive tissue, such as the tongue, but it was enough to goose the cell
into unlocking all its genes for potential use.
The effect depended on having the proper cells as well as the proper
current—white blood cells, skin cells, and other types didn't work.
Only erythrocytes seemed to serve as target cells in frogs. We found the
same response in the blood cells of goldfish, salamanders, snakes, and
turtles. The only variation was that the fish cells despecialized faster and
the reptilian cells more slowly than frog blood cells. In all erythrocytes
the shift in the transparency and staining characteristics of the nucleus
was a point of no return. These changes seemed to indicate reactivation
of the DNA, for afterward the rest of the process continued even if we
switched off the current.
This
was
a
breakthrough.
We'd
learned
something
hitherto
un-
suspected about fracture healing in frogs, and it was almost certain to
benefit human patients a few years down the road. Because we'd used
frogs instead of mammals, we'd also stumbled upon the best proof yet
for dedifferentiation—a do-it-yourself method. If we'd studied fracture
healing in mammals, we almost certainly would not have made the dis-
covery, for periosteal cells don't dedifferentiate and marrow cells are hard
to experiment with. Instead, we even had movies of dedifferentiation
happening and electron photomicrographs of air its stages, including
brand-new ribosomes being made in the nucleus and deployed into the
surrounding cytoplasm. Moreover, all the steps in dedifferentiation, in-
cluding the activities in the nucleus and the assembly of ribosomes and
mitochondria, exactly paralleled the changes found by the most recent
research on salamander limb blastemas. We'd found the electrical com-
mon denominator that started the first phase—the blastema—in all re-
generation.
The Genetic Key
Soon after we'd finished this experiment, I was invited to a meeting on
electromagnetism in biology at the New York Academy of Sciences.
This was basically a one-man show. Kenneth MacLean, a prominent sur-
geon and highly placed member of the academy, had been using mag-
netic fields on his patients for years and was convinced that they helped.
Independently wealthy, he'd set up a lab in his office, with a large elec-
tromagnet. The meeting was a testament to his persistence rather than
any widespread belief within the academy that he was right. So in Feb-