84
The Body Electric
odious euphemism as preached by Presidents. As a result, he began to
suggest his simple readings as a foolproof way to evaluate job applicants,
soldiers, mental patients, and suspected criminals or dissidents.
The fields Burr and Lund found were actually far too simple to ac-
count for a salamander's limb or a human face. Biological knowledge at
that time gave them no theoretical framework to explain where their
fields came from. They conceived of currents flowing within cells but
had no proof. They had no inkling that currents might flow in specific
tissues or in the fluids outside cells. They suggested that all these little
intracellular currents somehow added up to the whole field. Burr wrote
that "electrical energy is a fundamental attribute of protoplasm and is an
expression or measure of the presence of an electrodynamic field in the
organism." Unfortunately, an analysis of this sentence yields nonsense,
and Burr's work was dismissed as foggy vitalism. Lund suffered the same
fate. No one bothered to see if the measurements they'd made were valid.
After all, you can disagree with a theory, but you should respect the
data enough to check them. If you can't duplicate them, you're entitled
to rest easy with your own concepts, but if you get the same results,
you're obligated to agree or propose an alternate theory. Most scientists
took the easy way out, however, and simply ignored Burr and Lund.
Their discoveries remained little known, and most biologists didn't con-
nect them with the tentative morphogenetic-field concept of regenera-
tion.
Then in 1952 Lund's work was taken up by G. Marsh and H. W.
Beams using the planarian. They found that the flatworm's polarity, like
the hydra's, could be controlled by passing a current through it. When a
direct current was fed in the proper direction through a section of a
worm, normal polarity disappeared and a head formed at each end. As
the current strength was increased, the section's polarity reversed; a head
regrew at the rear, a tail at the front. At higher voltages, even intact
worms completely reorganized, with the head becoming a tail and vice
versa. Marsh and Beams grew convinced that the animal's electric field
was the morphogenetic organizing principle. Still, their work was also
ignored, except by Meryl Rose, who suggested that a gradation of elec-
trical charge from front to back controlled the gradient of growth inhib-
itors and stimulators. He suggested that the growth compounds were
charged molecules that were moved to different places in the body by
the electric field, depending on the amount and sign of their charge and
their molecular weight.