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The Body Electric
flop in polarity. The sector boundary's passage also induces a day
or two of turbulence in earth's field.
The potential interactions among all these electromagnetic phenomena
and life are almost infinitely complex.
For many years most scientists dismissed Brown's conclusions as im-
possible. Given the old premise that life was entirely a matter of water
chemistry, none of these electromagnetic changes would have enough
energy to affect an organic process in any way. Discovery of the DC
system showed how the interaction could work without energy transfer;
it gave living things a way of "sensing" the fields directly. Undaunted
by the slow acceptance of his work, Brown went on to document
Nassaria's sensitivity to electrostatic fields as well. He also found mag-
netically driven cycles in all other organisms he tested, including mice,
fruit flies, and humans. Even potatoes in a bin showed a field-linked
rhythm of oxygen consumption. In humans, hormone output and the
number of lymphocytes in the bloodstream are but two of many vari-
ables that dance to the same beat. One of the most important is cell
cycle time. The actual process of cell division—in which chromosomes
appear, line up, split in half, and are distributed equally between the
two cells—takes only a few minutes. It must be preceded by several
longer stages, one of which is duplication of all the cell's DNA. All
stages together take about one day. Thus all growth and repair, which
depend on regulated cell division, are synchronized with the earth's
field.
Rutger Wever has done some even more telling work with humans
during the last decade and a half. He built two underground rooms to
completely isolate people from all clues to the passage of time. One was
kept free of outside changes in light, temperature, sound, and such ordi-
nary cues, but wasn't shielded from electromagnetic fields. The other
room was identical but also field free. Observing several hundred sub-
jects, who lived in the bunkers as long as two months, and charting
such markers as body temperature, sleep-waking cycles, and urinary ex-
cretion of sodium, potassium, and calcium, Wever found that persons in
both rooms soon developed irregular rhythms, but those in the com-
pletely shielded room had significantly longer ones. Those still exposed
to the earth's field kept to a rhythm close to twenty-four hours. In some
of these people, a few variables wandered from the circadian rate, but
they always stabilized at some new rate in harmony with the basic one—
two days instead of one, for example. People kept from contact with the
earth field, on the other hand, became thoroughly desynchronized. Sev-