We Are Electric
Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
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We Are Electric
Narrated by:
Sally Adee
Buy Now for $34.39
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Narrated by:
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Sally Adee
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Written by:
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Sally Adee
You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome: the bacterial fauna that populate our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross into new scientific understanding: discovering your body's electrome.
Every cell in our bodies—bones, skin, nerves, muscle—has a voltage, like a tiny battery. It is the reason our brain can send signals to the rest of our body, how we develop in the womb, and why our body knows to heal itself from injury. When bioelectricity goes awry, illness, deformity, and cancer can result. But if we can control or correct this bioelectricity, the implications for our health are remarkable: an undo switch for cancer that could flip malignant cells back into healthy ones; the ability to regenerate cells, organs, even limbs; to slow aging and so much more. The next scientific frontier might be decrypting the bioelectric code, much the way we did the genetic code.
Yet the field is still emerging from two centuries of skepticism and entanglement with medical quackery, all stemming from an 18th-century scientific war about the nature of electricity between Luigi Galvani (father of bioelectricity, famous for shocking frogs) and Alessandro Volta (inventor of the battery).
In We Are Electric, award-winning science writer Sally Adee takes readers through the thrilling history of bioelectricity and into the future: from the Victorian medical charlatans claiming to use electricity to cure everything from paralysis to diarrhea, to the advances helped along by the giant axons of squids, and finally to the brain implants and electric drugs that await us—and the moral implications therein.
The bioelectric revolution starts here.
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What the critics say
"Sally Adee manages that most difficult feat in science writing: taking a subject you didn’t know you cared about and making it genuinely fascinating and exciting. The ‘ohmigod-that’s-so-cool’ moments come thick and fast as she brings the science up to date, investigating today’s cutting edge and what the future may hold for bioelectric medicine. It’s a vast and hugely exciting area of scientific research, shared with infectious enthusiasm, a real depth of knowledge, a smart and funny turn of phrase. You’ll never think of life in the same way again."—Caroline Williams, author of Move!: The New Science of Body Over Mind
"A revelatory survey of bioelectricity...[Adee] masterfully shows the implications of new discoveries and spotlights where the science doesn’t add up....With lucid explanations and fascinating anecdotes, Adee is the perfect guide to this hidden realm. Pop science fans, take note."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Amazing book
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Perhaps it is not surprising that this book is written in the tone and content of, say, an article in Wired, rather than real science history as would be written by someone like Matthew Cobb: the author is herself a journalist, not a scientist. This is not to write off all science journalism. Some is very good (ed. Carl Zimmer).
The author seems to have two agendas; first, to popularize the idea of a "bioelectric code" or "electrome" on the same level as the genome, proteome or connectome; the second is to promote a number sensationalistic claims about the potential for psychiatric and medical therapies that use various forms of electrical stimulation.
There is no doubt that electricity is critical in life at all levels, from the cellular to organ systems to the entire organism. While the study of biolectricity is an active and growing field, the idea of an electrome -- a single, collected electrical signature of an organism's entire bioelectric activity -- is far from a consensus idea. The most important and well-studied bioelectricity is, of course, in the brain and central nervous system. The author seems to believe that that study begins and ends with action potentials. She ignores completely the truly relevant "-ome", the connectome (the complete wiring diagram of a brain or brain region, a vast undertaking that has been completed in only miniscule organisms, and tiny brain regions of advanced organisms. Instead, the author talks about the electric code as if it were simply a matter of measuring the nature, frequency and intensity of electrical emanations from the skull.
Throughout large portions of the book the author sounds more like a publicist for a sketchy biotech startup than a journalist. Many of her examples that she cites as proof of the electrome concept are actually failed attempts to market devices far in advance of any understanding of the physiology they are expected to affect. In more than one case she cites the fact that attempts at developing an electro-bio-physical device failed as proof that the concept behind the device was sound!
This may be because the author cites only other journalism, which has attracted her attention not because the science is well founded, but because the article is sensationalistic. These are not peer reviewed journals, but pop science (Wired) and newspaper articles. Not only does she rely wholly on non-science articles, but she also relies heavily on the self-serving claims of entrepreneurs of start ups. When they don't succeed they blame the FDA or commercial rivals. And the author recounts all that, in great detail, as if it were real science or history of science.
Poor Scientific Journalism
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