The Body Electric Quotes

“And if some savage told us of a mag-ical worm that built a little windowless house, slept there a season, thenone day emerged and flew away as a jeweled bird, we'd laugh at suchsuperstition if we'd never seen a butterfly.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“We know of ESB's potential for mind control largely through the work of Jose Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex action: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly— the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, "The animals looked like electronic toys."

Even instincts and emotions can be changed: In one test a mother giving continuous care to her baby suddenly pushed the infant away whenever the signal was given. Approach-avoidance conditioning can be achieved for any action simply by stimulating the pleasure and pain centers in an animal's or person's limbic system.

Eventual monitoring of evoked potentials from the EEG, combined with radio-frequency and microwave broadcasts designed to produce specific thoughts or moods, such as compliance and complacency, promises a method of mind control that poses immense danger to all societies —tyranny without terror.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Real science is creative, as much so as painting, sculpture, or writing.Beauty, variously defined, is the criterion for art, and likewise a good theory has the elegance, proportion, and simplicity that we find beautiful. Just as the skilled artist omits the extraneous and directs our attention to a unifying concept, so the scientist strives to find a relatively simple order underlying the apparent chaos of perception.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The scientist must be free to follow unexpected paths as they appear.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“We found that bone was an LED. Like many such materials, it required an outside source of light before an electric current would make it release its own light, and the light it emitted was at an infrared frequency invisible to us, but the effect was consistent and undeniable.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium.

With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible.

A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines.

Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“It may be hard to convince ourselves that something we can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell can still hurt us so dreadfully. Yet the fact must be faced, just as we've learned a healthy fear of nuclear radiation. Certain scientists, some perhaps acting in a program of deliberate disinformation, keep telling the public that we still don't know whether electropollution is a threat to human health. That's simply not true. Certainly we need to know more, but a multitude of risks have been well documented.
Three dangers overshadow all others. The first has been conclusively proven: ELF electromagnetic fields vibrating at about 30 to 100 hertz, even if they're weaker than the earth's field, interfere with the cues that keep our biological cycles properly timed; chronic stress and impaired disease resistance result. Second, the available evidence strongly suggests that regulation of cellular growth processes is impaired by electropollution, increasing cancer rates and producing serious reproductive problems. Electromagnetic weapons constitute a third class of hazards culminating in climatic manipulation from a sorcerer's-apprentice level of ignorance.
”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Mechanical stress on the bone produced a piezoelectric signal from the collagen. The signal was biphasic, switching polarity with each stress-and-release. The signal was rectified by the PN junction between apatite and collagen. This coherent signal did more than merely indicate that stress had occurred. Its strength told the cells how strong the stress was,and its polarity told them what direction it came from. Osteogenic cells where the potential was negative would be stimulated to grow more bone, while those in the positive area would close up shop and dismantle their matrix. If growth and resorption were considered as two aspects of one process, the electrical signal acted as an analog code to transfer information about stress to the cells and trigger the appropriate response.Now we knew how stress was converted into an electrical signal. We had discovered a transducer, a device that converts other forces into electricity or vice versa.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Both electric and magnetic fields are really just abstractions that scientists have made up to try to understand electricity's and magnetism's action at a distance, produced by no known intervening material or energy, a phenomenon that used to be considered impossible until it be-came undeniable. A field is represented by lines of force, another abstraction, to indicate its direction and shape. Both kinds of fields decline with distance, but their influence is technically infinite: Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Electrical osteogenesis could be the opening wedge into a new era of medicine. Within a few years, we may know how to use these techniques to repair joint cartilage, or even replace whole joints, and to correct various defects of bone growth. In the further future, we may be able to extend regeneration as needed to nearly all human tissues. For the first time a physician can now direct nature, albeit in a small way,rather than play her helpless servant. We must use this power wisely.We're tapping into the most potent force in all of biology. If we're irresponsible about it, we risk another electrical letdown that could put off medicine's glorious future for many years.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The electrical forces turned the key that unlocked the repressed genes.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Two separate currents, then, one from the nerves and one from the bone matrix, were producing potentials of opposite polarity, which acted like the electrodes of a battery. These living electrodes were creating a complex field whose exact shape and strength reflected the position of the bone pieces. The limb was, in effect, taking its own X ray.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me.

As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible—"painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was more a process than a structure, but we tended to forget this, because a structure was so much easier to study. This film reminded me how far our static concepts still were from the actual business of living. As I thought how any one of those scintillating cells potentially could become a whole speckled frog or a person, I grew surer than ever that my work so far had disclosed only a few aspects of a process-control system as varied and widespread as life itself, of which we'd been ignorant until then.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Information, and a monumental amount of it, is clearly passed from the body to the blastema.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Answers were sought by transplanting the blastema to other positions on the animal. The experiments only made matters worse. If the blastema was moved within live to seven days after it first appeared, and grafted near the hind leg, it grew into a second hind leg, even though it came from an amputated foreleg. Well, that was okay. The body could be divided into "spheres of influence" or "organizational territories,"each of which contained information on the local anatomy. A blastema into a hind-limb territory naturally became a hind limb. This was an attractive theory, but unfounded. Exactly what did this territory consist of? No one knew. To make matters worse, it was then found that transplantation of a slightly older blastema from a foreleg stump to a hind-limb area produced a foreleg. The young blastema knew where it was; the older one knew where it had been! Somehow this pinhead of primitive cells with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics contained enough information to build a complete foreleg, no matter where it was placed. How? We still don't know.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“All the experiments led to one unifying conclusion: The overall structure, the shape, the pattern, of any animal is as real a part of its body as are its cells, heart, limbs, or teeth. Living things are called organisms because of the overriding importance of organization, and each part of the pattern somehow contains the information as to what it is in relation to the whole. The ability of this pattern to maintain itself reaches its height in the newts, mud puppies, and other amphibians collectively called salamanders.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The healer's job has always been to release something not understood,to remove obstructions (demons, germs, despair) between the sick pa-tient and the force of life driving obscurely toward wholeness. Themeans may be direct—the psychic methods mentioned above—or indi-rect: Herbs can be used to stimulate recovery; this tradition extendsfrom prehistoric wisewomen through the Greek herbal of Dioscoridesand those of Renaissance Europe, to the prevailing drug therapies of thepresent. Fasting, controlled nutrition, and regulation of living habits toavoid stress can be used to coax the latent healing force from the sick body; we can trace this approach back from today's naturopaths to Galenand Hippocrates. Attendants at the healing temples of ancient Greeceand Egypt worked to foster a dream in the patient that would eitherstart the curative process in sleep or tell what must be done on awaken-ing. This method has gone out of style, but it must have worked fairlywell, for the temples were filled with plaques inscribed by grateful pa-trons who'd recovered.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“It may be hard to convince ourselves that something we can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell can still hurt us so dreadfully. Yet the fact must be faced, just as we've learned a healthy fear of nuclear radiation. Certain scientists, some perhaps acting in a program of deliberate disinformation, keep telling the public that we still don't know whether electropollution is a threat to human health. That's simply not true. Certainly we need to know more, but a multitude of risks have been well documented.

Three dangers overshadow all others. The first has been conclusively proven: ELF electromagnetic fields vibrating at about 30 to 100 hertz, even if they're weaker than the earth's field, interfere with the cues that keep our biological cycles properly timed; chronic stress and impaired disease resistance result. Second, the available evidence strongly suggests that regulation of cellular growth processes is impaired by electropollution, increasing cancer rates and producing serious reproductive problems. Electromagnetic weapons constitute a third class of hazards culminating in climatic manipulation from a sorcerer's-apprentice level of ignorance.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The pituitary hormone prolactin, the same substance that stimulates milk flow in nursing mothers, seems to sensitize cells to electric current. Then the signal causes nearby cells to dedifferentiate and form a blastema, apparently by changing the way cell membranes pass calcium ions.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The DNA-RNA apparatus isn't the whole secret of life, but a sort of computer program by which the real secret, the control system, ex-presses its pattern in terms of living cells.This pattern is part of what many people mean by the soul, which somany philosophies have tried to explicate. However, most of the pro-posed answers haven't been connected with the physical world of biology in a way that offered a toehold for experiment. Like many attempts, the latest major scientific guess, the morphogenetic field proposed by Paul Weiss in 1939, was just a restatement of the problem, though a useful one. Weiss conjectured that development was guided by some sort of field projected from the fertilized egg. As the dividing cell mass became an embryo and then an adult, the field changed its shape and somehow led the cells onward.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The evidence to date indicates that PEMF works byincreasing the mitotic rate of the healing cells, not by altering calciummetabolism. If so, it can't possibly discriminate between bone-healingcells and any other type. It will accelerate the growth of any cellularsystem that is actively growing; this includes not only healing tissues,but fetal and malignant tissues as well”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“At this time, therefore, I must conclude that high-current electrodes might enhance the growth of any preexisting tumor cells in the electrical path—unlike low-current silver, which when negative had no effect on, and when positive suspended, mitosis of cancer cells in our lab.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“One of the main lessons of bioelectromagnetism so far is that less is often more.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Conversely, I believe low-current silver electrodes stimulate bone formation directly—by dedifferentiating the marrow cells and perhaps also by stimulating the periosteal cells.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“All vertebrates except mammals have nuclei in their red blood cells.In mammals, these cells go through an extra stage of development in which the nucleus is discarded. The resulting cells are smaller, can flow through smaller capillaries, can be packed with more hemoglobin, and thus can carry oxygen and carbon dioxide more efficiently.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“Fortified by our new knowledge that electricity controlled growth in bone, we returned instead to the nerves, taking a closer look at how their currents stimulated regrowth.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“ELECTRIC FIELDS ALIGN COLLAGEN MOLECULES

BONE'S ELECTRICAL SYSTEM GUIDES GROWTH”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“The electrodes we'd been using on salamanders couldn't be scaled up for people, but within a week Charlie invented some that would give us equally precise readings from the human head.We immediately found that the back-to-front current varied with changes in consciousness just as in salamanders. It was strongest during heightened physical or mental activity, it declined during rest, and it reversed direction in both normal sleep and anesthesia.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“If the current controlled the way nerves worked in the brain as well as in the rest of the body, then it must regulate consciousness to some extent.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life

“This experiment demonstrated unequivocally that there was a real electric current flowing along the salamander's foreleg, and it virtually proved that the current was semiconducting. In fact, the half-dozen tests I'd performed supported every point of my hypothesis.”
― Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life