Description

Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricitythe electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thingits misunderstood history and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance cleared arteries and new ways to combat cancer

You may be familiar with the idea of our bodys 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 bodys electrome

Every cell in our bodiesbones skin nerves musclehas 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 18thcentury 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 awardwinning 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 usand the moral implications therein

The bioelectric revolution starts here