THE BASIC BIOLOGICAL DATA TRANSMISSION AND CONTROL SYSTEM INFLUENCED BY ELECTRICAL FORCES *

Over the past decade, there has been a growing awareness that electrical and magnetic forces have specific effects on living organisms. These effects are produced by forces of very low magnitude and are not explainable in such simplistic terms a s Joule heating. They appear to indicate sensitivities on the part of living organisms several orders of magnitude greater than predictable by present concepts of cellular or organismal physiology. The effects are apparently separable into two broad categories: those that involve general or specialized functions of the central nervous system (CNS) and those that involve postembryonic growth and healing processes. C N S effects include the production of general anesthesia by electrical currents that traverse the brain,l the production of local or regional anesthesia by currents injected a t classical acupuncture sites,* the direction of migratory behavior of the Atlantic eel by the earth's electrostatic field,3 the navigational aid furnished the homing pigeon by the earth's magnetic field,4 the apparent cue for the timing of biological cycles by the earth's magnetic field,5 and the direct relationship between reversals of the earth's magnetic field and the extinction of whole species in the geological past.6 Growth effects include the stimulation of bone growth by direct current injection,' the stimulation of cartilage regeneration by similar means,8 the restoration of partial limb regeneration to mammals by small direct c ~ r r e n t s , ~ the stimulation of bone growth by electrical fields,1° the inhibition of growth of implanted tumors in mammals by electrical currents with a polarity dependence" and by exposure to nonuniform magnetic fields,12 the effect upon cephalocaudal axis development in the regenerating flatworm in a polarity-dependent fashion by applied direct and the production of morphological alterations in embryonic development by manipulation of the electrochemical species present in the environment." The lists are not intended to be all inclusive but were chosen to illustrate the great variety of effects produced. It should be noted that several of the effects a re clinically applicable, and, indeed, some are in clinical use today. Unfortunately, none of the effects (except possibly bone growth stimulation) are based on an adequate foundation of biological theory, and, in fact, the key proposition of these effects, namely, that cells are capable of sensing and responding, in a specific fashion, to levels of electrical current/voltage or electrical or magnetic fields, is hardly universally accepted. I should like to consider, not the question of what effects occur or how they occur, but rather why they occur a t all. Present physiological theories deal with