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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nordy with you. Sally eighty with us. Sally as a science and technology writer, author. Most recently she was a features editor at New Science, where she wrote some of the most lasting content, including the twenty twelve feature that explained bioelectricity technology to the
general public for the very first time. She is the science consultant for the television adaptation of Naomi Alderman's The Power at Amazon Studios, and has won a US National Press Club Award, a BT Information Security Award, and the Guild of Health Writers Award for her inside account of the Silicon Valley, a young Blood clinic and Welcome to the show, Sally. Your book is called We Are Electric and it's fantastic. Welcome.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
How did you get interested in bioelectricity?
So it's a bit of a long backstory. I used to work for a magazine called I Tripoli Spectrum, that's the magazine for the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers, and I was as a sort of young reporter. I was on the semiconductor beat, which tends to be a slightly dry beat, I guess if you go pretty hard
on microchips. But one of the things that was that one of the opportunities that that afforded me was to start really looking at the new generation of neuromorphic chips that they were designing based on sort of how the brain works, and then also the signal processing that was involved in trying to integrate prosthetics into the nervous system.
And that was so mind blowing, so interesting to see that they could actually take you know, that there was such a thing as bridging the gap between machine and you know, mind, And so I started getting really obsessed with that interface because I wasn't really sure what was happening. You know, how how would you know, electrical impulses delivered into the brain, How would that sort of control the brain for example, with you know, Parkinson's implants or vice versa.
How could reading brain signals and sort of decoding them drive for example, a robotic arm like in a lot of these studies where you see people who have had a spinal cord injury are able to operate either you know, cursors on their screen with just their minds, or operate robot arms to pick up a grape. And so that's
where sort of it came from. But then the whole thing got kind of supercharged when I found out about the US military working on a project to accelerate learning by electrical stimulation, and so I did a big feature on that for New Science, and that was when I started to really get quite obsessed with this topic because the mechanism was so mysterious, and so, you know, people had sort of their sort of explanation in a can, if you know what I mean, where it was like, well,
neurons that fire together wire together, and if you put an electrical field on the brain, those neurons will wire together, and so you're gonna learn marksmanship or mathematics faster. But I never understood what that meant. So that was ten years ago, and I've fallen down the longest rabbit hole of my life trying to.
Now, what is your definition of bioelectricity?
Right, that's a good question. So normally, when you think of electricity, you think of electrons arranged down a wire. That's what powers your dishwasher and everything, and the body also uses electrons for power. There's you know atp in mitochondria and all this sort of intro bio stuff. But the commune unication signal, you know, the thing that underpins
everything about your human experience. You know, your ability to think, to feel, to taste and see and act in move so all of that is powered by ions and their movements. So ions are these positively charged with little particles like sodium and calcium and potassium, and they are all infused in the fluid that makes up about you know, two thirds of you. You're always hear that you're made of two thirds of water. Well it's kind of like sea water.
It's all sort of full of these positively and negatively charged ions. And the neurons in your nervous system and your brain they have really strong opinions about these ions. And their strong opinions are we like potassium, we don't like sodium, and they are able to actually, with the help of these things called ion channels, keep the sodium
out and keep the potassium in. And this is the basis of the action potential that makes you able to move your arms and legs and you walk and talk and think and feel like you're thirsty and then have a drink. And every single thing about your human experience is underpinned by that preference that neurons have for these two ions, because that's the basis of the action potential. And what happens is the ions that pass on the signal.
Sorry.
So the neurons are cells that are studded with these little pores, and the pores aren't like they're not like a sieve. They're smart pores, and so that is what enables them to preferentially pull in potassium and keep out sodium. And this is when the neuron is in its happy place.
It's sort of it's called the resting potential. This separation of the neuron of the of the ions makes it so that the inside of a neuron is always about seventy millibles more negatively charged than the extracellular fluid, and that makes it like a little capacitor. And when an action potential comes down, all those smartpores open. At the same time, the you know, sodium floods in, potassium floods out.
Everything goes to zero from minus seventy and that electrical impulse is the basis of the action potential that moves all you know, your legs and arms and eyes, and you know forms the basis of every thought that you're able to have.
How close to the kind of electricity that we all understand today is bioelectricity.
Well it's not very it's not that similar because you know, in in our wiring you've got sort of electrons doing the work. In our nervous signal, these ions come, they flow in and out of what the fluid that suffuses you is called a volume conductor. And so you don't have like the same speed. For example, the nervous impulse travels on average at about the speed of a race car, whereas electricity travels basically at the speed of light. So
there are very there are many differences. However, the communication signal in your body is is profoundly electrical. Like everybody knows about the sort of you know, the electrochemical part, the chemical part of the electro chemical signal, which is the you know, the serotonin at the synapses of the of the nerves, that of the nerve terminals that brings
the signal across from one nerve to the next. But you know that that wouldn't be able to happen without the sort of electrical part of the signal that happens thanks to these ion uh signal traveling.
Your book We Are Electric starts with a couple scientists from the eighteenth century, Alessandro Volta, where they got the word volts from, and Luigi Galvani, where they got the Galvani skin test response from. Why Why Why did they fight? What happened to those two?
So Volta was I sorry? Galvani was the first person to have, you know, a clue that this sort of meandering explanation from before sorry, the whole thing about you know, the sort of that that that electrical signals are really instrumental in our ability to move and think and feel. He was the first person to really sort of elaborate on that explanation and try to really to say, you know, this longstanding mystery of how we are able to move our limbs and think and you know, actuate our desires
into movement and speak speech and everything. He's the first person to think to say, I think this is an electrical phenomenon. Before that, people for like fifteen hundred years had debated how this happened, but they never got anywhere. You know, even Descartes he thought that we had some kind of like hydraulic system that pumped some kind of fluid from our brain.
Yeah, none of them even thought about bioelectricity in those days, did they.
No, exactly. But so what's really interesting though, is, you know, this was this so Galvani says it's electric and Galvani was an anatomist, so he didn't have like a lot of standing to make claims about electricity at all. Volta was, you know, a physicist who at the time he was calling himself an electrician, which was it had had very different connotations back in those times. That was sort of
like the equivalent of like a rocket scientist. Because electricity was a really burgeoning new science at the time, people didn't really understand it. People were really coming to grips with what it was to begin with. Volta had a lot of you know, cred at the time, and initially Volta saw Galvani's papers and he thought this is amazing, I stand behind this. And then he very quickly changed his mind and he said, like, no, this is absolutely untrue.
And the fight that they got into was so enormous that it roped in all the scientists of Europe everybody had to choose side. Yeah, it was wild. I get into this more in the book. It's wild. It's like a it's like it's like a Twitter flight to like people were just dunking on each other, not in one of.
Forty care social.
Yeah, totally and so this but this was the original fight in which electricity lost custody. Soy biology lost custody of electricity because back then, you know, when we're still you know in this in the eighteenth century, we've just gotten the first tools to start investigating this mysterious phenomenon that we've never understood. People at the time didn't know whether lightning was connected to you know, this idea of
the static shock. They didn't they you know, they were still getting to grips with this incredibly mysterious phenomenon, and tools had been recently invented, like electrostatic generators that were able to spin a little, tiny, thin amount of electricity, and they were able to use these for the first time to probe this longstanding mystery. So I you know, it's it's hard to get across like how exciting electricity was,
Like it's kind of like uh chat GPT today. You know, it was the same level of wonder and hype, and some people being super wrong, some people being super grifty, other people really pursuing, you know, the new frontiers of knowledge in a in a scientific way.
And they were about eighty years before Tesla, weren't they.
Tesla. Now, this was Tesla was doing his thing about one hundred years later, I think. So that's because these people were fighting. This fight was in the seventeen nineties, so basically nobody knew what basically nobody had. These things hadn't been crystallized yet into formal scientific principles. That's what Faraday ended up doing for electricity, but nobody did the
same thing for bioelectricity. As a result basically of this fight, because it had these long consequences, Volta due to a very sort of not confused, but very multivariate combination of political issues to do with Napoleon and and other factors, and the fact that he invented the precursors to the battery. Because of all that, Volta won this fight. And it was a really unfortunate result because everybody assumed that if Volta was right, that electricity was a completely different medium.
That meant that Galvani was wrong. It took like more than a hundred years for other researchers to restore Galvani's reputation.
But they were probably both right at the time, weren't they.
They were, They totally were, except Volta had created a thing that you could use, the battery, which then you know, the pioneers of electricity took that and ran with it, and you know, they created the telegraph, they created, you know, power lines, they created you know, by the end of you know, by one hundred years later, using the battery for science had added fifty new elements to the periodic table, but no similar insights came out of Galvani's theories because
it was all just a bit too early days. And what's really sad is that after he died, there was no sort of brilliant champion of bioelectricity. The closest thing they had was Galavani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who is actually the scientists that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
With the electrical pulses that they got to make the body come back to life, right, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So he was trying to you know, keep Galvani's reputation you know, he was trying to defend it against this tide that said, well, bioelectricity is over and
it's done. Galvani's dead. That was a dumb idea. So Aldini, who had published with Galvani a lot, he really sort of he had seen Galvani developed this incredible theory of bioelectricity, so he was like, look, I need to keep this relevant, right, So then he decided that he was going to take the experiments Galvani had done, which were all in sprogs, and move him up the ladder to humans. And so he started actually electrocuting executed prisoners to figure out, like,
you know what these the principles of reanimation. Where he wasn't actually trying to do a full Frankenstein like monster trying to keep somebody get somebody back to life when they've been dead for two weeks. But he was really interested in whether you could take somebody who had been recently I don't know, drowned or electrocuted and bring them
back to life. Now, of course we know yet you can, you know, if you've if you don't let too much time go by soon enough, yeah exactly, But we didn't know any of that stuff either, so and al Dini unfortunately he wasn't quite the scientist that his uncle had been, so he relied on spectacle instead of solid science. So he was doing these wild demonstrations in front of royalty and other sort of titillated you know, sort of members
of high society and people would love. You know, people used to go in there and sort of you know, see these quivering prisoners, dead prisoners, you know, rising up because of you know, an electrode into the rectum and into the ear, and then you know, they would There's one instance where one of them lifted up their arm and pointed. It seemed like they pointed at someone and like everybody fainted. So it was quite a it was quite a it was. It was a wild thing that
Aldini was trying to do. He was really trying to keep it in the forefront of people's minds by any means necessary. And he had this galvanic society that he started where people were like, we can make batteries out of you know, biological material, and so they took layers of brain, muscle and hat material and they got an electric current out of it. So all this like body horror like crazy human centipede was like, it really made
sure that bioelectricity was associated with quackery. For about forty years, there was no good research because people saw this stuff and they just wanted to distance themselves as much as possible.
Why did they seem to be all Italians? Why were they sold far ahead of everybody?
Well, so this is something I get into a bit more in the book, but at the time, I think there was something about the Italian university system that really, you know, helped.
It's like the tools, Well, I don't know.
I mean, that's a that's a question that I'm not necessarily able to answer because you know, then we have Faraday in you know, the UK and the eighteen hundreds. But it's true, like the early electricity stuff is just
suffused with Italians. Actually, you know, you can't discount people like Ben Franklin in the US, who you know, with his lightning experiments, and you know, I think it's just I think it was definitely something to do with the universities because they had the tools that you needed, you know, they the they really made sure that their researchers had these next generation tools which are so important to understand advancing our understanding of these subtle electrical forces.
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