Understanding the Body Electric | Hacker News Reader

Understanding the Body Electric

newyorker.com

29 pointsThevet13 comments

For many decades, research on effects on living tissue of nano-currents and varying electromagnetic fields was effectively forbidden in the US. Trying to pursue it led to canceled grants, dis-invitation to conferences, and denial of tenure. (The electric power industry might be responsible: they wanted no chance of interference in their choices of transmission line routing.)

George Becker somehow got a free pass, working for the US Veterans' Administration on what was hoped might be limb regeneration. He wrote up his findings, in popular form, in "The Body Electric".

The key finding was that sub-nanoamp currents orchestrate both fetal development and healing processes, and also regeneration in animals that can still achieve it. But it turns out that healing a broken bone is, exactly, regeneration, even in us, and a small current can accelerate it, retard it, or trigger it in cases where it fails, as does happen.

I attended (sneaked into) a conference in Hungary in 1987 where an American biologist presented her results, growing insect larvae to 4x normal size via varying magnetic field stimulation. She could not present these results in the US at the time.

A key fact about effects of high frequency radio on living systems is that modulation is everything. Thus, a pure sine wave at 2.4 GHz and 1 watt might have no effect, but modulating it with two lower frequencies that differ by a few Hz could yield profound results, even at much lower power.

The number of ways one could modulate is practically infinite, so nobody can say anything simple about effects of E-M, with effects that can be very large. Regulators have responded by restricting consideration solely to possible heating by absorption of the baseband signal.

> For many decades, research on effects on living tissue of nano-currents and varying electromagnetic fields was effectively forbidden in the US. Trying to pursue it led to canceled grants, dis-invitation to conferences, and denial of tenure. (The electric power industry might be responsible: they wanted no chance of interference in their choices of transmission line routing.)

This smells of shady occultment by people (and organizations) unknown (by their choice) due to reasons "best" kept away from the public. Emphasis on we do not know because we're prevented from knowing by means of "canceled grants, dis-invitation to conferences, and denial of tenure"

This kind of thing induces massive distrust (from me) of official (government and state) organizations. Such distrust is problematic mostly for me until many other people also reason their way into this massive distrust. Now it's a social problem so them who hide things (whose factualness is most certainly a baseless assumption) must respond to the consequences of their choice to limit spread of knowledge.

This reeks to me like a story tailor made to confirm the bias of people already distrustful of institutions. We've heard this narrative before. A conspiracy of government and powerful capitalists are censoring the science they don't want you to know. Its the exact same story-line as 5g towers cause cancer. I for one find it hard to believe that any biological system, the product of the harsh reality of evolution, would be as fragile as described. Before we go along distrusting the government, can we at least get some compelling reason to trust the random hn comment?

The fact is, nobody knows whether 5G towers will cause cancer: not the people specifying them, not the people putting them up, nor any of the people complaining about them.

For 2.4 and 5 GHz, the experiment has now been performed on the general public, and the answer (with very large N but low confidence) appears to be "no". But that result does not extend to 20GHz 5G with its different modulation scheme.

Evolution is wholly silent on the topic: 20GHz radiation, like 2.4 and 5, never occurs in nature. No long-term, periodically varying or modulated E-M field is found, short of light waves. Life can have evolved no defense.

Something else that does not occur in nature is exposure to the very large amount of dietary fructose (without accompanying fiber) seen in the food supply in the US and in the UK and its (other) former colonies. In that case, the result is very clear: we are dropping like flies, in the worst public-health debacle since cats were exterminated to curb the Black Plague.

Anyone wary of vaccines or 5G but not exercised over sugar demonstrates wholly political motivation.

There's no particular reason to think 5g will cause problems, just like there is no reason my car's headlights are expected to cause cancer. We need to have evidence for claims, and shadowy organizations aren't behind blocking every claim you want to believe.

There is an equal lack of reason to think modulated microwaves will not contribute to incidence of cancer. The burden of proof rightly belongs on anyone forcing it on everyone else without their consent.

In the case of car headlights, animals gave been exposed to visible light for as long as there have been animals. Yet, we know UV exposure causes cancer. Microwaves penetrate flesh, and we have zero natural background exposure. So it is a reasonable question that deserves data, not dismissal as likely to interfere with billionaires' profits.

I have not encountered any reason to deploy 5G not directly tied to corporate balance sheets, but I know I will be made to pay for it.

I'm not so paranoid, my reasoning has more mundane justifications. A drive to secrecy that begins with protecting trade secrets.

And it is not even nessesary to imagine a drive (or intention). It just so happens that spreading knowledge (teaching things to other people) is hard work (for both the teacher and the student).

So as much as it's not a priority for them at the forefronts of science to teach their advanced theories to others they end up known by only a few (this also foments a stronger "market position" so to say).

So it boils down to incentives, how motivated are advanced research institutions to spread their advances in contrast to any benefits from a scarcity of such advanced knowledge?

Governments have a long track record of things that make me distrust them. Commenters on HN rarely get to 7K points by spouting nonsense, especially in only 4 years time. I'll err on the side of rare occurrences, before ignoring historical facts.

Really disappointing to see a whole host of inaccuracies in this article, even beyond the artistic license you'd expect for the New Yorker. My own area of knowledge is in neuroscience so I'd focus on this.

For instance, while its somewhat correct that nerve signals are binary, insofar as they are all-or-nothing, and yet activity is highly analogue, with specific groups of neurons firing together in pre-programmed bursts & rhythms. This has been one of the challenges in producing BCIs

The analog nature of neural processing is frustratingly nonanalogous to digital computing. I’d really like to see more oscillatory computing systems built, like the von Neumann harmonic injector or the parametron. Using oscillators like central pattern generators is more common in robotics but there are much more powerful oscillatory computers that have simply never been built. That’s frustrating only because I think we’d learn a lot more about the way oscillations are used for computation in the brain.

I'm curious why you think it is non-analogous to digital computing? I published a manuscript which diagrams the necessity for the applications of electrical engineering scientific theory to electromagnetic brain reflexes which ought to be equivalent to electronic feedback control orders which become digital, i.e. operations which are principally numerically caused.

If you're curious to read the proposition of cellular life evolving electronics please see it posted in the /r/dsp:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DSP/comments/m06n31/dsp_theory_appl...

Can you point me to where in the document I should look?

Yes, please see Chapter 5 "Human Homeostasis" on page 56. It is principled on the belief that biological tissue is piezoelectrical and forms electrical motion which is patterned - please see Chapter 1 section VII "Piezoelectricity in Biological Physical Matter" page 47:

There is a preponderance of available evidence on the piezoelectric properties of biological matter. According to Chen-Glasser et al, Eiichi Fukada demonstrated piezoelectric effects in major human physiological tissue, such as in bone and muscle.[55][56] Fukada’s biological examination demonstrates the intrinsic nature of piezoelectric effects in the building blocks of cellular life: proteins. Proteins, when considered to be digital control outputs of cellular replication stability, are genome expressions of amino acids –with at least 15 demonstrating piezoelectric properties. It is the reorientation and change in dipole moments in biological macromolecules under stress that causes piezoelectricity, hypothetically as an effect of the dipolebmoments causingbelectromagnetic resonances to naturally occur.[57]

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