Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nordy with you.
Speaker 2: Sally eighty with us. Sally as a science and technology writer, author.
Speaker 2: Most recently she was a features editor at New Science,
Speaker 2: where she wrote some of the most lasting content, including
Speaker 2: the twenty twelve feature that explained bioelectricity technology to the
Speaker 2: general public for the very first time. She is the
Speaker 2: science consultant for the television adaptation of Naomi Alderman's The
Speaker 2: Power at Amazon Studios, and has won a US National
Speaker 2: Press Club Award, a BT Information Security Award, and the
Speaker 2: Guild of Health Writers Award for her inside account of
Speaker 2: the Silicon Valley, a young Blood clinic and Welcome to
Speaker 2: the show, Sally. Your book is called We Are Electric
Speaker 2: and it's fantastic. Welcome.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I
Speaker 3: appreciate it.
Speaker 2: How did you get interested in bioelectricity?
Speaker 3: So it's a bit of a long backstory. I used
Speaker 3: to work for a magazine called I Tripoli Spectrum, that's
Speaker 3: the magazine for the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers,
Speaker 3: and I was as a sort of young reporter. I
Speaker 3: was on the semiconductor beat, which tends to be a
Speaker 3: slightly dry beat, I guess if you go pretty hard
Speaker 3: on microchips. But one of the things that was that
Speaker 3: one of the opportunities that that afforded me was to
Speaker 3: start really looking at the new generation of neuromorphic chips
Speaker 3: that they were designing based on sort of how the
Speaker 3: brain works, and then also the signal processing that was
Speaker 3: involved in trying to integrate prosthetics into the nervous system.
Speaker 3: And that was so mind blowing, so interesting to see
Speaker 3: that they could actually take you know, that there was
Speaker 3: such a thing as bridging the gap between machine and
Speaker 3: you know, mind, And so I started getting really obsessed
Speaker 3: with that interface because I wasn't really sure what was happening.
Speaker 3: You know, how how would you know, electrical impulses delivered
Speaker 3: into the brain, How would that sort of control the
Speaker 3: brain for example, with you know, Parkinson's implants or vice versa.
Speaker 3: How could reading brain signals and sort of decoding them
Speaker 3: drive for example, a robotic arm like in a lot
Speaker 3: of these studies where you see people who have had
Speaker 3: a spinal cord injury are able to operate either you know,
Speaker 3: cursors on their screen with just their minds, or operate
Speaker 3: robot arms to pick up a grape. And so that's
Speaker 3: where sort of it came from. But then the whole
Speaker 3: thing got kind of supercharged when I found out about
Speaker 3: the US military working on a project to accelerate learning
Speaker 3: by electrical stimulation, and so I did a big feature
Speaker 3: on that for New Science, and that was when I
Speaker 3: started to really get quite obsessed with this topic because
Speaker 3: the mechanism was so mysterious, and so, you know, people
Speaker 3: had sort of their sort of explanation in a can,
Speaker 3: if you know what I mean, where it was like, well,
Speaker 3: neurons that fire together wire together, and if you put
Speaker 3: an electrical field on the brain, those neurons will wire together,
Speaker 3: and so you're gonna learn marksmanship or mathematics faster. But
Speaker 3: I never understood what that meant. So that was ten
Speaker 3: years ago, and I've fallen down the longest rabbit hole
Speaker 3: of my life trying to.
Speaker 2: Now, what is your definition of bioelectricity?
Speaker 3: Right, that's a good question. So normally, when you think
Speaker 3: of electricity, you think of electrons arranged down a wire.
Speaker 3: That's what powers your dishwasher and everything, and the body
Speaker 3: also uses electrons for power. There's you know atp in
Speaker 3: mitochondria and all this sort of intro bio stuff. But
Speaker 3: the commune unication signal, you know, the thing that underpins
Speaker 3: everything about your human experience. You know, your ability to think,
Speaker 3: to feel, to taste and see and act in move
Speaker 3: so all of that is powered by ions and their movements.
Speaker 3: So ions are these positively charged with little particles like
Speaker 3: sodium and calcium and potassium, and they are all infused
Speaker 3: in the fluid that makes up about you know, two
Speaker 3: thirds of you. You're always hear that you're made of
Speaker 3: two thirds of water. Well it's kind of like sea water.
Speaker 3: It's all sort of full of these positively and negatively
Speaker 3: charged ions. And the neurons in your nervous system and
Speaker 3: your brain they have really strong opinions about these ions.
Speaker 3: And their strong opinions are we like potassium, we don't
Speaker 3: like sodium, and they are able to actually, with the
Speaker 3: help of these things called ion channels, keep the sodium
Speaker 3: out and keep the potassium in. And this is the
Speaker 3: basis of the action potential that makes you able to
Speaker 3: move your arms and legs and you walk and talk
Speaker 3: and think and feel like you're thirsty and then have
Speaker 3: a drink. And every single thing about your human experience
Speaker 3: is underpinned by that preference that neurons have for these
Speaker 3: two ions, because that's the basis of the action potential.
Speaker 3: And what happens is the ions that pass on the signal.
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 3: So the neurons are cells that are studded with these
Speaker 3: little pores, and the pores aren't like they're not like
Speaker 3: a sieve. They're smart pores, and so that is what
Speaker 3: enables them to preferentially pull in potassium and keep out sodium.
Speaker 3: And this is when the neuron is in its happy place.
Speaker 3: It's sort of it's called the resting potential. This separation
Speaker 3: of the neuron of the of the ions makes it
Speaker 3: so that the inside of a neuron is always about
Speaker 3: seventy millibles more negatively charged than the extracellular fluid, and
Speaker 3: that makes it like a little capacitor. And when an
Speaker 3: action potential comes down, all those smartpores open. At the
Speaker 3: same time, the you know, sodium floods in, potassium floods out.
Speaker 3: Everything goes to zero from minus seventy and that electrical
Speaker 3: impulse is the basis of the action potential that moves
Speaker 3: all you know, your legs and arms and eyes, and
Speaker 3: you know forms the basis of every thought that you're
Speaker 3: able to have.
Speaker 2: How close to the kind of electricity that we all
Speaker 2: understand today is bioelectricity.
Speaker 3: Well it's not very it's not that similar because you know,
Speaker 3: in in our wiring you've got sort of electrons doing
Speaker 3: the work. In our nervous signal, these ions come, they
Speaker 3: flow in and out of what the fluid that suffuses
Speaker 3: you is called a volume conductor. And so you don't
Speaker 3: have like the same speed. For example, the nervous impulse
Speaker 3: travels on average at about the speed of a race car,
Speaker 3: whereas electricity travels basically at the speed of light. So
Speaker 3: there are very there are many differences. However, the communication
Speaker 3: signal in your body is is profoundly electrical. Like everybody
Speaker 3: knows about the sort of you know, the electrochemical part,
Speaker 3: the chemical part of the electro chemical signal, which is
Speaker 3: the you know, the serotonin at the synapses of the
Speaker 3: of the nerves, that of the nerve terminals that brings
Speaker 3: the signal across from one nerve to the next. But
Speaker 3: you know that that wouldn't be able to happen without
Speaker 3: the sort of electrical part of the signal that happens
Speaker 3: thanks to these ion uh signal traveling.
Speaker 2: Your book We Are Electric starts with a couple scientists
Speaker 2: from the eighteenth century, Alessandro Volta, where they got the
Speaker 2: word volts from, and Luigi Galvani, where they got the
Speaker 2: Galvani skin test response from. Why Why Why did they fight?
Speaker 2: What happened to those two?
Speaker 3: So Volta was I sorry? Galvani was the first person
Speaker 3: to have, you know, a clue that this sort of
Speaker 3: meandering explanation from before sorry, the whole thing about you know,
Speaker 3: the sort of that that that electrical signals are really
Speaker 3: instrumental in our ability to move and think and feel.
Speaker 3: He was the first person to really sort of elaborate
Speaker 3: on that explanation and try to really to say, you know,
Speaker 3: this longstanding mystery of how we are able to move
Speaker 3: our limbs and think and you know, actuate our desires
Speaker 3: into movement and speak speech and everything. He's the first
Speaker 3: person to think to say, I think this is an
Speaker 3: electrical phenomenon. Before that, people for like fifteen hundred years
Speaker 3: had debated how this happened, but they never got anywhere.
Speaker 3: You know, even Descartes he thought that we had some
Speaker 3: kind of like hydraulic system that pumped some kind of
Speaker 3: fluid from our brain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, none of them even thought about bioelectricity in those days,
Speaker 2: did they.
Speaker 3: No, exactly. But so what's really interesting though, is, you know,
Speaker 3: this was this so Galvani says it's electric and Galvani
Speaker 3: was an anatomist, so he didn't have like a lot
Speaker 3: of standing to make claims about electricity at all. Volta was,
Speaker 3: you know, a physicist who at the time he was
Speaker 3: calling himself an electrician, which was it had had very
Speaker 3: different connotations back in those times. That was sort of
Speaker 3: like the equivalent of like a rocket scientist. Because electricity
Speaker 3: was a really burgeoning new science at the time, people
Speaker 3: didn't really understand it. People were really coming to grips
Speaker 3: with what it was to begin with. Volta had a
Speaker 3: lot of you know, cred at the time, and initially
Speaker 3: Volta saw Galvani's papers and he thought this is amazing,
Speaker 3: I stand behind this. And then he very quickly changed
Speaker 3: his mind and he said, like, no, this is absolutely untrue.
Speaker 3: And the fight that they got into was so enormous
Speaker 3: that it roped in all the scientists of Europe everybody
Speaker 3: had to choose side. Yeah, it was wild. I get
Speaker 3: into this more in the book. It's wild. It's like
Speaker 3: a it's like it's like a Twitter flight to like
Speaker 3: people were just dunking on each other, not in one of.
Speaker 2: Forty care social.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally and so this but this was the original
Speaker 3: fight in which electricity lost custody. Soy biology lost custody
Speaker 3: of electricity because back then, you know, when we're still
Speaker 3: you know in this in the eighteenth century, we've just
Speaker 3: gotten the first tools to start investigating this mysterious phenomenon
Speaker 3: that we've never understood. People at the time didn't know
Speaker 3: whether lightning was connected to you know, this idea of
Speaker 3: the static shock. They didn't they you know, they were
Speaker 3: still getting to grips with this incredibly mysterious phenomenon, and
Speaker 3: tools had been recently invented, like electrostatic generators that were
Speaker 3: able to spin a little, tiny, thin amount of electricity,
Speaker 3: and they were able to use these for the first
Speaker 3: time to probe this longstanding mystery. So I you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's hard to get across like how exciting electricity was,
Speaker 3: Like it's kind of like uh chat GPT today. You know,
Speaker 3: it was the same level of wonder and hype, and
Speaker 3: some people being super wrong, some people being super grifty,
Speaker 3: other people really pursuing, you know, the new frontiers of
Speaker 3: knowledge in a in a scientific way.
Speaker 2: And they were about eighty years before Tesla, weren't they.
Speaker 3: Tesla. Now, this was Tesla was doing his thing about
Speaker 3: one hundred years later, I think. So that's because these
Speaker 3: people were fighting. This fight was in the seventeen nineties,
Speaker 3: so basically nobody knew what basically nobody had. These things
Speaker 3: hadn't been crystallized yet into formal scientific principles. That's what
Speaker 3: Faraday ended up doing for electricity, but nobody did the
Speaker 3: same thing for bioelectricity. As a result basically of this fight,
Speaker 3: because it had these long consequences, Volta due to a
Speaker 3: very sort of not confused, but very multivariate combination of
Speaker 3: political issues to do with Napoleon and and other factors,
Speaker 3: and the fact that he invented the precursors to the battery.
Speaker 3: Because of all that, Volta won this fight. And it
Speaker 3: was a really unfortunate result because everybody assumed that if
Speaker 3: Volta was right, that electricity was a completely different medium.
Speaker 3: That meant that Galvani was wrong. It took like more
Speaker 3: than a hundred years for other researchers to restore Galvani's reputation.
Speaker 2: But they were probably both right at the time, weren't they.
Speaker 3: They were, They totally were, except Volta had created a
Speaker 3: thing that you could use, the battery, which then you know,
Speaker 3: the pioneers of electricity took that and ran with it,
Speaker 3: and you know, they created the telegraph, they created, you know,
Speaker 3: power lines, they created you know, by the end of
Speaker 3: you know, by one hundred years later, using the battery
Speaker 3: for science had added fifty new elements to the periodic table,
Speaker 3: but no similar insights came out of Galvani's theories because
Speaker 3: it was all just a bit too early days. And
Speaker 3: what's really sad is that after he died, there was
Speaker 3: no sort of brilliant champion of bioelectricity. The closest thing
Speaker 3: they had was Galavani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who is actually
Speaker 3: the scientists that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: With the electrical pulses that they got to make the
Speaker 2: body come back to life, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So he was trying to you know, keep
Speaker 3: Galvani's reputation you know, he was trying to defend it
Speaker 3: against this tide that said, well, bioelectricity is over and
Speaker 3: it's done. Galvani's dead. That was a dumb idea. So Aldini,
Speaker 3: who had published with Galvani a lot, he really sort
Speaker 3: of he had seen Galvani developed this incredible theory of bioelectricity,
Speaker 3: so he was like, look, I need to keep this relevant, right,
Speaker 3: So then he decided that he was going to take
Speaker 3: the experiments Galvani had done, which were all in sprogs,
Speaker 3: and move him up the ladder to humans. And so
Speaker 3: he started actually electrocuting executed prisoners to figure out, like,
Speaker 3: you know what these the principles of reanimation. Where he
Speaker 3: wasn't actually trying to do a full Frankenstein like monster
Speaker 3: trying to keep somebody get somebody back to life when
Speaker 3: they've been dead for two weeks. But he was really
Speaker 3: interested in whether you could take somebody who had been
Speaker 3: recently I don't know, drowned or electrocuted and bring them
Speaker 3: back to life. Now, of course we know yet you can,
Speaker 3: you know, if you've if you don't let too much
Speaker 3: time go by soon enough, yeah exactly, But we didn't
Speaker 3: know any of that stuff either, so and al Dini
Speaker 3: unfortunately he wasn't quite the scientist that his uncle had been,
Speaker 3: so he relied on spectacle instead of solid science. So
Speaker 3: he was doing these wild demonstrations in front of royalty
Speaker 3: and other sort of titillated you know, sort of members
Speaker 3: of high society and people would love. You know, people
Speaker 3: used to go in there and sort of you know,
Speaker 3: see these quivering prisoners, dead prisoners, you know, rising up
Speaker 3: because of you know, an electrode into the rectum and
Speaker 3: into the ear, and then you know, they would There's
Speaker 3: one instance where one of them lifted up their arm
Speaker 3: and pointed. It seemed like they pointed at someone and
Speaker 3: like everybody fainted. So it was quite a it was
Speaker 3: quite a it was. It was a wild thing that
Speaker 3: Aldini was trying to do. He was really trying to
Speaker 3: keep it in the forefront of people's minds by any
Speaker 3: means necessary. And he had this galvanic society that he
Speaker 3: started where people were like, we can make batteries out
Speaker 3: of you know, biological material, and so they took layers
Speaker 3: of brain, muscle and hat material and they got an
Speaker 3: electric current out of it. So all this like body
Speaker 3: horror like crazy human centipede was like, it really made
Speaker 3: sure that bioelectricity was associated with quackery. For about forty years,
Speaker 3: there was no good research because people saw this stuff
Speaker 3: and they just wanted to distance themselves as much as possible.
Speaker 2: Why did they seem to be all Italians? Why were
Speaker 2: they sold far ahead of everybody?
Speaker 3: Well, so this is something I get into a bit
Speaker 3: more in the book, but at the time, I think
Speaker 3: there was something about the Italian university system that really,
Speaker 3: you know, helped.
Speaker 2: It's like the tools, Well, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's a that's a question that I'm not
Speaker 3: necessarily able to answer because you know, then we have
Speaker 3: Faraday in you know, the UK and the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: But it's true, like the early electricity stuff is just
Speaker 3: suffused with Italians. Actually, you know, you can't discount people
Speaker 3: like Ben Franklin in the US, who you know, with
Speaker 3: his lightning experiments, and you know, I think it's just
Speaker 3: I think it was definitely something to do with the
Speaker 3: universities because they had the tools that you needed, you know,
Speaker 3: they the they really made sure that their researchers had
Speaker 3: these next generation tools which are so important to understand
Speaker 3: advancing our understanding of these subtle electrical forces.
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