I almost never read paperbacks anymore, but I did this one because there was no e-book option, and I’d heard from so many different places that it was one of the most important books on the subject of how electricity and biology interact that it became worth it. I’m in process of transposing my highlights to my Evernote notebook by hand…

Becker was, I believe after reading this, not just a brilliant scientist willing and able to think outside the box, but a man of integrity as well, willing to fight against the establishment and risk his career in order to do what he could to alleviate human suffering. His experiments proved, stunningly, that electricity is not just involved in, but the driving force in healing and even regeneration. He first established this with salamanders, known to regrow limbs after their loss. But then he was able to establish that the same thing was possible in mammals as well, provided the positive polarity electrical signal sent out from the adjacent nerves were not interfered with by allowing the wound to heal over too quickly. His one lasting contribution to medicine was that this approach made its way into mainstream orthopedics for non-healing fractures, and now electrical currents are used to stimulate bone healing, and he won a Nobel Prize for this. But he had such big dreams, of helping regrow limbs for human beings, or triggering healing within the spinal cord itself for those who had suffered spinal cord injuries. It certainly sounds to me like all of these things are possible, based on the studies he performed, but I’ve never heard of any of it before. It seems that research on all these frontiers completely stopped, possibly in the 80s, when Becker’s research itself came to a halt.

Many of the powers-that-be came against him because Becker also used his insights into the power of electricity to heal to extrapolate that manmade electromagnetic frequencies could interfere with the body’s own signaling processes, and cause potentially tremendous suffering. Here the book was a repeat of many others I’ve read on the damage from EMF, but it was grounded in the concept that frequencies can heal as well as harm. How do we know which will do which? It seems that is an area ripe for research, which (so far as I know) still isn’t being done. The last chapter of the book was dedicated to all the political intrigue that conspired against him, and the psychological reasons behind it. Much of it, as Becker put it, wasn’t so much about financial gain as it was just about pride. The ‘establishment’ did not want anyone to challenge their own contributions to academia, which meant that anyone with a revolutionary idea didn’t get funding. Those who pandered to the existing power structure got grants, got published, and eventually made it into the pantheon of the old guard themselves… which only served to perpetuate the system. Eventually when a new idea couldn’t be hushed up, the old guard would mock on one hand, while taking credit for their opponents’ work on the other. Then of course, financial incentives of industry put pressure as well.

What all of this ultimately suggests to me is that a lot more miraculous things might be possible than we think, even from an objective scientific standpoint… but if it doesn’t make it into the mainstream, for whatever nefarious reasons, the rest of us may never know.

My rating: *****