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Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Ms. Sally Adee
Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity—the electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thing—its misunderstood history, and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance, cleared arteries, and new ways to combat cancer.
You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome: the bacterial fauna that populate our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross into new scientific understanding: discovering your body's electrome.
Every cell in our bodies—bones, skin, nerves, muscle—has a voltage, like a tiny battery. It is the reason our brain can send signals to the rest of our body, how we develop in the womb, and why our body knows to heal itself from injury. When bioelectricity goes awry, illness, deformity, and cancer can result. But if we can control or correct this bioelectricity, the implications for our health are remarkable: an undo switch for cancer that could flip malignant cells back into healthy ones; the ability to regenerate cells, organs, even limbs; to slow aging and so much more. The next scientific frontier might be decrypting the bioelectric code, much the way we did the genetic code.
Yet the field is still emerging from two centuries of skepticism and entanglement with medical quackery, all stemming from an 18th-century scientific war about the nature of electricity between Luigi Galvani (father of bioelectricity, famous for shocking frogs) and Alessandro Volta (inventor of the battery).
In We Are Electric, award-winning science writer Sally Adee takes readers through the thrilling history of bioelectricity and into the future: from the Victorian medical charlatans claiming to use electricity to cure everything from paralysis to diarrhea, to the advances helped along by the giant axons of squids, and finally to the brain implants and electric drugs that await us—and the moral implications therein.
The bioelectric revolution starts here.
"A revelatory survey of bioelectricity...[Adee] masterfully shows the implications of new discoveries and spotlights where the science doesn't add up....With lucid explanations and fascinating anecdotes, Adee is the perfect guide to this hidden realm. Pop science fans, take note." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Adee] provides a wealth of material to think about. A clear, intriguing examination of a field with huge potential." - Kirkus Reviews
"In her debut book, [Sally Adee] paints a riveting (and often humorous) picture of 200 years of research on the bioelectricity coursing through our bodies, from debates over twitching frogs' legs to devices developed to give sensation back to people with traumatic nerve injuries." - Scientific American
"Adee gives an entertaining account… Adee's enthusiasm is infectious, and she conveys well the jaw-dropping scale and complexity of this newly discovered 'electrome.' This 'bioelectrical revolution' is more than medicine."- Times of London (UK)
"The human body runs on an electricity we barely understand. Unlocking its secrets has the potential to usher in a new age of human health interventions that will revolutionize the way we comprehend and treat our most common maladies. In this fascinating look at this next frontier of scientific discovery, Sally Adee explores the untold history of bioelectricity and sketches its tantalizing, and promising, future." - Jamie Metzl, author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity
"If you thought genetics was the secret of life, think again: in We Are Electric, Sally Adee vividly explores the magic of bioelectricity, and how it affects every aspect of our being. A joy to read—I loved this book." - Joseph Jebelli, author of In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's
This information about We Are Electric was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sally Adee is a science and technology writer. Most recently, she was a features editor at New Scientist, where she wrote some of its most lasting content, including a 2012 feature that broke the bioelectricity technology to the general public and is cited in Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. Adee's writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Economist, BBC Future, and Quartz. She has spoken on the Economist's Intelligence podcast, NPR's Radiolab, Canadian Broadcasting's The Current, and BBC Breakfast. She is the science consultant for the TV adaptation of Naomi Alderman's The Power (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 Silicon Valley's young blood clinics. Adee is a citizen of Germany and the US, and lives in London.
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