Answers and Questions: Forty Years in Bioelectromagnetics

The work began in 1972 when three young assistant professors used a slime mold to see if electromagnetic fields would affect it. The fields did, though the effects were small and hard to tease out of the noise. The cell cycle was lengthened and there were changes in respiration. So, the next question was "how and why?" Further changes were seen using these and then other bacterial and eukaryotic cells in respiration, in ATP, in the protein replication chain, and so forth. Changes occurred even in cell extracts that lacked an intact plasma membrane. Nerve cells showed changes in leakage of neurotransmitters and in neurite outgrowth from excised ganglia. Based on some experiments with nerve cells, I also did some computer calculations, modeling the internal electric and magnetic fields and current densities in simplified representations of bone fractures and also of spinal cords in vertebrae. More recently, I have collaborated on some theoretical models of what fields might be doing at the cellular and molecular level, particularly with reference to the radical model. With each piece of research, my collaborators and I generally found a small piece of information about fields and biological systems; and each answer raised another set of questions, which is the way of science. Though bioelectromagnetic scientists have learned much and can say much at greater depth about what happens when an organism is exposed to a field, the fundamental question still remains: What exactly is going on here? © 2021 Bioelectromagnetics Society.