Quotes from Robert O. Becker

By this time we'd also cleared up several more cases of osteomyelitis by reversing the battery and making the silver electrode positive for a day. It looked safe. There was no crossover of effects: When negative,the wire didn't make infectious bacteria grow, and when positive, it didn't destroy bone-forming cells or prevent them from growing when we switched the current to negative.

Like all other injuries, a fracture produced a current of injury, in this case derived from the nerves in and around the periosteum.* At the same time, the bone generated its own current piezoelectrically due to residual stress in the mangled apatite-collagen matrix. These signals combined to stimulate the cells that formed new bone.

Burr and Lund advanced similar theories of an electrodynamic field,called by Burr the field of life or L-field, which held the shape of anorganism just as a mold determines the shape of a gelatin dessert."When we meet a friend we have not seen for six months there is notone molecule in his face which was there when we last saw him," Burrwrote. "But, thanks to his controlling L-field, the new molecules havefallen into the old, familiar pattern and we can recognize his face.

This was the start of a long friendship. I'm deeply indebted to Chester Yntema for his encouragement. Had he not believed that research should be fun, that you should do what you want rather than what's fashion-able, my first experiment would have been impossible, and this book would never have been written.

The question of how this information is transferred is one of the hardest problems ever tackled by scientists, and when we fully know the answer, we'll understand not only regeneration but the entire process of growth from egg to adult. For now, we had best, as biologists themselves have done, skip this problem and return to it after addressing some slightly easier ones.

It seems reasonable that understanding what comes out of the blastema would be easier if we understood what goes into it, so the other major questions about regeneration have always been: What stimulates the blastema to form? And where do its cells come from?

Scientific results that aren't reported might as well not exist. They're like the sound of one hand clapping. For scientists, communication isn't only a responsibility, it's our chief pleasure.