We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body?s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

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.

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.