Robert O. Becker: The Body Electric and the War for Bioelectricity

How an Orthopedic Surgeon Discovered the Body’s DC Electrical System and Nearly Lost Everything Fighting for the Truth

Robert Otto Becker was an orthopedic surgeon at the Syracuse Veterans Administration Hospital and a professor at SUNY Upstate Medical Center who spent three decades studying something his colleagues insisted did not exist: a direct current (DC) electrical system in the human body that controls healing, growth, and regeneration.

By the time he published The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life (co-authored with Gary Selden) in 1985, Becker had accumulated a body of evidence that challenged some of the deepest assumptions of modern medicine. He had demonstrated that the body uses DC electrical currents — not just the action potentials of nerves, which are brief, pulsed, AC-like signals — to regulate wound healing, bone repair, and limb regeneration. He had shown that these currents flow through a previously unrecognized system: the perineural cells (the glial cells and Schwann cells that surround neurons), which function as a separate, analog electrical network distinct from the digital, all-or-nothing signaling of neurons.

He had also demonstrated that external electromagnetic fields — power lines, microwave radiation, radio frequencies — interfere with this system, potentially causing cancer, depression, and other health effects. For this last discovery, he was systematically attacked by the electrical power industry, had his research funding cut, his laboratory closed, and his career effectively destroyed.

The Body Electric is both a scientific memoir and a detective story. It documents Becker’s decades of research, his key discoveries, and the political and economic forces that ultimately silenced him. It is also one of the most important books ever written about the electromagnetic nature of the living body.

The Problem That Started Everything: Bone Healing

Becker’s research began with a practical clinical problem: why do some broken bones fail to heal? In orthopedic surgery, approximately 5-10% of fractures develop into “non-unions” — the broken ends of the bone fail to knit together, even after proper alignment and immobilization. This represents a significant clinical problem, particularly for complex fractures, patients with poor circulation, and the elderly.

The standard explanation for bone healing involved only biochemical and cellular mechanisms: fracture triggers inflammation, which recruits stem cells, which differentiate into bone-forming cells (osteoblasts), which lay down new bone matrix. But this explanation did not account for non-unions — why would the cellular machinery fail in some cases but not others? And it did not explain a much older observation: that fractured bones generate measurable electrical currents.

This observation — the “fracture potential” or “current of injury” — had been known since the 19th century but had been dismissed as an epiphenomenon, a trivial byproduct of tissue damage with no biological significance. Becker disagreed. He hypothesized that the electrical current was not a byproduct but a signal — a control signal that initiates and directs the healing process.

His hypothesis was remarkably simple: if the electrical current controls healing, then non-unions might be caused by failure of the electrical signal, and restoring the signal should restore healing.

The Salamander’s Secret

To understand how electrical currents might control healing, Becker turned to the master of biological regeneration: the salamander.

Salamanders can regenerate entire limbs. Cut off a salamander’s leg, and it will grow back — bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, skin, and all. No other adult vertebrate can do this. The question of why salamanders can regenerate while humans cannot has been one of biology’s most intriguing puzzles.

Becker approached the question electrically. He placed electrodes at amputation sites on salamanders and measured the voltage changes during regeneration. What he found was a consistent, characteristic electrical pattern:

1. Immediately after amputation, a strong negative current flows from the wound (the “current of injury”)
2. Over the first few days, the current reverses polarity, becoming positive
3. During active regeneration, a sustained positive current flows from the regenerating stump
4. As the limb completes regeneration, the current gradually returns to baseline

This sequence — negative to positive to neutral — was the electrical signature of regeneration. It occurred every time, in every salamander, and it correlated precisely with the cellular events of regeneration (wound closure, blastema formation, differentiation, and completion).

Becker then measured the same electrical pattern in frogs, which have a limited regeneration capacity. Frogs showed the initial negative current of injury but failed to generate the sustained positive current that drives regeneration. The electrical signal cut out, and regeneration stalled.

The critical experiment: Becker applied an external positive current to frog amputations, mimicking the electrical pattern of the salamander. The frogs — which normally cannot regenerate limbs — began to show partial regeneration. Blastema formed. Cartilage appeared. In some cases, rudimentary limb structures developed.

This was a landmark result. It demonstrated that the electrical signal was not merely correlated with regeneration but was causally involved. Provide the signal, and the regeneration program activates — even in an organism that normally cannot regenerate.

The Perineural System: The Body’s Analog Network

Becker’s search for the anatomical pathway of the body’s DC electrical system led him to an unexpected discovery: the perineural cells.

The conventional understanding of the nervous system focuses on neurons — the cells that transmit rapid, pulsed electrical signals (action potentials) along their axons. But neurons do not operate alone. They are surrounded and supported by a much larger population of non-neuronal cells — Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system, glial cells (astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, microglia) in the central nervous system. These cells had been considered passive support structures — the “glue” that holds the nervous system together (the word “glia” comes from the Greek for glue).

Becker found that these perineural cells are not passive. They conduct DC electrical currents — slow, steady, analog signals that flow continuously through the body, distinct from the rapid, digital signals of neurons. The perineural system, Becker proposed, is an ancient electrical system — evolutionarily older than the neuronal system — that predates the development of neurons and still performs fundamental regulatory functions.

The perineural DC system, in Becker’s model, functions as:

• A global communication system that carries information about injury, growth, and repair throughout the body
• A developmental control system that guides the growth and differentiation of cells during embryonic development and regeneration
• A consciousness system that modulates awareness, sleep, and anesthesia (Becker found that general anesthetics work by blocking the perineural DC system, not by blocking neuronal action potentials)
• A healing system that initiates and coordinates wound repair, fracture healing, and potentially regeneration

The perineural system operates on completely different principles from the neuronal system. The neuronal system is digital (all-or-nothing action potentials), rapid (millisecond timescale), and point-to-point (neuron to specific target). The perineural system is analog (graded DC currents), slow (seconds to hours), and global (currents flowing through interconnected networks of cells). The two systems work in parallel, complementing each other: the neuronal system for rapid, specific communication; the perineural system for slow, global regulation.

Silver Ions and the Healing Current

One of Becker’s most clinically significant discoveries involved the use of silver in wound healing. Silver has been used as an antimicrobial agent since antiquity — Hippocrates used silver preparations for wound treatment. But Becker discovered something about silver that went far beyond its antimicrobial properties.

When Becker applied small amounts of electrically generated silver ions (Ag+) to wounds, he observed an extraordinary phenomenon: the silver ions appeared to stimulate dedifferentiation of mature cells into a more primitive, stem-cell-like state. Mature fibroblasts at the wound site reverted to a less specialized form, similar to the blastema cells that drive regeneration in salamanders.

This was a stunning finding. Dedifferentiation — the reversal of a mature, specialized cell to a more primitive, unspecialized state — was thought to be impossible in mammals. Salamanders could do it; mammals could not. Yet Becker’s electrically generated silver ions appeared to trigger exactly this process in mammalian cells.

The clinical implications were immediate. Becker developed a silver-based wound treatment that combined the antimicrobial properties of silver with its apparent ability to stimulate healing. He treated non-healing fractures, chronic wounds, and even osteomyelitis (bone infection) with electrically generated silver ions, reporting remarkable success rates in cases that had failed to respond to conventional treatment.

These clinical successes led to the development of electrical bone growth stimulators — devices that apply weak electrical currents to fracture sites to accelerate healing. These devices are now FDA-approved and widely used in orthopedic practice. They represent one of the rare cases where Becker’s work has been translated into mainstream clinical practice, though the theoretical framework behind them (the perineural DC system) remains largely unrecognized.

The EMF War: Power Lines, Cancer, and the Destruction of a Career

The second half of Becker’s career — and the second half of The Body Electric — tells a darker story. Having established that the body operates on DC electrical currents, Becker was naturally led to ask: what happens when external electromagnetic fields interfere with those currents?

The answer, based on his research and the research of others, was alarming. External EMFs — from power lines, radar installations, microwave transmitters, and other sources — could disrupt the body’s DC regulatory system, with potential consequences including:

• Increased cancer rates in populations exposed to power line fields
• Depression and suicide correlated with EMF exposure
• Disrupted circadian rhythms and sleep patterns
• Immune system suppression
• Developmental abnormalities

Becker became a vocal advocate for EMF safety standards, testifying before Congress and state legislatures about the health risks of electromagnetic pollution. This brought him into direct conflict with the electrical power industry, which had enormous financial incentives to deny that power line fields posed any health risk.

The consequences were devastating. Becker’s research funding from the Veterans Administration and the NIH was cut. His laboratory was closed. His academic appointments were not renewed. Colleagues who had supported his work distanced themselves. The power industry funded counter-research designed to produce null results and discredit the EMF-health connection.

Becker described this experience in The Body Electric and in his subsequent book, Cross Currents: The Perils of Electropollution, the Promise of Electromedicine (1990). He detailed the mechanisms by which the power industry — working through government agencies, industry-funded research organizations, and compliant scientists — systematically suppressed research on EMF health effects.

The story is depressingly familiar: it follows the same pattern as the tobacco industry’s suppression of cancer research, the sugar industry’s deflection of blame onto fat, and the fossil fuel industry’s denial of climate change. A powerful industry, confronted with inconvenient scientific evidence, uses its economic and political leverage to attack the scientists rather than address the science.

Becker’s EMF warnings have been partially vindicated by subsequent research. In 2002, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF) as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2B) based on a consistent association with childhood leukemia. In 2011, IARC similarly classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (from cell phones) as Group 2B. These classifications fall short of what Becker advocated, but they represent a significant shift from the blanket denials that characterized the industry’s initial response.

The Larger Vision: Bioelectricity and Consciousness

In his later writings, Becker extended his thinking about the body’s DC system to questions of consciousness. He proposed that the perineural DC system is not just a healing system but a consciousness system — that the slow, analog, global nature of DC currents makes them a plausible substrate for the unified, continuous nature of conscious awareness.

The argument: neuronal action potentials are too fast, too discrete, and too localized to account for consciousness. They are the body’s digital communication system — efficient for transmitting specific information between specific locations, but poorly suited for generating the unified field of awareness that characterizes conscious experience. The perineural DC system, with its slow, continuous, global characteristics, is a better candidate.

Becker noted several pieces of evidence supporting this view:

• General anesthesia does not block action potentials in neurons. Anesthetized patients still have normal neuronal activity. What anesthesia does block is the DC component of brain electrical activity — the perineural system. This suggests that consciousness depends on DC currents, not action potentials.
• Sleep is associated with changes in the brain’s DC potential. The transition from waking to sleeping involves a shift in the DC electrical baseline — a change in the perineural system, not just in neuronal firing patterns.
• Hypnosis produces measurable changes in DC brain potentials, as Leonard Ravitz (Burr’s colleague) had demonstrated.
• Meditation produces changes in DC brain potentials that correlate with subjective reports of altered awareness.

These observations led Becker to propose that consciousness is not a product of neuronal computation (the dominant model in neuroscience) but of the electromagnetic field generated by the perineural DC system. This field is continuous, unified, and global — properties that match the phenomenology of consciousness far better than the discrete, localized, modular properties of neuronal networks.

Critics and Legacy

Becker’s work has been criticized on several fronts:

The EMF-health controversy. The question of whether environmental EMFs pose health risks remains contested. While epidemiological studies have found associations (particularly between ELF-MF and childhood leukemia), the mechanism is not established, and experimental evidence is mixed. Critics argue that the associations may be due to confounding factors rather than a direct causal effect.

The regeneration claims. Becker’s claim that electrically generated silver ions trigger mammalian cell dedifferentiation has not been widely replicated. While electrical bone growth stimulators are clinically effective, their mechanism of action is attributed to more conventional pathways (stimulation of osteoblast activity) rather than to Becker’s dedifferentiation model.

The perineural system. The idea that glial cells and Schwann cells form a DC electrical signaling network distinct from the neuronal system has gained some support from modern research (particularly the discovery that astrocytes form interconnected networks and communicate through calcium waves and gap junctions), but the full scope of Becker’s perineural hypothesis has not been confirmed.

The consciousness claims. Becker’s proposal that consciousness is generated by the perineural DC system rather than by neuronal computation remains speculative and is not testable with current methods.

Despite these criticisms, Becker’s core contributions are secure:

• The demonstration that bioelectric signals control healing and regeneration
• The development of electrical bone growth stimulation (now mainstream clinical practice)
• The identification of the body’s DC electrical system as distinct from the neuronal action potential system
• The early warning about EMF health effects (partially vindicated by IARC classifications)

Becker in the Digital Dharma Framework: The Healing Current

Robert Becker’s work reveals a critical layer of the body’s operating architecture: the bioelectric control system that manages repair, regeneration, and maintenance of the biological hardware.

If the body is wetware, Becker discovered the wetware’s self-repair protocol. The DC electrical system is the body’s built-in maintenance program — it detects damage (through the current of injury), activates repair processes (through electrical signaling to stem cells and dedifferentiation pathways), and coordinates healing across the entire system (through the perineural network). When this system works properly, the body heals. When it fails — through age, disease, or electromagnetic interference — healing stalls.

If DNA is source code, Becker’s work suggests that the code includes subroutines for regeneration that are present but suppressed in mammals. The salamander’s regeneration program — its ability to regrow entire limbs — is not a unique genetic capacity. It appears to be activated by the appropriate electrical signal. If the signal can be provided externally (as Becker demonstrated with frogs), the program can be partially activated even in organisms that normally cannot regenerate. The implication: the regeneration code is present in mammalian DNA but is silenced. The key to unlocking it may be bioelectric, not genetic.

If consciousness is the operating system, Becker’s perineural hypothesis suggests that the OS runs on DC — that the continuous, analog, global nature of consciousness is implemented through the body’s DC electrical field rather than through the digital, pulsed, modular signaling of neurons. This is consistent with the shamanic understanding that consciousness permeates the body (not just the brain) and that healing involves restoring the body’s energetic coherence.

The practical implication for the Digital Dharma framework is profound: healing is an electrical process. The body heals through electrical currents. These currents can be disrupted by external EMFs (disease of civilization) or enhanced by specific interventions (energy healing, acupuncture, electrical stimulation). The healer who works with “energy” is not using a metaphor — they are literally working with the bioelectric field that controls healing.

Becker’s story is also a cautionary tale about the politics of paradigm-challenging science. His destruction by the power industry is a reminder that truth does not always prevail in the short term, and that scientists who challenge powerful economic interests can expect to pay a personal price. This too is part of the Digital Dharma: the recognition that the suppression of consciousness research is not accidental but structural — that the systems of power have a vested interest in maintaining the materialist paradigm that denies the primacy of consciousness and the electromagnetic nature of life.

Key Works

• The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life (with Gary Selden, 1985) — The foundational account of Becker’s research and its suppression
• Cross Currents: The Perils of Electropollution, the Promise of Electromedicine (1990) — The extension of Becker’s work to EMF health effects and the promise of electrical healing
• Numerous papers published in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Nature, Science, and other peer-reviewed journals

The Bottom Line

Robert Becker proved that the body runs on electricity — not just the fast, pulsed electricity of nerves, but a slow, continuous, direct current that controls healing, growth, and regeneration. He proved that this current can be measured, manipulated, and disrupted. And he paid for this proof with his career.

The body electric is still there, flowing through the perineural network of every living human, directing the repair of every wound, the healing of every fracture. It does not require belief. It does not require understanding. It requires only measurement — the willingness to place electrodes on a living body and read what they report.

Becker did that measuring for thirty years. What the instruments told him was that the body is an electromagnetic organism, that healing is an electrical process, and that the industrial-scale electromagnetic pollution of the modern world is an experiment being conducted on every living thing on the planet without consent, without monitoring, and without precaution.

The experiment continues.