Sally Strange reviewed We Are Electric by Sally Adee
Fascinating and complex but very readable, not at all dense
5 stars
An easy read with complex scientific ideas in its focus. Sally Adee takes the reader from batteries made of dead frogs in the 19th century to the problems caused by medical device manufacturers going bankrupt in the 21st, stopping along the way to explain proton pumps, ion channels, and the importance of electrical signaling in fetal development. After all, our DNA says that we should have brown or green eyes, but it has nothing to say about how many eyes we should have or where on our body they should go. Adee compares DNA to hardware and "the body's bioelectric code" to software that runs on that hardware. She makes a convincing case for why we should set aside qualms based on the long history of quackery and con artists marshaling electrical signals in the body to their cause and embrace the 21st century as the century of bioelectricity and …
An easy read with complex scientific ideas in its focus. Sally Adee takes the reader from batteries made of dead frogs in the 19th century to the problems caused by medical device manufacturers going bankrupt in the 21st, stopping along the way to explain proton pumps, ion channels, and the importance of electrical signaling in fetal development. After all, our DNA says that we should have brown or green eyes, but it has nothing to say about how many eyes we should have or where on our body they should go. Adee compares DNA to hardware and "the body's bioelectric code" to software that runs on that hardware. She makes a convincing case for why we should set aside qualms based on the long history of quackery and con artists marshaling electrical signals in the body to their cause and embrace the 21st century as the century of bioelectricity and the bioelectrical code.