I am sure that the term "Bioelectromagnetism"means many different things to many different people. To me it means"The Coalescence of the Sciences".
We engineers feel very good about Ohm's Law. It isthe same yesteday, today, and tomorrow out to many decimal places.But we forget that the reason this is so is that we are averaging thechaotic vibrations of many billions of electrons so that the averageis always the same. As we go into the macrosciences like physics andchemistry, things are no longer so precisely repetitive. As we getinto physiology and medicine, very little is ever the same and itoften becomes almost more of an art than a science.
But as we get down into the science of very smallbiological units such as the nucleotides of the human genome, thingsseem better organized. Each rung on the DNA "ladder" (can you believethree billion rungs?) is made up of two nucleotides. There are onlyfour nucleotides we can use, A,C, T and G. A always matches with Tand C always matches with G. Three rungs code for an amino acid, anda bundle of amino acids make up a protein. Proteins make up us, sothat everything we are is dictated by the sequence of the nucleotideson each rung of the ladder. Nucleotides are very small, only a fewdozen atoms apiece. You can't see them in an electron microscope.They are so fundamental that they actually don't know if they areplant or animal, or if they are male or female. But when you startputting them together they pretty much go together the same way everytime, reminiscent of our electrical laws in engineering.
So I believe all the Sciences are coalescing intoone and that one is biology, specifically molecular biology. I notethat the recent annual meeting (which I helped organize) of our USAAcademy of Engineering had "Bioengineering" as its theme. I also notethat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now requiring theirengineering students to include biology in their engineeringeducation. So I suspect that "Bioelectromagnetism" is coming into itsown as a very broad-ranging, philosophical study of the effect ofelectricity and magnetism on all forms of plant and animal life, indiagnosis, analysis, and therapy.
The above keynote address was given by Dr. WilsonGreatbatch, the inventor of the implantable cardiac pacemaker, inFebruary 1998 in Australia at the Convention of the 2nd InternationalConference on Bioelectromagnetism. At 78 years, Dr. Greatbatch stillcontinues to work on various scientific research projects. He is therecipient of numerous awards, and lives with his wife Eleanor nearBuffalo, New York. Dr. Greatbatch also serves as the Vice-Grandmasterof the Order of Alexander the Great for Art and Science.
Copyright 1999 Museum of European Art