
We Are Electric
Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
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Narrated by:
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Sally Adee
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By:
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Sally Adee
About this listen
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 listeners 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.
©2023 Ms. Sally Adee (P)2023 Hachette BooksCritic reviews
"Sally Adee manages that most difficult feat in science writing: taking a subject you didn’t know you cared about and making it genuinely fascinating and exciting. The ‘ohmigod-that’s-so-cool’ moments come thick and fast as she brings the science up to date, investigating today’s cutting edge and what the future may hold for bioelectric medicine. It’s a vast and hugely exciting area of scientific research, shared with infectious enthusiasm, a real depth of knowledge, a smart and funny turn of phrase. You’ll never think of life in the same way again."—Caroline Williams, author of Move!: The New Science of Body Over Mind
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Please don't let authors read their own books
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Medical hope for the future
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I tried
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Research and science made interesting!
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What a great writer and a wonderful speaker
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A-Level Substance; B-Level Writing; C+ Performance
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Awesome subject material
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For the rest ... Well, Sally Adee's narration of her own book captures its tone very faithfully, and that, I think, is why so many people are annoyed by it. At one point, having explained several times in the last few pages what an ion is, she goes on, "Remember that an ion is a charged atom." It's not strange that people feel talked down to. Adee can write perfectly clear exposition, addressed to adults, and she's good when she does, but then she drops into a cloying folksiness, as if she thinks that her readers are rubes and she'll lose them unless she stoops to their level.
I think the problem is simply that her style hasn't matured yet. At times it's like reading a high school essay, chatty and innocently self-centered. Adee even speaks of "my book" in the middle of the text. When she interviews someone who thinks that it's not useful to break down science into separate disciplines, which is off topic to begin with, she says "I can't think of any good alternatives, however." The introduction talks about how participating in a biolelecticity experiment got her a dream job at New Scientist.
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So if this kind of sensibility grates on you, you might have to grit your teeth sometimes, and you do have to keep in mind where the author is coming from. It is useful work, however, and goes down more easily as a book rather than a recording.
Read the book
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But please, buy the paper book. The audio production is amateur. After finishing a book read by Julie Whelan, the narration is a distraction. I feel like I am listening to a guest author read a book to to a group of children in the library.
Please do not let authors read their own work
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Excellent
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