My explorations of biology and electricity have taken me down some interesting side roads.
In Minneapolis, there is a museum of "Electricity in Life." It was started by Earl Bakken, a local resident who also started Medtronic , the pacemaker company, a few years earlier. Follow that last link for the 'official" company history. It presents Bakken as an energetic Electrical Engineering student drop-out too impatient to finish his studies. He makes friends with nurses at his wife's workplace, and is asked to repair medical equipment. After starting a repair and design company, he is drawn into the fascinating and profitable world of pacemakers, rhythmic electrical stimulators that can save lives when patients suffer heartbeat blockages after surgery.
There is more here than meets the official eye, however. Personally, I have had discussions with friends of Bakken who implied that he was interested in medical uses of electricity from the early days of his engineering studies. As that story goes, he was warned off from pursuing this interest by his contacts in the medical community, because the AMA had launched a campaign to smear all research into electrical-based medical therapies as quackery. Medical use of electricity had become a significant industry by the late 19th century, with avid experimenters applying more or often less theory to the alleviation of symptoms, or the effecting of cures of difficult diseases such as rheumatism, impotence, neurasthenia and other nervous disorders, etc. By the time the AMA consolidated its power over medical standards and practices in the 1930's, there were thousands of medical electrical products and treatments available in the U.S. By the 1940s very few of these options were left, and the only legal ones were in the control of licensed clinical practitioners who depended upon the AMA for their ability to practice. At this time I can only make these general comments on the situation. I do know that one of my informants, Otto Schmitt, of the University of Minnesota, was in a position to know these things first hand.
I encountered Archaeus project here in the 1980's. It was funded by Bakken and led by Dennis Stillings, who had assembled the original collection of information and devices for the Bakken Museum. I attended several of their public presentations in the 80s including a series of lectures and workshops by Andrija Puharich, who held patents on the first implantable hearing aid, but was more famous as the sponser of Uri Geller to the United States in the 70s. Puharich wrote the biography "Uri" in which a number of claims of paranormal phenomena were made that would confound or offend the average skeptical reader. The whole Archaeus project, however, was founded upon conversations about the paranormal which began in Bakken's living room as a weekly group. After attending a few of the Archaeus presentations, and talking to Puharich personally, I became less skeptical and more interested in why Bakken would have given such significant personal support to such "far-out" research.
Based on what I have studied so far this year, and what I have read recently of Puharich's writings from '84, I am beginning to think he was on to something pretty important. For better or worse, it is currently buried in scattered reports, most of which are in unpublished form, or published in journals and proceedings are are pretty difficult for the amateur researcher to collect.
One of his basic premises is that the ratio of the electron to proton velocity in the hydrogen atom is 8:1, which determines the basic resonant ratio of healthy life processes.(1) The concomitant insight is that 8 Hz is the critical frequency for life on earth. A moment's reflection will yield the conclusion that there is no intrinsic 8:1 ratio in 8 Hz frequencies, since the "second" as a unit of time is entirely arbitrary; thus 8 events per "second" as a periodicity has no correspondance with a more integrated ratio of electron velocity to proton spin. His writing is full of odd disjuncts such as this, and you must read him carefully to avoid them.
Nevertheless, he gathers a lot of useful and important information that his generalist approach and specialist training filters and packages into an intriguing set of propositions for the avid student of EMF. It is left to wonder where Earl Bakken stands on these issues "currently."
1. "CHANGES IN GLOBAL WEATHER AND BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS,
WITH A REVIEW OF THE BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF ELF
RADIATION FROM TESLA TO THE PRESENT " Andrija Puharich, M.D. , in Archaeus, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1984. Available as a PDF download from here.
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