January 20, 2023
It is an irony of our age that while electricity increasingly drives nearly every aspect of our daily lives, we tend to view it as an external physical force that powers our appliances rather than an internal force that animates our bodies. But that wasn’t always the case. In fact, the story of how we came to understand electricity is rooted in early experiments that sought to measure the influence of electricity on the body—influences governed largely by the body’s nervous system. But the nervous system itself was a mystery at the time. Limitations in the understanding of neuroscience complicated the interpretations of electrical experiments. And likewise, limitations in our understanding of electricity stymied progress in neuroscience. Consequently, these two branches of science progressed in tandem, with discoveries in one discipline enabling discoveries in the other, “leap-frogging” over each other, if you will, in a continuous march to our current level of understanding. This knowledge is now enabling the development of electrical interventions for a variety of health conditions, including diseases not only of our nerves and muscles, but also our brains. This interaction between the two disciplines continues at a rapid pace, as recently evidenced by Elon Musk’s new company Neuralink, which has the goal of linking the human nervous system with computers via high-electrode-density brain implants. In his presentation, Tim Jorgensen will discuss the steady progress in electrical understanding afforded by using an iterative approach between different scientific fields, and describe a scientific synergy that likely represents the prototypical model for what we now call “interdisciplinary research.”
Timothy J. Jorgensen is a professor of radiation medicine and biochemistry at Georgetown University. He is author of the recent book Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life (Princeton University Press, 2021), as well as an earlier book Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation, which received the American Institute of Physics Communication Award of 2017 for “Best Book of the Year.” He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and he currently resides in Rockville, Maryland.
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