Electromagnetism and Life

Electromagnetism and Life is the technical monograph behind Becker's later popular books. It is a dense review, with hundreds of references, of what was known by about 1981 about electricity, magnetism and living things. It draws on Western and Soviet-bloc literature; many of the Soviet papers are cited through US government translations (JPRS reports). The preface says Becker wrote the history and "bioregulatory" parts and Marino wrote the parts on the effects of man-made fields. The authors deliberately leave out heat and electric shock, which they call "well-understood but relatively unimportant." Their subject is effects below the heating level ("subthermal"), which they say "seem destined to revolutionize the study of biology." They admit that their testimony on non-thermal effects in the 1970s made them powerful enemies. They say they have tried to keep that fight out of the analysis, and they warn readers that some of their judgments will turn out to be wrong in what is a first attempt at a synthesis.

The book makes one argument in three steps. First, living things have their own electrical control system: a slow, analog, direct-current (DC) system carried in the cells that surround the nerves. It works alongside the fast "digital" nerve impulse, and it governs how excitable the nerves are and how growth, healing and regeneration proceed. Bone adds a piezoelectric, semiconductor-like "self-organizing" system of its own. Second, organisms detect the Earth's natural electromagnetic background and use it. It sets the timing of biological cycles, it helps animals navigate, and magnetic-pole reversals appear to have driven extinctions. Third, if both are true, man-made fields should affect biology at far below heating levels. Chapters 5–8 go through the evidence system by system: nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, blood, immune, metabolic, reproductive, growth and genetic.

The authors conclude that "there is no biological function which can be said to be impervious to nonthermal EMFs." Their unifying model is Hans Selye's stress theory. The central nervous system detects a field that the person cannot consciously perceive, and the body then mounts a general, adaptive stress response. That response is usually reversible, but it uses up reserve capacity. It becomes harmful when exposure is too long or too strong, or when other stressors are present at the same time. Chapter 10 applies this to real life. Environmental field levels from broadcast towers, radar, power lines and appliances fall in the range that was active in the laboratory. Epidemiological and occupational studies show a scatter of stress-type illness rather than one specific disease, which is what the stress model predicts. The US heating-based limit of 10,000 µW/cm² protects only against heating. The Soviet limits of 10 µW/cm² for workers and 1 µW/cm² for the public were, in the authors' words, "the correct one."

The tone is academic and measured. The authors regularly report negative and failed-replication studies (Battelle, Fulton, Preston, Gould & Able, Martin & Gutman). They devote a whole section to "uncontrolled variables" that can make the same experiment give opposite results. This is the evidence base that The Body Electric and Cross Currents popularise; Marino's memoir Going Somewhere tells the story of writing it and of the controversy around it. The book predates cell phones, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Its relevance to headphones is through general principles, not device data.