Robert O Becker

Robert O. Becker
Born	(1923-05-31)May 31, 1923 River Edge, New Jersey, United States
Died	May 14, 2008(2008-05-14) (aged 84) Lowville, New York, United States
Residence	Lowville, NY, United States
Nationality	USA
Alma mater	Gettysburg College, New York University School of Medicine
Known for	Bioelectricity, limb regeneration, The Body Electric, EMF health effects
Scientific career
Fields	Medical Doctor, Inventor, Orthopedic surgery, Biophysics, Bioelectromagnetics

Robert Otto Becker (May 31, 1923 – May 14, 2008) was an American orthopedic surgeon and biophysicist who became a leading figure in the field of bioelectromagnetics. He is best known for his research on the electrical "currents of injury" and the role they play in tissue growth, wound healing and limb regeneration, and for his popular book The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life (1985). Becker was among the early pioneers responsible for the resurgence of silver use in medical applications, and he later became a prominent voice warning about the possible health effects of low-level electromagnetic fields. He is credited as the first to use the term "electromagnetic pollution."

Biography

Education

Becker was born on May 31, 1923, in River Edge, New Jersey. He earned a bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College in 1946 and a medical degree from the New York University School of Medicine in 1948. He interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and completed a residency at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. Becker served in the U.S. Army during World War II (1942–1946) and again in the Army Medical Corps (1951–1953).

Career

Becker was a professor at the Upstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Syracuse, and served as Director of Orthopedic Surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Syracuse, New York. His primary area of personal interest throughout his career was exploring the possibility of complete tissue and organ regeneration in humans. Over more than three decades of research he investigated bioelectric and electromagnetic systems in an effort to understand and influence the growth and healing processes of complex organisms.

Becker recalled that the question that shaped his life's work first occurred to him while he was still in medical school:

Salamanders have the same bones and muscles and nerves as people. If salamanders can grow new limbs, why not people? I think they can. They lack only the signal to activate cells. I was only in medical school when I thought about this, and I decided to spend my life trying to study bioelectricity and perhaps answer that question.

Becker's involvement in public controversies over high-voltage power lines and the U.S. Navy's submarine communications system (Project Sanguine, later Project Seafarer and still later Project ELF) drew opposition from military and utility interests, and he was forced into retirement at the age of 56. After his laboratory at the VA Hospital in Syracuse was closed, he wrote The Body Electric with Gary Selden. Published in 1985, the book became a classic of the field and remained in print for decades. Becker spent his later years in Lowville, New York, where he died on May 14, 2008, at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia.

Scientific contributions

Becker's research demonstrated that living tissues exhibit direct-current electrical potentials and semiconductor-like properties, and he argued that these bioelectric signals help control growth, wound repair and regeneration in lower organisms such as salamanders. Building on Carlo Matteucci's earlier discovery of "currents of injury," Becker reinterpreted their significance, work that later underpinned the clinical application of electromagnetic fields to stimulate bone repair. In the 1960s he investigated the electric currents in bone together with orthopedic surgeon Andrew Bassett, and helped establish that bone possesses piezoelectric properties.

During the same period Becker made observations on the effects of magnetic fields on human behavior. In a 1967 paper in Nature with Howard Friedman and Charles Bachman, he reported that modulated magnetic fields could affect human reaction times, and earlier work associated psychiatric hospital admissions with geomagnetic activity. In collaboration with his longtime graduate student and colleague Andrew Marino, and with physician Stephen Perry in England, Becker published studies linking exposure to power-frequency electromagnetic fields to depression and suicide. In one widely cited experiment, Becker and Marino reported that mice exposed continuously to power-line fields across three generations produced offspring that were stunted and generally frailer; a later multi-generation study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was reported to be consistent with their findings.

Becker also pioneered the use of electrically generated silver ions in medicine, applying them to promote wound healing and to suppress bacterial infection, contributing to renewed medical interest in silver. His and Marino's opposition to a 765-kV power line planned by the New York Power Authority contributed to the establishment of the New York Power Lines Project, which funded research replicating the childhood-leukemia studies of Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper.

Honors

Becker received the William S. Middleton Award from the research and development branch of the U.S. Veterans Health Administration in 1964, and the Nicolas Andry Award of the Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons in 1979. He was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Prize for his research on bone healing and regeneration.

Books

• 1998 - "Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life" (Read in full)

External links

• Robert O. Becker at Wikipedia
• Robert Becker (1923–2008), Microwave News, obituary, May 2008