The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
"This is a wonderful book. Frances Ashcroft has a rare gift for making difficult subjects accessible and fascinating." —Bill Bryson, author of The Body: A Guide for Occupants
What happens during a heart attack? Can someone really die of fright? What is death, anyway? How does electroshock treatment affect the brain? What is consciousness? The answers to these questions lie in the electrical signals constantly traveling through our bodies, driving our thoughts, our movements, and even the beating of our hearts.
The history of how scientists discovered the role of electricity in the human body is a colorful one, filled with extraordinary personalities, fierce debates, and brilliant experiments. Moreover, present-day research on electricity and ion channels has created one of the most exciting fields in science, shedding light on conditions ranging from diabetes and allergies to cystic fibrosis, migraines, and male infertility. With inimitable wit and a clear, fresh voice, award-winning researcher Frances Ashcroft weaves together compelling real-life stories with the latest scientific findings, giving us a spectacular account of the body electric.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With style and enthusiasm, Oxford professor Ashcroft (Life at the Extremes) reveals the ubiquitous role electricity plays in our bodies. In the late 1700s, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani's experiments with frogs showed that animals produced their own electricity. His nephew Giovanni Aldini conducted public demonstrations using the corpses of recently executed criminals that gave the appearance of "re-animation" and probably sparked Mary Shelley's imagination when she created Frankenstein as well as the Victorian idea of the "mad scientist." But scientists didn't know how that electricity was produced in the body until the 1970s, when physicist Erwin Neher and physiologist Bert Sakmann measured the minuscule flow of current as potassium and sodium ions moved through tiny gates ion channels in a cell membrane. With this grounding, Ashcroft widens the story to explore everything from how different nerve agents, like puffer fish venom, curare, and botox, work, to how electric eels generate electricity, how defibrillators stabilize the heart's rhythms, and how our brains interpret sensory data. Ashcroft's writing is clear and accessible, offering surprising insights into the "electrical machine" we call the human body. 50 illus.
Customer Reviews
PAGE LAYOUT ERRORS IN SAMPLE BOOK
Fantastic author interview on NPR Fresh Air led me to the interesting book. I think it will be a good read, but in iBooks there are page layout error dialog boxes on the pages for the sample book. The sample book looks great on the Kindle.
PLEASE FIX - then remove this "review"