Controlling electric signals in the body could help it heal

> We took the early eye structure from one frog embryo, and implanted it onto another embryo’s back. We were interested in two things: First, would the recipient be able to see out of that implanted eye on its back? Is the brain plastic enough to be able to actually see out of it? Second, we wanted to know, what is this eye structure going to do without a brain nearby? Where is it going to connect, and what are the neurons going to do?

Oh my. This is both amazing and a cliché straight from a cheap horror movie. The actual results are even more surprising - apparently yes, the implanted eye can be made to sort-of work.

Is anyone here aware of more research in this area?

I find regrettable that the reasoning is still explained/oversimplified in terms of "electric potential tells body to do this". This is utterly nonsensical determinism, unhelpful when trying to understand hugely complex and dynamic systems. To say that ions interact with their environment and affect it, through their electrical properties (and maybe chemical too), would be much closer to the reality being described here.

To make an analogy of why determinism is not helpful in biology, consider a white blood cell catching a few bacteria that would otherwise have tried to attack the lungs. Determinism would have us say this white blood cell is protecting the lungs, as if it were its goal. But a white blood cell is just that, a single cell, with no idea that things such as lungs exist or that they need protecting. A white blood cell is just a hunter that recognized something it could eat, and ate it.

If interested in the topic, I was paraphrasing "neither god nor gene" there, a book by Kupiec and Sonigo, and the one read that changed the way I understood biology when I was an undergrad in the field.

Has this been widely known? I always wondered how cells know what structures to grow into, especially those at the fringes of tissues. I also wonder what taking things like calcium channel blockers do to our bodies, or how that relates to photobiomodulation, which is known for regulating calcium channels.

There is a lot of research in this field which occurred in Russia and the eastern bloc and is still practised there.

The Scenar device for example is popular for reducing pain and allegedly speeding healing: http://www.scenar.com.ru/en/production/

Not posting that as proof but as an example of the sorts of devices Russian health care use.

From what I understand most of the research is untranslated and often ignored here in the West so it’s good to see some headway occurring on the effect of electric signals in cellular growth.

If you're interested in this sort of thing pick up a copy of "The Body Electric" by Robert O. Becker and Gary Selden. [1] Describes investigation of regeneration among other things. YMMV

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book)

For some reason this reminded me of the research on how EMFs can affect the nervous system [0]

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089106181...

Hope Pence doesn't get any ideas.. (joking)