Your bioelectric body is basically a walking, talking electrical grid. No, not because you’re scrolling TikTok all day (though that doesn’t help), but because every single one of your cells is literally electric. While you’ve been worrying about your phone battery dying, your body has been running on its own bioelectric network this entire time – and scientists are just now figuring out how to hack it. Can bioelectricity make you a real-life Wolverine, or at least help you regrow a fingertip?
Meet Your Body’s Secret Electrical Engineer
Dr. Michael Levin from Tufts University has spent the better part of two decades proving that your cells are basically tiny electricians with really good union benefits. The Allen Discovery Center studies “bioelectrical signals that make up part of the language by which cells communicate to serve the patterning needs of the host organism” – signals that “exist in all cells (not just neurons), and regulate cell behavior and gene expression.”
Think of it this way: while you’re consciously deciding whether to have pizza for breakfast (again), your cells are having incredibly sophisticated electrical conversations about whether to build an arm, grow some skin, or maybe just chill and be a liver cell for a while.
The Bioelectric Body Plan
Here’s where it gets wild. Bioelectric signaling involves “feedback loops, long-range communication, polarity, and information transfer over multiple size scales” through “endogenous voltage gradients, ion flows, and electric” patterns. Your body isn’t just using electricity to make your heart beat – it’s using electrical patterns as a sophisticated information storage and processing system.
Dr. Levin and team have discovered that bioelectrical networks store “non-genetic patterning information during development and regeneration.” Translation: your cells are keeping electrical blueprints of how to build and rebuild your body, completely separate from your DNA.
Planaria: The Comeback Kids of Biology
To prove this isn’t just fancy scientific speculation, Levin’s team started experimenting with planaria – flatworms that can regrow their entire bodies from tiny fragments. “Levin and his team are tackling this challenge by trying to figure out how cells within a worm fragment coordinate with each other to create a specific structure, and then manipulating those cellular conversations to change how the fragments regenerate – with a head at each end, for example.”
Yes, they made two-headed worms. Not because they’re mad scientists (well, maybe a little), but because they figured out how to reprogram the electrical signals that tell cells “build a head here” versus “build a tail there.”
A flatworm’s DNA is designed to build a single-headed worm. However, once new bioelectrical instructions are added and the worm has two heads, it actually carries that information forward if it is split again. Yes, cut a two-headed worm in half and each half regenerates another head, not a tail. The bioelectric memory of shape takes precedence over the DNA.
One might wonder if biolectric memory is passed from a mother to offspring. This hasn’t been researched yet. At present, the premise is that DNA establishes the initial default bioelectric settings for new life forms. This assumption may not be correct.
Bioelectricity: The Human Regeneration Question
Now for the million-dollar question: could bioelectric communication and memory be used to repair (or enhance!) humans? Currently, “humans do not regrow their limbs,” though Levin notes there are “sporadic reports in the medical literature” of unusual regenerative events. We do have some regenerative abilities – “humans between ages of 7 and 11 can regrow the tips of fingertips” and obviously we can regrow toenails (which is fortunate, given how often we stub our toes).
But here’s the exciting part: bioelectricity could potentially communicate to cells “that instead of going down the scarring path, they should be, for example, retreading the kinds of paths that they took during development to build the structure in the first place.” Instead of forming scar tissue when injured, we might be able to convince cells to rebuild the original structure – like having a really good customer service department for your body.
The Allen Discovery Center at Tufts in coordination with Harvard’s Wyss Lab has had success in getting a frog to regrow a mostly functional leg. Frogs don’t naturally regenerate lost limbs.
The Bioelectric Medicine Revolution
The implications go far beyond just regrowing limbs. Understanding bioelectric circuits “will have important implications for regenerative medicine, cancer biology, and bioengineering.” Researchers are already working on “optogenetics” approaches and developing “better voltage reporters and techniques for in vivo modulation of bioelectric state.”
Levin and Tufts Ph.D. student Gizem Gumuskaya have even created “microscopic living robots called Anthrobots, which are made of human tracheal cells” that could potentially “help heal neural damage.” They’re literally building tiny biological robots from your own cells that could repair you from the inside. It’s like having a microscopic construction crew that actually shows up on time and finishes the job.
When Can You Expect Your Wolverine Powers?
Here’s where we need to pump the brakes on the hype train. Although the science is incredibly promising, we’re still in the “figuring out the basic electrical wiring diagram” phase, not the “download the limb regrowth app” phase.
The potential applications include “new ways to promote healing, restore function, and even enhance human capabilities,” as well as “programming cells to develop in specific ways” for creating “custom tissues and organs for transplantation.” But transforming these laboratory breakthroughs into practical human treatments will likely take decades, not years.
Current estimates from researchers in the field suggest that meaningful bioelectric regenerative therapies for humans might emerge in the 2040s to 2060s timeframe. We’ll probably see applications for tissue repair and organ regeneration before full limb regrowth – think fixing damaged hearts, kidneys or livers before growing back arms.
Dr. Levin and Tufts engineering professor David Kaplan have launched a company, Morphoceuticals, to pursue commercial solutions. They are building the first-ever atlas of the bioelectrome, which can predict bioelectric patterns in tissue over space and time. Their initial focus is on mapping the bioelectric components in the kidney and liver, in pursuit of therapeutic interventions.
Other companies are using different techniques to pursue rejuvenation and regeneration solutions. For more, see Keep Health’s article on Rejuvenation and Regeneration.
The Bioelectric Bottom Line
Your body is already an electrical marvel that would make Tesla jealous. The Allen Discovery Center and other bioelectricity researchers are essentially learning to speak the electrical language your cells already use, potentially unlocking regenerative abilities we’ve only dreamed about.
Although you won’t be regrowing limbs anytime soon, the foundational research happening now is laying the groundwork for a future where bioelectric medicine could revolutionize how we heal, age, and maybe even enhance ourselves. Until then, keep treating your one and only body well – we haven’t quite figured out the warranty repairs yet.
Just remember: when bioelectric regeneration becomes available, please use it responsibly. The last thing we need is people intentionally cutting off perfectly good limbs just to watch them grow back. Your insurance company is probably already having nightmares about that coverage decision.
