In our premiere issue, I spoke briefly about why we chose the name Bioelectricity rather than, for example, electrophysiology. The reason is that electrophysiology has come to be associated with action potentials and the cells that propagate them. Meanwhile, the term bioelectricity, a subfield of biophysics, is right there waiting to take on the role of more inclusive term. Our goal with Bioelectricity is to gather together and serve researchers who study bioelectricity as a mechanism underlying a greater diversity of activities. Hence, the more inclusive title.
Two trains of thought about the term bioelectricity continue to bounce around inside my head: how has that term been used before, and how do we make sure that we not only publish peer-reviewed, rigorous studies, but we are known for that and not for a superficial similarity to Frankenstein.
Train of thought 1: Many of us have had our work spoken or written about under a title that includes Frankenstein (with or without a question mark). I will hereby deal with “the Frankenstein problem” head on so that we can all move forward. There are too many movies with too many variations to address, so I read the original story by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. There is not much similarity, actually. Victor Frankenstein (VF) was a graduate student who ignored the advice of his scientist-advisors and snuck off in the night to practice alchemy. The supposed hubris of scientists is absent from the book; what is there is Victor the alchemist's personal hubris. The actual scientists are portrayed as killjoys who don't think VF should waste his time with alchemy. That's about it. As for the rest of the book, I agree with, and point you toward, Steven J. Gould's essay giving his interpretation: Frankenstein is about bad parenting.
Train of thought 2: My search for uses of the word bioelectricity are summarized in this chart, made using PubMed's search engine with the query “bioelectric* OR bio-electr*” in the title or abstract. It illustrates, albeit imperfectly, the lead up to the launch of Bioelectricity. A glance shows a small but steady interest until about 1980. Since then, however, bioelectricity has been in a phase of exponential growth: in the past 10 years the number of articles has quadrupled and there is nothing to suggest it will plateau any time soon.
It is fascinating to me how many scientists were breaking relevant ground decades ago. Modern researchers may have molecular biology and two-photon microscopes, but the questions and topics that are being approached now have an impressive history, going back all the way to TH Morgan. The oldest article I found was Electrical Polarity in Hydroids by Mathews from early in 1901. This quote from Matthew's work may be the first time someone wrote explicitly about electricity as a mechanism to explain a biological phenomenon:
The marked resemblance of animal and plant polarity to that of a magnet suggested that it might be possible to detect and measure the amount of this polarity by purely physical means, on the assumption that the polarity was electrical in nature, or gave rise to electrical differences. This hypothesis was supported by the facts.
Supported by the facts, not “believed,” not “intuited,” and not written down just because. That is the difference between bioelectricity and pseudoscience. The work we publish is evidence-based, rigorous, science. I am reminded of Senior Editor Ann Rajincek's comment during the Roundtable pointing out that because the pioneers were not readily believed, they had to do a lot of extra work just to be taken seriously. The result is that to date, our field has a history of publishing only the most careful and most complete studies. It is our intention to maintain those high standards so that the proliferation of studies always points at the positive impact of what we do.