The Skin Battery

The “wound current” has intrigued scientists for more than a century. It could turn out to be the key to healing catastrophic injuries.

Written bySally Adee

| 4 min read

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Image credit:Hachette Books, February 2023

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Take a hard bite on the inside of your cheek. You’ll feel a tingling sensation. That tingling is the wound current, whose existence has frustrated and misdirected scientists since the 18th century. It intruded on Luigi Galvani’s seminal attempts to demonstrate the existence of animal electricity in frogs; it got in Emil du Bois-Reymond’s way as he tried to pin down the action potential in the 19th century. In 1843, du Bois-Reymond, whose famously obsessive approach to creating tools shaped the emerging science of electrophysiology, built his own galvanometer to measure this weird electrical interloper. Painstakingly created from at least a mile of coiled wire, the device revealed that leaking out of a cut in his finger, alongside the blood, was about one microampere of electrical current.

Nearly two centuries later, the modern tools helping us pry open the secrets of bioelectricity would be all but unrecognizable to du Bois-Reymond. ...

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Meet the Author

Sally Adee
Sally Adee is a science and technology writer. Most recently, she was a features editor at New Scientist, where she wrote some of its most lasting content, including a 2012 feature that explained bioelectricity technology to the general public for the first time, and is cited in Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. Adee’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Economist, BBC Future, and Quartz. She has spoken on the Economist’s “Intelligence” podcast, NPR’s “Radiolab,” CBC’s “The Current,” and BBC “Breakfast.” She is the science consultant for the TV adaptation of Naomi Alderman's The Power (Amazon Studios) and has won a US National Press Club award, a BT Information Security Award, and the Guild of Health Writers Award for her inside account of Silicon Valley’s young blood clinics. Adee is a citizen of Germany and the US, and lives in London. Her book about the electrical signals generated by life, We Are Electric is out now in the UK and the US.
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