Bjorn Nordenstrom - Discover Magazine - April, 1986 Part 1

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An electrifying possibility; a Swedish radiologist posits an

astounding theory; the human body has the equivalent of electric

circuits - Bjorn Nordenstrom

 

Discover,

April, 1986

by Gary Taubes

 

Watching Bjorn Nordenstrom operate will give you some idea of

thenature of the problem. Unorthodox, to say the least.

 

It's a winter morning in Stockholm; still dark, although well into the

day. An old man lies on the operating table, his chest quilted with

scars from previous cancer operations. He has a new tumor in what the

surgeons have left him of his lungs. Nordenstrom has been given

permission to treat him, because the old man doesn't have enough lungs

left to remove, and if something isn't done he'll be dead in a year.

Still, the old man, prepped with Valium, is conscious and smiling.

 

Nordenstrom is tall and greying, with a military bearing; the deep

lines under his eyes are signs of both his 65 years and his propensity

to overwork. Beneath his surgical gown he wears a rubberized radiation

vest. He takes hold of a foot-long needle and stares down at the old

man's chest. Guided by x-ray equipment of his own design--which gives

views of the patient's chest from front to back and side to

side--Nordenstrom inserts the needle, with a slight jerk to get it

through the chest muscle, directly into the center of the tumor. He

takes up another needle and slips it in ten inches below the first.

The needles are platinum electrodes. He hooks wires to each, then

turns to his assistant and nods. The assis tant twists a dial on an

orange box, and the treatment begins.

 

Nordenstrom asks his patient if he feels any pain, and the old man

says no.

 

A few minutes later, Nor denstrom doffs his gown and radiation vest

and settles down on a chair next to the operating table. One of the

nurses brings him and the old man coffee and cookies. All the while,

electric current courses through the old man's chest.

 

So there Bjorn Nordenstrom sits, calmly sipping his coffee whilehe

tries to save the life of another man with a technique that looks as

if it has been cooked up by a maniacal electrician with delusions of

grandeur. But Nordenstrom is no quack. Not by a long shot: his track

record, as a physician and researcher, is as good as any one's. In the

1950s he pioneered a series of remarkable innovations in clinical

radiology that seemed radical at the time but are now routinely

employed at every major hospital in the world. In the 1960s he was

promoted to the most respected position in his field: head of

diagnostic radiology at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, then the

pre-eminent radiological research labora- tory in the world. In 1985

he served as chairman of

 

Karolinska's Nobel Assembly, which chooses the laureates in medicine.

He is, in the words of Morris Simon, the director of clinical

radiology at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, ''a brilliant, very

innovative, very imaginative scientist, who has made significant

contributions to radiology and medicine.''

 

In 1983 Nordenstrom published a 358-page book covering more thantwo

decades of experimental work. It's entitled Biologically Closed

Electric Circuits: Clinical, Ex- perimental, and Theoretical Evidence

for an Additional Circulatory Sytem, and it's potentially revolutionary.

 

 

Nordenstrom claims to have discovered a heretofore unknown universe of

electrical activity in the human body--the biological equivalent of

electric circuits.

 

As Nordenstrom describes his body electric, the circuits are switched

on by an injury, an infection, or a tumor, or even by the normal

activity of the body's organs; voltages build and fluctuate; electric

currents course through arteries and veins and across ca- pillary

walls, drawing white blood cells and metabolic compounds into and out

of surrounding tissues. This electri- cal system, says Nordenstrom,

works to balance the activity of internal organs and, in the case of

injuries, represents the very foundation of the healing process. In

his view, it's as critical to the well-being of the human body as the

flow of blood. Disturbances in this electrical network, he suggests,

may be involved in the development of cancer and other diseases.

 

The idea that electric currents can stimulate bodily repair, alert

defense mechanisms, and control the growth and function of cells is

not a new one in medicine. Bioelec tromagnetics dates back at least

200 years. But the field picked up a dubious reputation at the turn of

the century, when researchers who had proposed electromagnetism as a

panacea were proved wrong, and the stigma has lingered ever since.

 

Enter Nordenstrom. His book is neither an esoteric piece of

theorizing nor the result of a single isolated ex- periment. He backs

up his statements, theories, and conclusions with a wealth of

meticulous and ingenious experi- ments, with one clinical ob-

servation after another, with theoretical proofs, and with known

facts. He makes a strong case, and, at least as far as he's concerned,

he has proved it.

 

Nordenstrom doesn't spare his medical colleagues from the jab ofhis

needles. To him their attitude toward elec- tricity in the human body

is almost medieval. Knowing of the ''enormous importance of closed

electric circuits in modern electronic technology,'' asks Nordenstrom

in the conclusion of his book, ''is it seriously plausible that

biology can 'afford to ignore' the ex- ceedingly efficient principle

of transporting electric energy over closed circuits?''

 

Classical medicine certainly doesn't deny that there are myriad

electrical forces at work within the body, in addition to chemical

ones exerted by hormones and enzymes, and physical ones like the

pressure of the blood in the arteries and veins. Every human thought

and action is accom- panied by the conduction of electrical signals

along the fibers of the nervous system. Indeed, life wouldn't exist at

all without a constant flow of ions across the membranes of cells. Yet

Nordenstrom argues that this picture is incomplete. As he sees it,

medical research has provided a descriptive view of the chemical and

physical processes at work in the human body, but hasn't explained how

they're interrelated. It's a picture of effects without causes. In

Nordenstrom's view, the cause behind many of the effects is the ebb

and flow in his biologically closed electric circuits.

 

If Nordenstrom is right, these circuits may explain many fundamental

regulatory processes in the human body, and even the seemingly

inexplica ble therapeutic effects of acupuncture and of

electromagnetic fields.

 

To prove that his theory is more than just an academic curiosity,

Nordenstrom has put his ideas to work, using electricity to treat lung

and breast tumors. Considering the immaturity of his science, he has

had remarkable success.

 

In the two hours before Nordenstrom unhooks the electrodes and sends

the old man home, he sips his coffee and talks about the complete lack

of impact his work has had. He's talking less about his cancer

treatments than about his basic research, and there he's a little

perplexed. Medical researchers have barely acknowledged Nordenstrom or

his book.

 

''If I'm right,'' Nordenstrom is saying, ''time works for me.''

 

His voice is raspy; though heavily accented, his English is good. He

tells of years of care- ful experimenting--hypothesis and test.

Classic scientific method.

 

''When I had the whole material ready'' he says, ''nobody wantedto

publish it. 'To whom should we direct the message?' they asked. I said

to everybody--to biologists, to all doctors. They should know about

this. Then they said, 'We don't dare to publish it.' If I had done

only one experiment, they would probably very easily accept it. But to

prove my theory I had to do so many things based on the same principle

and they [the medical community] say it's crazy because I say it

explains everything. I understand, but this is the difficult thing for

me. It's so basic and so important because it plays so many roles in

every biological reaction. It's not my fault.''

 

Nordenstrom laughs.

 

In 1984, a full year after his book came out, the first review

appeared in the medical press, in the journal Investigative Radiology.

The journal doesn't usually print book reviews, the editor wrote, but

Norden strom's work presented such ''fundamental and far-reaching

concepts that a review was deemed desirable . . . The importance of

the concepts presented in Dr. Nordenstrom's book cannot be

overemphasized.'' The reviewer went on to call the book ''remarkable''

and ''a seminal work.''

 

A year later, a second article appeared, this one in the American

Journal of Roentgenology. The AJR is one of the two most important

journals in the field. The article was a rewrite of a Nordenstrom

lecture, and it, too, came with an editor's note: the publication of

the paper, it said, was unconventional and required an explanation.

The work was unique, the editor wrote: unlike the multi-author

publications common in journals, it was all the work of one

man--Nordenstrom. ''He alone is responsible for the original concepts,

the experiments, the analysis and the text. Al- though employing

modern terms and instruments, his performance has been in the

tradition of the pioneer scientist: complete and isolated immersion in

the research.'' The journal said that a final judgment was premature,

but that, at the very least, the work was ''imaginative,

experimentally ingenious, and provocative'' and deserved serious

examination by the medical community.

 

No such examination has yet been made, although four small groups of

researchers--one each in France and Italy, two in Japan--are be-

ginning to replicate Nor-L denstrom's experiments. ''His work is far

too original,'' says John Austin, a Columbia University radiologist,

who helped edit the book. ''It's far too wide ranging. Nobody in this

country is beginning to touch what he's doing.''

 

Some of Nordenstrom's American colleagues--highly respected men in the

world of medicine--say his work is undeniably revolutionary. If it's

right, it's important not only to medicine but to all of biology.

(They'll compare it to Harvey's 1628 treatise on the circulatory

system, but they don't want to have such claims attributed to them.)

And if it's wrong, they say, the experiments them- selves are

brilliant in any case. What Nordenstrom desperately needs, says Beth

Israel's Simon, ''is to have people persuaded that it's worth making a

major effort to prove or disprove what he says.''

 

The mystery is why the medical community has barely oticed that

Nordenstrom's theory exists. If you were to ask radiologists at random

about Bjorn Nordenstrom, you'd be lucky to find one who knew his name.

If you asked cancer experts, or biophysicists, or

pathologists--scientists whose disciplines are the heart and soul of

Nordenstrom's book-- you'd probably get a blank stare. Bjorn who?

 

 

Nordenstrom was born in 1920 in Ragunda, a village in central Sweden,

and was raised in the city of Bollnuas, where his ancestors have lived

for three hundred years. He studied at the University of Uppsala, and

finished his medical training in Stockholm. After World War II, he

joined the Swedish Red Cross and spent three months touring southern

Austria with another doctor, immunizing orphans against TB. He

estimates they had inoculated 25,000 children by the time his wife

called to tell him she was pregnant (with the first of their three boys).

 

Back in Stockholm, in 1949, he began a career in radiology. He picked

his speciality the way many people do--someone offered him a job that

paid well, and it turned out to be interesting. He also apprenticed

for a year with the Swedish surgeon Clarence Crafoord, one of the

pioneers of open heart surgery, before going to the University of

Michigan on a one-year fellowship. At Michigan he was an innovator in

the use of both radio-opaque chemical dyes and a method known as

balloon catheterization, for producing more distinct x-ray images of

the heart, blood vessels, and lungs.

 

In the autumn of 1956 Nor denstrom returned to Stockholm and began

searching for a way to determine, without cutting open the chest and

lungs, whether a lung tumor was malignant or benign. He had an

ingeniously simple solution: under x-ray guidance, stick a needle

through the chest wall and into the tumor and remove a tissue sample,

then examine it under a microscope--''a practical, valid approach to

the thing,'' he calls it.

 

Nordenstrom had pioneered what's now known as percutaneous needle

biopsy, a diagnostic technique used in every major hospital in the

world. But before he could put it to use, he had to redesign the

biopsy needles employed to penetrate deep into the body, and the x-ray

equipment needed to steer them to the tumor. His colleagues showed the

usual hesitation: much too danger- ous a procedure, they said;

Nordenstrom was much too aggressive. And it was nearly two decades,

not until the 1970s, before Nordenstrom's biopsy technique finally

caught on in America. Says Richard Green span, head of radiology at

Yale Medical School, ''Before Nor denstrom came along, if some- body

had told me you could take a needle and shove it into a lung and

biopsy a tumor, I'd have been shocked.''

 

Nordenstrom refers to these innovations as the first waves of his

career. The latest wave

 

is his theory of biologically closed electric circuits, which also

began building in the 1950s, when his curiosity was piqued by a subtle

phenomenon he observed in his practice. Every so often he would see in

his x-rays the forbidding mass of a tumor nestled within the lung, and

around it a halo of light-colored streaks radiating from its edges.

Because the image reminded him of the rays of the sun, he called it a

corona. He looked at thousands of tumors, but only some were

surrounded by coronas, while others--of the same size, shape, and

location--had none. More puzzling, a corona might show up in one x-ray

and then fail to appear in a later one. When Nordenstrom showed his

 

x-rays to other radiologists, they seldom spotted the coronas. When

they did, they considered them trivial and wondered why Nordenstrom cared.

 

For nearly ten years he tracked the coronas on his x-rays, but found

nothing that could explain their origin or significance. Even when he

used his biopsy needles to sample tissue from tumors with and without

coronas, he discovered no consistent differences between them.

 

Finally, in 1965, he decided to perform what he calls a systematic

exploration, and began to test the electrical properties of the

tumors. This was as much by necessity as by choice. First, he had

little else left to try: a tumor in the body is inaccessible to the

resources of a labora- tory, but take the tumor out of the body and

you may destroy the conditions that created the corona. Second,

because he was working with human cancer patients, it was one of the

few experiments he could perform without increasing the risk to the

patient beyond that already entailed in doing a biopsy. Nordenstrom says,

 

''I thought to myself, 'Isn't this silly, just to introduce a needle

to take out samples

 

of materials? Perhaps I could see something more, study somethingmore

when I'm in there with my instruments.' ''

 

So Nordenstrom turned his needles into electrodes and combined the

sampling of tissue with the study of the electrical properties of

tumors in the body. He measured the electric potential of the tumor

compared to that of surrounding tissue--the voltage, in essence-- and

found that tumors with coronas were frequently associated with an

electric potential. Moreover, he noticed that in many of these tumors

the innermost cells had begun to die. Such tissue death, or necrosis,

occurs when the cells at the core of a tumor are cut off from the

blood stream as the outer cells continue to proliferate.

 

These experiments absorbed Nordenstrom almost totally. By the late

1960s he was no longer doing conventional radiology; instead he was

slowly moving, experiment by experiment, into physiology, oncology,

and pathology. He had created his own field of science, and had left

the establishment behind.

 

To understand the electric potentials in the tumors, Nor denstrom

measured the potential of blood as it slowly deteriorated. Blood was

the only tissue he could extract from the body without worrying about

damaging it in the process. He found that the electric charge in the

decaying blood was first positive, then negative; over the course of

days it oscillated slowly between the two states until all the blood

cells had died off. These results could explain the variations in

volt- age he had discovered in the tumors, and became the basis for

one of the key points in his the- ory: any injury to the body creates

a voltage that continuously fluctuates between positive and negative

until it finally reaches electrical equilibrium--a state Nordenstrom

believes is associated with healing. Nordenstrom later found that the

release of energy by injured and dying cells could be the driving

force--the battery--of his electric circuits.

 

Next, Nordenstrom carefully measured the electrical properties of

veins, arteries, capillaries, and blood in living animals. He found

that the electrical resistance of the walls of the veins and arteries

was at least 200 times that of blood. In effect, he claimed, these

vessels were acting as insulated cables, and the blood flowing within

them conducted electricity between the tumor and the surrounding

tissue. That much was high school physics.

 

Then he designed experiments to test his theory. He hooked his

electrodes to the blood vessels of dogs and showed that the current

flowed preferentially through the veins and arteries. When he applied

an electric current to the blood vessels, white blood cells, which

carry negative charges on their surface, were attracted to the

positive lectrode. Blood clots, too, would form in the vessels in

response to the current. The attraction of white blood cells to

injuries isn't well understood by scientists, yet Nordenstrom seems to

have demonstated that a simple, fundamental principle underlies it.

 

Nordenstrom spent most of his waking moments on his research. Hemade

mistakes; he repeated experiments again and again. He worked absurd

hours for the laid-back Swedish life style. He got to bed by ten but

woke up to do his creative thinking between three and five in the

morning; he would lie in the dark, reviewing his problems from the

previous day and planning his experiments for the next. He refused to

take on a junior researcher, because he wanted to do every experiment

himself, so that he would have firsthand information and would know

how best to proceed.

 

By 1978 Nordenstrom had completed his basic research: he had

identified all the elements of an electric circuit in the body. In the

vascular interstitial closed circuit, or VICC, as he called it,

necrosis in a tumor functioned somewhat like an AC power source. It

built a fluctuating potential, driving the circuit with a slowly

alternating current. The blood vessels served as electric cables

between injured and healthy tissue. The blood served as one segment of

the conductor in the circuit; the fluid between the cells of

tissue--called interstitial fluid, it's as conductive as the

blood--served as the other. Enzymes in the cells of the capillary

walls formed the system's electrodes. Says Nordenstrom, ''When you

have found all the elements that correspond to an ordinary electric

circuit, and each element performs its defined function, it must work.''

 

By then the medical establishment and Nordenstrom had lost touch. He

had given few lectures on his research and had published only a

handful of papers. When he began writing his book in 1979, he was

convinced he had proved his thesis of biologically closed electric

circuits. But even the handful of colleagues who knew of it didn't

seem to care. When he finished the book in 1983, medical publishing

houses refused to take it seriously, so he raised $50,000 and

published it himself. Of the 2,000 copies printed, only 400 were sold.

What he considered the most important work of his life languished in

obscurity.

 

Nordenstrom was as much to blame as anyone. He had committed oneof the

cardinal sins in research: he rarely bothered to publish in the

medical journals, the traditional network of information in this

branch of science. Instead he chose to pack two decades of effort into

a single tome. (Although Nordenstrom has published 140 papers in his

life, only a few are on his biological circuit research.)

 

Researchers hesitated to buy a book about a seemingly bizarre new

field--even more so because Nordenstrom was asking $135 per copy to

cover his publishing costs. Moreover, the book hadn't been subjected

to peer review, as articles in a top journal would have been. Says

Melvin Figley, a professor of radiology and medicine at the University

of Washington, and recently editor of the AJR, ''It's conceivable that

it's all very solid, but it's not presented in the conventional way.''

 

Nordenstrom responds that he did publish three papers, one in 1971,

one in 1974, and one in 1978. ''But there was no response

whatsoever,'' he says. ''I published and I talked about it with my

colleagues, and they didn't understand. They just said it was a crazy

idea, nothing of importance.''

 

After that, he insists, he was more interested in pursuing his

research than in publishing it, which isn't quite as rebellious as it

sounds. Most researchers write up their experiments to earn promotions

in academia's highly competitive publish-or- perish climate.

Nordenstrom needed no promotions; he was already at the pinnacle of

his field

 

continued.......in Part 2