We sadly report that Dr. Robert O. Becker passed away on May 14, 2008 at the age of 84. His death is an enormous loss to all who study the role of electromagnetism in biology and medicine. More than any of his contemporaries, he foresaw both the potential dangers and the possible benefits arising from low-energy bioelectromagnetic interactions. A first-class dedicated physician, who was both Professor of Surgery at SUNY Upstate and Chief of Orthopedics at the VA hospital in Syracuse, he was widely respected as a superb diagnostician. He pioneered the therapeutic use of silver iodide. His books enabled the public to better comprehend the complex issues connected to what he termed “electromagnetic pollution”. Above all, in our view he was a creative scientist.
He was devastatingly honest and outspoken, to the point where he was fired by the Veterans Administration for publicly opposing the construction of high-voltage transmission lines in New York State. When in the mid 1970s he and Marino first raised the issue of potential hazards from power line fields, many regarded them as little more than public nuisances. But these warnings proved to be remarkably prescient. In 1979, Nancy Wertheimer published her ground-breaking epidemiological report relating power line magnetic fields to childhood leukemia. And, only a year or two later the New York State Power Lines Project was initiated under the leadership of David Carpenter, awarding contracts to 16 research groups.
Becker's research interests covered a lot of territory, reflecting an insatiable curiosity coupled to the sort of outside-the-box thinking that seeks solutions to questions that others never think to raise. With Bassett he contributed to the problem of electrically mediated bone repair. He conceived of bone remodeling as a natural but suppressed consequence of primitive regeneration still working in animals like salamanders. To reinforce this view, he related the endogenous electric field resulting from wound repair to the way the severed limb regrows, an experiment that prompted Steve Smith to apply electric fields to regrowing an amputated rat limb. Again, well ahead of his time, he argued that electric fields could be used to promote either cell differentiation or dedifferentiation.
Using unexplained data by McElhany, Becker and Marino were able to infer a beautiful explanation for Wolff's Law, the 19th century dictum maintaining that bone remodels according to the distribution of stress it experiences. They showed that bone precursor cells will differentiate into either osteoblasts or osteoclasts (bone builders or bone removers) depending on the sign and intensity of the local stress-generated potential. His laboratory was likely the first ever to search for the electrical correlates of the acupuncture meridian lines. Very early in his career he initiated a study on the relationship of hospital admissions to solar activity, a remarkable exploration, predating by 30 years similar studies currently underway by a number of groups.
Mixed in with all of this, Becker again and again returned to his central hypothesis, that there exists in all organisms electrically mediated control systems that govern well-being, repair, and growth. This was his extended insightful interpretation of the “currents of injury” discovered by Carlo Matteucci in the first half of the 19th century.
Bob Becker was a visionary who never received the accolades that were his due, mainly because of political pressures from interests that felt threatened by scientists like him seeking to better understand the relationship between life and electromagnetism. One can hope that as the truth unfolds the future will recognize Bob as the key player in this emerging area of science.
A. R. Liboff