I've been wondering if an informational field (some called it morphic field) is behind the blueprint
of biological growth and repair or if purely biochemical mechanism is enough to explain ALL
biological process.
Dr. Robert Becker, a pioneer in regeneration and its relationship to electrical current in living
things, wrote a book over a decade ago called "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the
Foundation of Life" and asked whether some kind of morphogenetic field in-forms the
biological process.
If anyone knows or can point researches that describe in detail or show mathematical model of how
biological and biochemical process alone can produce a human being from a single fertilized cell
with all the intermediate steps of differentiation into the different tissues, organs, bones and
their right placement and growth. Let me know and I'll throw away the belief of the possibility of
informational fields in living things.
In the following is a short excerpt of how Dr. Becker got puzzled about how their placement occurs
without morphogenetic field. Since the book was written in 1985, Many updates have likely occured.
So if you know of any, let me know and I'd give up the belief in the possibility and necessity of
informational field in organizing the physical expression of living.
Quoting Dr. Becker:
"The salaniander, directly descended from the evolutionary prototype of all land vertebrates, is a
marvelously complex animal, almost as complicated as a human. Its forelimb is basically the same as
ours. Yet all its interrelated parts grow back in the proper order-the same interlocking bones and
muscles, all the delicate wrist bones, the coordinated fingers - and they're wired together with the
proper nerve and blood vessel connections.
The sarne day the limb is cut off, debris from dead cells is carried away in the bloodstream. Then
some of the intact tissue begins to die back a short distance from the wound. During the first two
or three days, cells of the epidermis-the outer layer of skin-begin to proliferate and migrate
inwardly covering the wound surface. The epidermis then thickens over the apex of the stump into a
transparent tissue called the apical cap. This stage is finished in about a week.
By then, the blastema, the little ball of undifferentiated cells described by Morgan, has started to
appear beneath the apical cap. This is the "organ" of regeneration, forming on the wound like a
miniature embryo and very similar to the embryonic limb bud that gave rise to the leg in the first
place. Its cells are totipotent, able to develop into all the different kinds of cells needed to
reconstitute the limb.
The blastema is ready in about two weeks. Even as it's forming, the cells at its outer edge start
dividing rapidly, changing the blastema's shape to a cone and providing a steady source of raw material-
new cells-for growth* After about three weeks, the blastema cells at the inner edge begin to
differentiate into specialized types and arrange themselves into tissues, beginning with a cartilage
collar around the old bone shaft. other tissues then form, and the new limb-beginning with a
characteristic paddle shape that will become the hand-appears as though our of a mist. The elbow and
long parts of the limb coalesce behind the hand, and the regrowth is complete (except for some
slight enlargement) then the four digits reappear after about eight weeks.
This process, exquisitely beautiful and seemingly simple, is full of problems for biology. What
organizes the growth? What is the control factor? How does the blastema "know" that it must make a
foreleg instead of a bind leg? (The salamander never makes a mistake.) How does all the information
about the missing parts get to these undifferentiated cells, telling them what to become, which
genes to activate, what protelns to make, where to position themselves? It's as if a pile of bricks
were to spontaneousl y rearrange itself into a building, becoming not only walls but windows, light
sockets, steel beams, and furniture in the process.
Answers were sought by transplanting the blastema to other positions on the animal. The experiments
only made matters worse. If the blastema was moved within five to seven days after it first
appeared, and grafted near the hind leg, it grew into a second hind leg, even though it came from
an amputated foreleg. Well, that was okay. The body could be divided into "spheres of influence- or
"organizational territories," each of which contained information on the local anatomy. A blastema
put into a hind-limb territory naturally became a hind limb. This was an attractive theory, but
unfounded. Exactly what did this territory consist of? No one knew. To make matters worse, it was
then found that transplantation of a slightly older blastema from a foreleg stump to a hind-limb
area produced a foreleg. The young blastema knew where it was; the older one knew where it had
been! Somehow this pinhead of primitive cells with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics
contained enough information t o build a complete foreleg, no matter where it was placed. How? We
still don't know.
One attempt at an answer was the idea of a morphogenetic field, advanced by Paul Weiss in the 1930s
and developed by H. V. Bronsted in the 1950s. Morphogenesis means "origin of form," and the field
idea was simply an attempt to get closer to the control factor by reformulating the problem."
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end quote (Note: a similar "morphogenetic field" thesis has been put up by Sheldrake see