We're lucky to have a dad who's a cardiologist in my sons cub scout den. During today's field trip, Dr Drachman taught the boys, the other dads, and me a thing or two about the human heart. He showed us his Echo Cardio Machine, which is really something like an ultrasound for the heart. He wired one dad up and we saw his four chambered heart, a foggy, ghostly looking thing on the screen, pumping away, the valves flapping with the regularity of a clock.I had a couple of epiphanies. For one, it hit me how much human beings and refrigerators have in common. Electricity powers both our hearts and refrigerator motors. Take away the electric current and what happens? We die and the food rots. Most miraculous is how our bodies generate their own electrical currents. Artificial hearts are powered by a battery that has much in common with the one that powers a car!
I thought of the movie Frankenstein and how the doctor shrieked, "It's alive! It's alive!" as a corpse began to breath and move after being jolted by harnessed lightning.
I thought about the theory that life started on Earth billions of years ago after lightning licked an inorganic, primordial cesspool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H3dFh6GA-A
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