Electronics: Getting Under Your Skin

In General Electric's Space Sciences Laboratory at Valley Forge, Pa., they are wiring rats to radios that draw all their electrical power from the bodies of the rodents themselves.

The faint electrical currents generated by living tissues, says G. E. Biologist John J. Konikoff, are nothing new. They have been used for many years in instruments, such as electrocardiographs, to show the condition of the body, but the currents were too weak to consider as serious power sources. Now transistors and other miniature electronic devices, which use only infinitesimal amounts of current, have changed all that.

Working in Konikoffs laboratory, L....

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