Animal electricity and the birth of electrophysiology: the legacy of Luigi Galvani

One-channel Cell-attached Patch-clamp Recording

“…First, because both voltage clamping and current recording are accomplished with the same electrode, it can be used to record signals across small cells or membranes patches. The technique revealed that ion channels are not restricted to excitable membranes of frog muscles, eel electroplaques, or squid giant axons 3,4 , but rather that they represent ubiquitous fixtures of transmembrane signaling mechanisms and are intrinsic to all cellular membrane types of uni-or multicellular organisms, and also to intracellular membranes. Importantly, the capability to record transmembrane currents by simply attaching a glass pipette to an intact cell provided the unprecedented opportunity to record activity from ion channels in their native undisrupted membranes.…”

Potential Energy and the Body Electric

“…Rereading the Galvani-Volta debate about animal electricity (Bernardi 2001;Piccolino 1998) may afford unexpected genealogies for today's electromagnetic body, as may a review of discussions between Lord Kelvin/ William Thompson and his brother James Thompson about the electromagnetic fields within which human bodies are located (see also Winter 1998 on the rise and fall of "mesmerism"). What Walt Whitman called "the body electric" in 1855 (just 6 years after Hermann von Helmholtz clocked the first nerve impulse) is a body that might be newly investigated for what it can tell us about the circuits of power within which many of our hearts and minds now live, circuits of potential that have many possible pasts, presents, and futures, many time lines that can reinforce as well as interfere with one another.…”

Advances in patch clamp technique: towards higher quality and quantity

“…Based on his experiments which considerably contributed to the formulation of theory of electrical excitation, Luigi Galvani anticipated the existence of ionic channels already at the end of 18 th century (Piccolino 1998). Nevertheless, the assumed structure of plasmalemma was supplemented with associated proteins including ionic channels as late as in the 1930s (Danielli and Davson 1935).…”