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Preface

magnetic sensing in humans, animals and plants. The detection of magnetic fields by biological systems

is an age-old question in bioelectromagnetism. The topics of recent advances in magnetobiology as a

guide for bioelectromagnetism include: magnetic navigations; magnetotactic bacteria; and magnetic

sense and magnetic responses of plants, birds, animals and humans. It mentioned also that in future,

these researches are expected to progress in relation to quantum biology. Chapter 7 deal with the latest

efforts to set safety guidelines from the viewpoint of human health in the electromagnetic environment

that exists widely around us.

The chapter authors are experts in each area. They wrote their chapters with great pleasure to explain

the background and recent advances in each field. We hope readers enjoy the essence of this expanding

field. Through discussions in this book, past and today’s research advances and a number of prospects

in bioelectromagnetism are given for many students, researchers and specialists in biology, medicine,

biophysics, electrical engineering and biomedical engineering.

The editors sincerely hope that this book will be used as a companion to our previous published

books: Biomagnetics: Principles and Applications of Biomagnetic Stimulation and Imaging and

Bioimaging: Imaging by Light and Electromagnetics in Medicine and Biology. Both books are published

by CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group in 2016 and 2020.

The following is an overview of the chapters covered in this book to give you a breadth of research in

bioelectromagnetism.

Chapter 1 Introduction (Shoogo Ueno and Tsukasa Shigemitsu)

The term ‘Bioelectromagnetism’ became popular in scientific communities around 1980. This chapter

begins with general information which forms frameworks for understanding this book. The origin of

bioelectromagnetism is the study of the relationship between electromagnetism and biological systems.

It connects electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism with biology, medicine, chemistry, physics and

engineering. Today, bioelectromagnetism focuses on biological and medical studies of electromagnetic

fields ranging from direct current (DC) to optical frequencies. These studies can be mainly divided into

two issues: beneficial, such as various medical applications, and harmful, such as biological effects of

electromagnetic fields with the setting of safety guidelines. Taking this into consideration, the discussion

of this chapter will give us today’s study of bioelectromagnetism and its future prospects, along with a

discussion of the issues that bioelectromagnetism is facing. The electromagnetic environment generated

by various devices that use non-ionizing radiation will be familiar to us all. Therefore, there is a need to

clarify the impact of that electromagnetic environment on the global environment. In the future, quan-

tum biology, which is a combination of quantum mechanics and biology, will occupy an important posi-

tion in the research in bioelectromagnetism. We pointed out that the research in bioelectromagnetism

will be more interdisciplinary than ever before and will require the coordination of many experts.

Chapter 2 The History of Bioelectromagnetism (Tsukasa

Shigemitsu, Shoogo Ueno and Masamichi Kato)

This chapter presents how bioelectromagnetism has been gradually developing and expanding to a vari-

ety of fields in engineering, biomedical engineering, medicine and biology. This chapter provides the

fantastic and dramatic history of bioelectromagnetism from ancient times to the twenty-first century.

It deals with the chronological history of major subjects with scientists who have made physical, chemi-

cal, electrical and biological discoveries. In addition, since the late 1960s, research on the biological

and health effects of man-made electromagnetic fields has been taken up. In this chapter, the history

of this research is also presented. This chapter as far as possible includes the historical development of

Japanese research. The emphasis is on how the long historical development of bioelectromagnetism

reveals that today’s scientific achievements in engineering, biomedical engineering, biology and medi-

cine are shaped by solving the electromagnetic phenomena in biological systems.