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The History of Bioelectromagnetism

Recently, it is well known that magnetic felds afect fame behavior and gas fows such as quench­

ing fames by magnetic felds. Te efect was frst reported by Michael Faraday in 1847 (Faraday, 1847).

Faraday applied a magnetic feld to a fame of a wax taper. He observed that permanent magnets could

cause the fames to deform into equatorial disks and that the fames were more luminous when placed

in the magnetic feld. Faraday theorized that the change in the fames shape were due to the mixed

presence of paramagnetic and diamagnetic gases in the fame. Te constituent gases are of parametric

and diamagnetic nature. Oxygen is a paramagnetic molecule, and nitrogen and CO2 are diamagnetic

materials. Afer Faraday’s report, there has been great interest in the impact of magnetic felds on com­

bustion behavior.

Afer about 140 years of Faraday’s experiment and report, Japanese scientists began to investigate

the efect of magnetic felds on biological and chemical processes with more advanced technologies

(Ueno and Harada, 1986). Ueno and his co-workers investigated the efects of gradient magnetic felds

on the burning fames of candles and their quenching (Ueno and Harada, 1986, 1987; Ueno, 1989). Tey

exposed a candle that burned in the airgap between magnetic poles, and its fame was exposed to gradi­

ent magnetic felds. During the magnetic feld exposures, the fames were pressed down and the shape

changed and looked like a mushroom (Ueno and Harada, 1987). Te feld strength in the center of the

airgap in this experiment was 1.2 T. Tey expanded their experiments to study the fow of gases. Tey

observed that the fow of gases such as CO2, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon are blocked or disturbed by

magnetic felds. Tey introduced a model called magnetic curtain to explain these phenomena. Tese

phenomena can be explained by the action of magnetic forces on paramagnetic molecules. Te magnetic

curtain is a wall of oxygen or air. Furthermore, they examined the efect of magnetic felds on quenching

candle fames using an electromagnet with a pair of columnar magnetic poles in which the inner side­

pieces were hollow and a candle burned in the hollowed space. Te fames were quenched a few seconds

afer the magnetic feld was turned on. Te interception of oxygen by magnetic curtain has a quenching

efect on the fames (Ueno and Iwasaka, 1990). Tis phenomenon must be taken into consideration when

a human subject is positioned inside the magnetic curtain such as inside an MRI. We have to be careful

about the respiratory functions, evaporation of water molecules, body temperature, blood circulation,

and other physiological functions being disturbed due to the above efect.

From the 1990s with development of high magnetic feld magnets, the most drastic demonstrations of

diamagnetic materials have been investigated. E. Beaugnon and R. Tournier, from the Centre National

de la Recherche Scientifque (CNRS) in Grenoble, France, demonstrated the magnetic levitation of dia­

magnetic materials such as water, ethanol, acetone, bismuth, antimony, graphite, wood, and plastic at

room temperature in a strong inhomogeneous static magnetic feld of up to 27 T with feld gradients as

high as 2,000 T²/m (Beaugnon and Tournier, 1991a, b). Tey pointed out that the levitation technique

opens the way to provide possibilities of a contactless, microgravity environment for the elaboration of

a wide range of materials. Andre Geim, a Russian-born Dutch-British physicist, from the University of

Manchester, showed the levitation of diamagnetic substances in a high static gradient magnetic feld

(Berry and Geim, 1997). Tey levitated living frog in a magnetic feld of about 16 T. Andre Geim won the

Ig Nobel Prize in 2000, for levitating a live frog in a high magnetic feld. In addition, Andre Geim shared

with Konstantin Novoselov, a Russian-born British physicist, University of Manchester, the Nobel Prize

in Physics in 2010, for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.

Andre Gerim is the only person to have won both Nobel and Ig Nobel Prizes.

Water is diamagnetic. When a container of water is placed in a magnet, there is a phenomenon where

splitting the water into two parts. In 1994, Ueno and Iwasaka discovered the surface deformation of

diamagnetic fuids under high gradient magnetic felds (Ueno and Iwasaka, 1994a, b), which later was

called the Moses efect. Tey used a horizontal type superconducting magnet of 70 cm long and a 10 cm

diameter bore, by which at 8 T, the maximum product of the magnetic feld gradient was 400 T²/m at

±75 mm along to horizontal bore axis. Tis phenomenon is due to the diamagnetic property of water.

Permanent magnets induced opposite magnetization in water. Two “frozen” cascades were formed; the

surface of the water near the center of the magnet was parted, and the bottom of the water chamber could