Sally Adee is an award-winning science and technology writer. She spent ten years as a technology features editor at New Scientist and IEEE Spectrum magazine. She has also written for the New York Times, BBC Future, Quartz and The Economist.

She has won a US National Press Club award, a BT Information Security awards and the Guild of Health Writers Award for her inside account of Silicon Valley’s young blood clinics.

Sally’s talk

We Sing the Body Electric: the underappreciated power of biological electricity

Here are some things you don’t typically associate with electricity: eggs and sperm, their meeting to conceive, whether your injuries can heal, and cancer. But in the past few decades, new tools and new insights from across a range of scientific disciplines have made it clear that electricity is involved in all of these.

We are not talking about wall plug electricity here – this is bioelectricity, and it is generated in your cells. Every one of your 40 trillion cells is a little battery – and their voltage is more relevant in your biological processes than you probably ever realised.

People are starting to find out how to manipulate these tiny batteries in ways that could revolutionize the way we comprehend and treat our most common maladies.