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By Root 774 0

charlatanism—useless pills and nostrums. Researchers did amass data on human subjects, usually students or retired people, or playwrights with plays to finish, willing to accept a few hundred dollars a week to live in “time isolation”: no daylight, no temperature change, no clocks, and no telephones. People have a sleep-wake cycle and also a body-temperature cycle, both nonlinear oscillators that restore themselves after slight perturbations. In isolation, without a daily resetting stimulus, the temperature cycle seems to be about twenty-five hours, with the low occurring during sleep. But experiments by German researchers found that after some weeks the sleep-wake cycle would detach itself from the temperature cycle and become erratic. People would stay awake for twenty or thirty hours at a time, followed by ten or twenty hours of sleep. Not only would the subjects remain unaware that their day had lengthened, they would refuse to believe it when told. Only in the mid–1980s, though, did researchers begin to apply Winfree’s systematic approach to humans, starting with an elderly woman who did needlepoint in the evening in front of banks of bright light. Her cycle changed sharply, and she reported feeling great, as if she were driving in a car with the top down. As for Winfree, he had moved on to the subject of rhythms in the heart.

CHEMICAL CHAOS. Waves propagating outward in concentric circles and even spiral waves were signs of chaos in a widely studied chemical reaction, the Beluzov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Similar patterns have been observed in dishes of millions of amoeba. Arthur Winfree theorized that such waves are analogous to the waves of electrical activity coursing through heart muscles, regularly or erratically.

Actually, he would not have said “moved on.” To Winfree it was the same subject—different chemistry, same dynamics. He had gained a specific interest in the heart, however, after he helplessly witnessed the sudden cardiac deaths of two people, one a relative on a summer vacation, the other a man in a pool where Winfree was swimming. Why should a rhythm that has stayed on track for a lifetime, two billion or more uninterrupted cycles, through relaxation and stress, acceleration and deceleration, suddenly break into an uncontrolled, fatally ineffectual frenzy?

WINFREE TOLD THE STORY of an early researcher, George Mines, who in 1914 was twenty-eight years old. In his laboratory at McGill University in Montreal, Mines made a small device capable of delivering small, precisely regulated electrical impulses to the heart.

“When Mines decided it was time to begin work with human beings, he chose the most readily available experimental subject: himself,” Winfree wrote. “At about six o’clock that evening, a janitor, thinking it was unusually quiet in the laboratory, entered the room. Mines was lying under the laboratory bench surrounded by twisted electrical equipment. A broken mechanism was attached to his chest over the heart and a piece of apparatus nearby was still recording the faltering heartbeat. He died without recovering consciousness.”

One might guess that a small but precisely timed shock can throw the heart into fibrillation, and indeed even Mines had guessed it, shortly before his death. Other shocks can advance or retard the next beat, just as in circadian rhythms. But one difference between hearts and biological clocks, a difference that cannot be set aside even in a simplified model, is that a heart has a shape in space. You can hold it in your hand. You can track an electrical wave through three dimensions.

To do so, however, requires ingenuity. Raymond E. Ideker of Duke University Medical Center read an article by Winfree in Scientific American in 1983 and noted four specific predictions about inducing and halting fibrillation based on nonlinear dynamics and topology. Ideker didn’t really believe them. They seemed too speculative and, from a cardiologist’s point of view, so abstract. Within three years, all four had been tested and confirmed, and Ideker was conducting an advanced program