Cells can be funny. Try to grow them with a slightly wrong recipe, and they turn over and die. But hit them with an electric field strong enough to knock over a horse, and they do enough things to justify international meetings, to fill a sizable book, and to lead one to speak of an entirely new technology for cell manipulation. The very improbability of these events not only raises questions about why things happen but also leads to a long list of practical systems in which the application of strong electric fields might enable the merger of cell contents or the introduction of alien but...