During Becker’s public involvement in the four-year powerline hearings, his grant renewal requests were denied, sometimes without explanation; a main NIH grant that had funded positions in his lab for over a decade was terminated, as was his grant to study acupuncture. Soon after he lost the grants, during an interview on “60 Minutes” in February 1977 regarding the Navy’s proposed Sanguine antenna, Becker suggested that the National Academy of Sciences committee then evaluating the safety of the antenna was biased against finding biological effects. The Academy president Philip Handler, who had selected the committee, called for Becker’s firing; Becker continued to function as a staff physician but lost his appointment as Medical Investigator, which had the effect of reducing his staff by half. In early 1979 the Veterans Administration closed his laboratory; with no capacity to continue his research, he retired. He was 56. In his preface to a 1985 book about the New York hearings and aftermath, he wrote that the book revealed not only the health hazard, but also “the hazards…of raising the issue.”

In the years following his forced retirement, Becker wrote extensively about his research in articles, books, and public testimony, recounting its history, explaining its meaning, and providing what he viewed as a coherent basis for examining medical issues in general and the specific issue of electromagnetic health risks. He cofounded the Journal of Bioelectricity (subsequently Electromagnetic Medicine and Biology), gave the 1983 President’s Guest Address before the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, and testified again in congressional hearings on health risks from electromagnetic technologies. 

Becker articulated his views in four books. In Electromagnetism and Life, published in 1982, he argued that exposure to artificial environmental electromagnetic energy was a general biologic stressor and can produce functional changes in biological systems. Mechanisms of Growth Control, published in 1981, was the proceedings of an international conference on regeneration that he organized. Writing for a general audience in The Body Electric in 1985 and Cross Currents in 1990, Becker summarized his research and his views on science and medicine in historical perspective.

He patented a cell-modification process in which cells were dedifferentiated by ions from electrically positive silver electrodes; the modified cells were said to be capable of regenerating organs and tissues. An FDA-approved clinical study of his method was sponsored by the Sybron Corporation at the LSU Medical School in Shreveport to study the safety and efficacy of the method for treating osteomyelitis, but the Sybron product was not brought to market.