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The Story Behind Cell Phone Radiation Research
XopherMV writes "A study by Lai and Singh, published in a 1995 issue of Bioelectromagnetics, found an increase in damaged DNA in the brain cells of rats after a single two-hour exposure to microwave radiation at levels considered "safe" by government standards. The idea behind that study was relatively simple: expose rats to microwave radiation similar to that emitted by cell phones, then examine their brain cells to see if any DNA damage resulted.
The news was apparently unwelcome in some quarters.
According to internal documents that later came to light, Motorola started working behind the scenes to minimize any damage Lai's research might cause even before the study was released. In a memo and a draft position paper dated Dec. 13, 1994, officials talked about how they had "war-gamed the Lai-Singh issue" and were in the process of lining up experts who would be willing to point out weaknesses in Lai's study and reassure the public.
To this day, the cell phone industry continues to dispute Lai and Singh's findings although half of about 200 studies say there is a biological effect from cell phone radiation.
Read more in UW Columns."
P.S. I see this study was done at my alma-matter, the University of Washington. I wonder if my old roommate Jim Oliver might have been affected, since he did handstands from our 7th floor balcony railing - maybe he should have been wearing a tin-foil hat? ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I fully understand the use of vivisection; I'm even going to say that I am pro animal testing (lets watch the flames now :S)
However, a human is NOT a rat. Our skulls are thicker, our neurons interconnect differently, there is different bloodflow around the cranial cavity and the meninges is more complex in humans. We are not looking for research related to biochemistry, we are looking at physical abstraction.
I would give this research a second look if it were performed on primates, but a rat just isnt a proper comparitive test.
Reminds me of the internal cigarette documents that came to light in the tobacco trials. I wonder if there will be enough people injured to have massive class action suits.
Althoguh from what I understand the new digital cells are nothing like analog phones for the amount of energy they put out. I know when I'm in an analog only area my phone goes flat in less than a day, compared to 3-4 days when I have digital service. So anecdotally I'm seeing maybe 1/3 to 1/4 of the power output with digital.
Is there more radiation emanating from my cellphone or from the rest of the city ?
I know it sounds weird, but when I was at University of Missouri-Rolla, I did some work at the nuclear reactor on campus. There is far less radiation inside the reactor building (not inside the reactor core itself) than there is outside on the hockey puck (a big concrete circle in the middle of campus). So, if you are worried about radiation, just move into a nuclear reactor building.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Have you any numbers of the power levels ? Bluetooth uses lower levels AFAIK. Still not optimal, but probably better. More insights on this topic are very welcome.
A cell tower was recently installed very near our home. A level-head and concerned neighbor went around with a petition, not to force the removal of the tower, but, restrainedly, just to demand that the community be involved in any such future decisions that may impact health and well being, him noting his concerns about the health impact of the tower. We signed the petition. Is there any research showing negative health effects of nearby cell towers, especially on children?
--- What?
That's not tinfoil talk at all. It happens constantly.
Sugar company lobbyists basically tried to label the WHO as idiots and liars when they published reports that recommended decreased sugar consumption as means of increasing cardiovascular health and reducing obesity.
I'm not even going to get in on the fast-food industry.
This is just yet another example of the corporations exerting their stranglehold on US policy to up profits, damn the consequences.
It's really amazing the kind of short-sightedness they exhibit, considering that consumers, and by extension, healthy consumers, are their prime income creating resource.
The energy per photon is just too low to break covalent bonds, so there is no way microwave energy could break DNA directly, unless you pump in enough energy to cook it.
So you really have to resort to some fancy hypotheses to rationalize this. Well maybe, just maybe, there is some kind of a resonance of the current through an ion channel (although I'm not entirely sure that this is even plausible), which somehow alters its coupling to some intracellular kinase or other second messenger system, which activates an enzyme that happens to produce free radicals, and those break DNA. But I'd have to see some definitive evidence before I take that kind of hypothesis seriously.
The point is that "microwaves damage DNA" is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. "Some studies support it and some do not" simply doesn't qualify.
I'm skeptical of "DNA break" assays, anyway. There is a long history of people finding DNA damage by this and that, and others failing to reproduce the result. It's easy to break DNA--you can even break it by rough handling.
But in the early 90's the computer industry and U.S. military quashed a paper to be released by the U.S. EPA that listed low frequency electromagnetic radiation from, among other sources, desktop PC power supplies as a Class B Carcinogen.
m
http://www.mercola.com/article/emf/emf_dangers.ht
Everybody's all up in arms about cell phones, but if you're parked in front of a desktop you might possibly have at least as much to worry about from other sources.
Well-balanced site which gives several takes on the issue:
http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/emf.htm#dangerous
I know it sounds weird, but when I was at University of Missouri-Rolla, I did some work at the nuclear reactor on campus. There is far less radiation inside the reactor building (not inside the reactor core itself) than there is outside on the hockey puck (a big concrete circle in the middle of campus).
Not really - reactors emit very little radiation beyond the reactor vessel / primary containment; amd teh secondary is an effective shield from natural radiation.
A nuke submariner recieves a smaller dose that an airline flight crew or a Navy pilot - though paradoxically he wears a dosimeter while aviators don't.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is a Nobel Prize-category topic. Our existing understanding of physics and biochemistry is simply insufficient to account for any interaction between microwave radiation and DNA.
I agree. Its current status is about the same as cold fusion. Right now we have a bunch of scattered hard-to-explain and hard-to-reproduce results in the literature, mostly in minor journals, and it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. It could easily all be artifact. What is needed to give this field some credibility is some real progress on the question of mechanism.
The long wire between the phone and the headset can also be a source of signal, sometimes stronger than what is measured from the intended antenna as I recall. Searching for info is needle-in-haystack right now with all the crap being published about this, but it was discussed a few years ago.
You have to actually test for the situation, not assume that making a change will solve the problem.
One relatively likely solution is using a hollow tube instead of a wire for the earpiece; sound travels fine from phone to ear that way. And the microphone for voice-to-phone should (test!) be electrically isolated from the phone's amplifier.
Heck -- just put optical transducers in, use a little light guide instead of a wire for the entire headset. Problem solved.
But maybe making a safe headset would be like making a safe cigarette -- the lawyers would never let it happen if it could be considered an admission of liability.
Over your heart is the best place. That region is generally very tolerant to most environmental effects and mutagens. Ever heard of anyone getting heart cancer?
(OK, lung cancer exists, but what do you expect when you fill them with toxins)
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
I'm a minimalist w/ my cellphone for reasons other than radiation... but seems to me we need something better than "50% of studies say it's an issue."
This is the problem with sound-bytes. If you actually read the article, you'd notice that a lot of the article is about industry tainting of research through a carrot-and-stick approach. Lai notes that if you split up the studies into publicly and industry funded studies, you see that 75% of publicly funded studies show a problem and 80% of industry funded studies show no problem.
In other words, 75% of studies with no obvious pro-industry conflict of interest say that it's an issue. Not that it matters for those who don't want to change their lives; merely 5% of researchers (and a host of people who aren't climate scientists) dissenting has been good enough for people who don't want to act on global warming.
Bah, the other poster's elephants analogy is a better counter-argument anyway.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...not the same wavelenght so not the same thing at all. From what I remember Bluetooth os around 2.4... GHz and cellphones are aroung 900 MHz and 1800 MHz.
Now I am not a physycist so I am sure that someone will correct me....
Now the thing that is critical is how much energy we are absorving from the phone. The frequency for microwave ovens is 2450MHz. this is the frequency where the water gets most excited by the radiation. Now you can and should argue that we have lots of other molecules in our body and they will all absorve at different frequencies. However we contain alot of water... If you ask my uninformed opinion I would rather have a mobile than bluetooth strapped to my head.
I can not answer how the power will come into it. Is 2450MHz at low power worse than 1800MHz at high power..?
Maybe someone informed can comment.