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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
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.
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.