Slashdot Mirror
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."
Use a headset. Leave the phone in your pocket or on your desk. You also get the benefit of having your hands free (for typing, or other activities)
Is there more radiation emanating from my cellphone or from the rest of the city ?
Is it safe ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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
quite a bit of difference between the minimum "safe" level of gigahertz RF and what a present day cell phone emits. Now those "brick" phones of my college days, those are another matter.....
What is this, global warming?
So 100 studies say there are no problems. And 100 say there are problems.
So there must be problems!
Have there been any similar studies on effects of the electromagnetic radiation from regular landline phones?
--JLockard - "Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." - Emo Phillips
Turns out it was the phone itself, and not the bills that were trying to kill me.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
This is almost tinfoil hat territory, but this sounds remarkably similar to the way tobacco companies once behaved. I wonder if any cellular companies have undergone their own private tests, and if so, I wonder what they have found.
Save the galaxy!
me loose brain? why me laugh?
hack a day
We'll all find out later in life when we're 40 and slobbering all over ourselves and mumbling incoherent nothings.
You're new around here aren't you?
: Radiats Biol Radioecol. 2003 Sep-Oct;43(5):541-3. Biological effects of mobile phone electromagnetic field on chick embryo (risk assessment using the mortality rate) [Article in Russian] Grigor'ev IuG. State Research Center-Institute of Biophysics, Ministry of Health of Russian Federation, Moscow, 123182 Rissua. yugrigor@rol.ru Chicken embryos were exposed to EMF from GSM mobile phone during the embryonic development (21 days). As a result the embryo mortality rate in the incubation period increased to 75% (versus 16% in control group). PMID: 14658287 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE
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.
The poster implies we should all worry because half of the studies say it's a health risk...
But by that same logic none of us should worry because half of the studies say there is no damage.
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."
Ah hell, who am I kidding, this is slashdot. I'm going to go burn my T610 now. That Bluetooth probably already killed my sperm anyway.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
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
So, just how much radiation *does* the government consider to be safe for rats?
I also remember see graphics that showed that the rad / cell phone leakage goes further into a teenagers (or small childs) brain then that of an adult for the obvious reason that a child's head is smaller...
.0001 of the time they really need it as opposed to the 99.999% of the time they are on the phone with their friends yapping worthlessly...
and guess who is the phone company's biggest new target over the last 3 years....? yep. teeenagers....
but who buys these phones for their kids? Adults...
Of course its for "safety" you know that
If i had a kid i would not let use one... yet parents don't even spend time to think of the health effects on their kids...
yet another sad statement on society...
I shouldn't be talking on my cell phone while waiting for my eats infront of the microwave oven?
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
Maybe it's true maybe it's not. In either case I suspect it's a little bit like NYC banning smoking in a city where walking down the street will get you a lungful of fried hydrocarbon rot bus diesel fumes. I tend to look at the actual effects in a world where the cell phone using population went from about zero to 800 million in 15 years. Is it really that big a risk given the huge numbers of users who aren't manifesting extremely and obviously high incidences of disease?
Let's issue standard cel phones to one group, placebo cel phones to another and see if there's any difference in cancer rates.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Russia has long had LOWER emission requirements than Western countries. Russian scientists are not stupid. See: http://www.gallawa.com/microtech/Ch3.html Quote from this site: "Rather than concentrating on the effects of high-intensity levels, 'Soviet scientists were focusing their efforts on the lesser-known effects of prolonged or repeated exposure to low levels of microwaves. Their research, which began quite some time before that of their Western counterparts, has yielded some rather unsettling reports. Soviet studies show that long-term exposure to low levels of microwave energy could result in unpleasant effects that are not attributable to over-heating (or thermal effect) alone. These effects could be seen at exposure levels at and below 10mw/cm2, which is the occupational safety standard in the U.S. The USSR, and other European countries, has thus set their own strict guidelines for microwave safety, concluding that Western safety standards are simply not safe. For example, Russian workers are required to wear protective goggles any time they are temporarily exposed to a microwave radiation level of 1mw/cm2, a level routinely allowed to leak (although in recent years, rarely does) from U.S. microwave ovens." Personally I think the Russians know a lot we don't....
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?
Also the base stations (GSM, UMTS) are reported (scientifically) to cause brain damage.
www.stopumts.nl is a good dutch site of one guy fighting against these types of radation, after noticing health problems himself.
I look at this as the thing that we will be laughed at by people in 100 years. Think 100 years ago, people used to wear radioactive radium watches, and 60 years ago, people exposed themselves to harmful amounts of radiation to make sure their shoes fit properly. Hell, Marie Curie, the father (mother) of modern radioactive theory kept a beaker full of radium next to her bed because it made a swell nightlight. Now, nobody is going to accuse her of being stupid, seeing as how she developed the initial scientific theory leading to most of what we know about physics today. It's just that they didn't know any better. Nowadays, we say "She did WHAT?!?"
I think in 100 years they will be saying "They did WHAT?!? They put microwave transmitters RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR BRAINS! What morons!" The cell phone industry can fight it all they want, but the cigarette industry didn't acknowledge that cigarettes were addivtive until the 1990's.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
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 there will be a lot of calls of bullshit, but here goes.
My first phone was an analog Nokia. I don't recall the model but I still have it here someplace. It took me awhile to realize the cause, but every time I used it, I'd get a headache and a weird sensation on that side of my head. A tingly hot feeling, almost felt like a hairdryer when it's too close to your head. Also slightly scattered in my thinking. Like it was hard to concentrate.
This was before I ever heard a peep about even the possiblity of radiation being a problem so it wasn't in my imagination. I never felt anything like that outside of using that phone. Never happend again after I stopped using it either (about 7 years ago)
After the realization, I was like Kirk and his communicator. I'd say something quickly and then hold it away from my head as far as I could while still being able to hear. My calls also got amazingly terse.
I hung on to it thinking of getting it tested one day. How could (where would) you go about measuring the radiation?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Fifty years from now our grandkids could be laughing at us for holding such dangerous devices up to our heads.
That's why I keep my mobile in my front trousers-pocket. There's no chance I'll be laughed at by grandkids.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
This site has a list of SAR ratings. For a phone to pass FCC certification, the phone's maximum SAR level must be less than 1.6W/kg (watts per kilogram). The SAR levels shown in the linked chart represent the maximum SAR level with the phone next to the ear.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
There are two major issues here. The first one is reproducibility. If you look hard enough in the literature you can find a study that can support any conclusion. Errors are made and statistical variations will occur but if an effect is real it needs to be reproduced consistently. This has not been the case for effects from non-ionizing radiation in general and seeing that this is a paper from 1995, for this case in particular.
Now one can argue that maybe the few positive results are the real ones and that experimental technology is just not very good. Fair enough but there is a second issue here. There is no plausible mechanism for DNA damage from non-ionizing radiation aside from possibly heating. Again, it doesn't mean that one doesn't exist but this is in stark contrast to damage from ionizing radiation where the basic mechanisms have been known for decades.
With no body of reproducible results and no plausible mechanism, the null hypothesis that there is no effect is the one is generally accepted. You should, of course, pass your own judgement on the risk involved - I'm just trying to explain why these results are consigned to Electromagnetics rather than gracing the front pages of Science and Nature.
In the case of global warming, of course, basically it's unanimous among scientists who aren't bought and paid for by the energy industry. (Even the Bush administration admits global warming is happening -- they just say we should "study" what to do about it for a few more decades.) The only holdouts are people susceptible to the industry's disinformation campaign.
So hey -- good analogy, way to go.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
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.
You're thinking politically here.
Think as a researcher instead -- you can't prove a negative in science (you apparently can in politics, at least for decades at a time while avoiding action).
200 studies. At the standard for significance, five percent of those -- ten -- would be expected to show an effect by random chance alone.
100 studies -- ten times what you'd expect from random chance -- reported an effect.
--> There is an entire field of industrial chemistry using microwave pumping of chemical reactions to selectively favor one reaction path or another, changing the yield and outcome of batch production. There is no doubt at all that moving molecules around with microwaves changes chemical reactions. Nobody's sure HOW yet.
--> "No proven mechanism" -- it works, they don't know how it works, whether rearranging the pattern or movement of molecules alters the rate at which certain reactions happen.
--> "No proven mechanism" -- legally, you can't prove HOW it could happen so it can't happen (that's the legal/regulatory approach).
So we have an effect that's solid enough to build industrial chemical plants on, but not solid enough to believe is possible legally.
------
What do you think of intelligent life on earth?
I think it would be a good idea.
"Sorta" on both counts. Modern digital (GSM / CDMA / etc) phones change the game somewhat from the old analog cell days. First, even when you're busy talking on the phone the transmitter is not spewing constant power. The radio is only keyed up when there is enough buffered audio data to send (which happens fairly frequently though).
When the phone is idle, it still occasionally talks back to the tower to exchange info about its location (the network needs to know what area you're in for it to ring you when you receive a call) and other bits of data like SMS, message alerts, and even the local time. The majority of the traffic is directed to your phone and not to the network, so these exchanges radiate very little power over time.
As for the effect on your guts, well, I have doubts that the average phone at an average 100mW can penetrate far into tissue. Radio at microwave frequencies tends to stay on the surface of a conductor (skin effect) and beneath the outer layers of skin we're fairly conductive. Combined with the fact that cellphones have omnidirectional antennas, and therefore follow the inverse square law pretty closely, I'd say that the inch or so that your cellphone case puts between you and the phone makes any possible danger to your cajones (or otherwise) minimal.
2: Mobile phone antennas are designed to use your skull as part of the antenna system; they DELIBERATELY radiate into your head!
I call bullshit on this.
Considering the general decline of manners and overall public behaviour, we can confidently say that cellphone usage has caused cerebral damage.
Not commonly known outside scientific circles, the radiation specifically targets the cellula oblongata. Keeping it in the pocket, on the other hand, causes the Ericsson dysfunction syndrome.
Let's be realistic about this.
Cell phones (particularly digital phones) operate at the gigahertz range. Microwaves are a natural frequency to travel through space with minimal loss or interference (one reason why seti@home looks at those frequencies). So do microwave ovens. The reason why microwaves work is because the energy they pump into the microwave get absorbed into and excite the water molecules, producing heat. My 600 watt microwave takes 2 minutes to heat up a cup of water to the boiling point, and that's in a space designed to trap and to preserve the entire microwave energy. A cell phone peaks at about 4 watts and radiates the energy in every direction, most of it not to return to the operator of that phone and if it all did, would take probably 5 hours to heat that same cup of water. Given that the average human body contains many many many more cups of water than what I put in my microwave, any extra heat produced by 4 watts of microwave energy is easily transformed and radiated away from the skin.
In order to damage DNA it usually requires far more energy as it means breaking the molecular bonds. UV-B on up to XRays for example have sufficient engery to penetrate the skin with the energy required to break those molecular bonds. UV-A is not sufficient to cause skin cancer, but UB-B is. If the entire electromagnetic spectrum is sufficient to cause cancer, we might as well live in a lead box, because we'd all be F**KED before we even got to puberty and the entire gene pool would be done for in a single generation.
Although I can't dismiss the possibility of microwaves giving someone cancer, it's far more likely to do nothing more than give you that warm fuzzy feeling of having one.
The wave length emitted by cell phones is too long/short (I can't remember) to do cellular damage. Period. Next problem.
I just have to comment.
Two things:
Cell phones emit a pretty powerful signal. Speakers near the phone can be modulated on an incoming call. Nothing else I own does that. And this happens when the speakers are off. (And yes, the frequencies in use have a lot to do with that and that's my point!)
My second accidential observation is even more spooky. Back when I was short of cash, I fixed a microwave that was broken, but was afraid to use it without a way to be sure it was still safe. Someone got me one of those little microwave radiation detectors, sold at Radio Shack. It's a little handheld device with no batteries, just a flat antenna you point near the microwave.
Happened to be testing a friends new microwave because the cheap ones are pretty loose in front. (Don't put your face near the glass on one of the low end models, unless you don't enjoy the current state of your frontal lobes.) The cell phone was nearby and received a call. I could hear the *click* as the needle went off the high end of the scale. --That has made me think a little harder about this since it happened a few months back.
Of course, the windings in the meter could have been responding as the speakers did. Either way, that's enough RF saturation to be considered unsafe by Amateur radio standards.
I agree with the eariler poster that pointed out we used to wear radioactive watches and X-ray our feet. My gut says we are going to find something wrong with the phones in the future.
My symptoms, after longer cell use, are ringing in the ears. I don't use my cell as much as I used to and my right ear will, on occasion, just start ringing for no reason. That's the ear I most often choose when I am not thinking about things and just answer the phone.
Ok, so that's three things, whatever.
Blogging because I can...
There are numerous international studies which have seen various effects. This is unlike cold fusion, where the results couldn't be reproduced.
On the contrary, it is very similar. Some people claimed to reproduce the results, others could not. It is more accurate to say that they could not be reliably reproduced. Here is a recent DOE review
Note also that it is a lot easier to get positive results published than negative. So when I hear, "half the studies support it, and half don't," that tells me that it is very hard indeed to reproduce.
Furthermore, if you had read the article, you'll see that researchers are explicitly facing harassment by the industry. Many are being driven out because of this harassment.
By and large, industry has little power to drive anybody out of research. But to get continued grant funding for something as improbable as this, a researcher would have to show clear progress in elucidating the mechanism.
As for industry, I am sure that they are concerned about possible public relations or liability fallout from such research. But they probably also sincerely believe that is nonsense--because in terms of known mechanisms, it makes little sense.
Think of it like throwing stones in a pond; it'll take a lot of people doing that at the same time for a ripple to capsize a boat at a distance; but the force exerted on the water at the locus is probably enough to punch a hole through your boat.
If you prefer another analogy, think of people talking -- you aren't going to get a headache from someone a long way away yelling at your friend sitting beside you -- their voicewaves are distributed, with the signal getting fainter at any specific location the more dispersed they become. The problem happens when your friend, with his mouth right beside your ear, yells back.
There is an entire field of research in industrial chemistry right now to see how microwaves can affect chemical reactions and promote certain reaction paths over others. You don't have to break an molecular bond to have an effect on chemistry. Microwave heating, even at very low levels, can significant speed up certain reactions. Enzymes in particular seem subject to this effect at very low power levels. (Read this, look for a paragraph 2/3 down.)
Futhermore, I remembered some of Lai's more recent research just a few seconds ago. Remember an article several months ago about 50-60 Hz magnetic fields doing DNA damage to rat brains? That was the same guy.
Basically, in his paper, he put forth the theory that an iron-mediated reaction is going wrong when rats are exposed to alternating magnetic fields. Even though the fields are not enough to break covalent bonds, there is an iron-mediated reaction that turn hydrogen peroxide into hydroxyl free radicals that they theorize is affected by the magnetic fields. When they introduced an oxidative free radical chelating agent into the mice, DNA damage from magnetic fields ceased.
You can read more on it here.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Check this FAQ for good reference material. I started reading the author's work about power lines and antennas several years ago and he is a fact based resource for information about the effects of radio radiation. http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/cop/cell-phone-health-FAQ/ toc.html
I know a woman who has electromagnetic field sensebility. She can feel a CRT Monitor being switched on in the other room or on another floor and feels it especially intense at certain angles (yepp, it's the vertical and horizontal coils). She's allready had the effect scientifically examined. :-)
She also senses mobile radiocell handshakes nearby (5-7 meters) and has a habbit of anouncing a phonecall just a second before a mobile rings. Quite irritating for people not knowing this/ believing her and funny to watch aswell.
However, her life is hell most of the time. People usually don't believe her and think she's crazy. She's having a hard time asking the neighbor that lives above her (a copmuter geek) to switch of his CRT when he's not using it. Basically she's one of those candidates who would be best of sleeping in a faraday cage.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's obvious that cell phones cause mutations. Ever watch anyone talk on a cell phone while driving a car? They are turned into inconsiderate, oblivious assholes.
"Wonder twin powers, Activate! Form of a cell phone user driving a car! Oh, wait. Make that from of an asshole."
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Both the normal protein, called PrP^C for prion (related) protein cellular, and diseased form, called PrP^Sc for scrapie, are the same stereoisomer as far as we know. They are different conformations, different foldings of the same protein. Stereoisomerism and chemical conformation are not the same. Read more about prion.
Actually, you may be affected by radiation directly below an antenna. While there is a null in the far-field pattern in this direction, you must consider the near-field effects. Assuming a vertical dipole, there is a 1/(R^3) field in that very direction!
An example:
Verizon recently wanted to put a cell station on top of the engineering building at my campus. The EE department is on the top couple floors, and a professor was very concerned about the 200 kW station that Verizon wanted to install interfering with experiments in the labs which are about 20 feet below where the antennas would be located. The professor had to convince the Verizon people that the far-field pattern did not completely describe the field, especially at such close ranges. In the end, Verizon put a less-powerful cell station on another building on campus (I believe it is where the school's administrators offices are housed).
I'll take you to the ball, Barbara Manitee!!!
What you say is true of a device that only RECEIVES signals, such as a pocket AM/FM radio. But a cellphone also TRAMSITS signals, and that is where the alleged problem is. The transmitted signals have to be receivable by the base station up to 5 km away, which means they have to be rather strong as they are originally trasmitted from the source - the source that is right next to your head.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
...supporting that assertion?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing