The Story Behind Cell Phone Radiation Research 560
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."
Biological effects on chick embryo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps a bluetooth headset can minimize the energy which your DNA in the brain has to absorb.
Russian Microwave emission standards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:2, Informative)
Not only telephones! (Score:3, Informative)
www.stopumts.nl is a good dutch site of one guy fighting against these types of radation, after noticing health problems himself.
Re:So ? (Score:2, Informative)
1: (most) Mobile phones have vertical monopole antennae - ergo they radiate best sideways (i.e. into your head!)
2: Mobile phone antennas are designed to use your skull as part of the antenna system; they DELIBERATELY radiate into your head!
An aside; one of the places you are less likely to be affected by radiation from the base-station antenna, is right below it. It takes about 40m range before the signal radiates widely enough to reach the ground (due to the height of the transmitter)
Re:Half of 200? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
Lai says there have been about 200 studies on the biological effects of cell-phone-related radiation. If you put all the ones that say there is a biological effect on one side and those that say there is no effect on the other, you'd have two piles roughly equal in size. The research splits about 50-50.
"That, in and of itself, is alarming," Lai says. But it's not the whole story. If you divide up the same 200 studies by who sponsored the research, the numbers change.
"When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one--three out of every four papers shows an effect," Lai says. "Then, if you look at the industry-funded research, it's almost opposite--only one out of every four papers shows an effect."
SAR Testing (Score:5, Informative)
This site [sarshield.com] 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.
Your warming comparison is better than you think (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:only when on ? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Half of 200? (Score:5, Informative)
Ever try to get a null result published?
I believe that industry-sponsored research is biased. But simply because research is not industry-sponsored does not mean it is not biased.
In particular, what a scientist wants to see in an experiment is a positive effect, an non-null result. I've seen people (in genetics, as it happens) do terrible things to their data to get a non-null result, and carefully massage the statistics to make a result that deviates from the null hypothesis by a miniscule amount look significant.
Why?
Because it's a hell of a lot easier (to say nothing of more personally satisifying) to do all this work, kill all these rats, and at the end of the day be able to say something more interesting than, "Nothing to see here, move along..."
--Tom
Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Informative)
Proteins and enzymes, and probably even DNA (IANABC) rely heavily on steric (shape) effects to do their work. Why cannot microwaves cause a molecule to flip and turn into a stereoisomer of itself ?
Consider the horrors of, for example, prions [prohosting.com] such as those that cause CJD. Here is an example of a simple stereoisomer of a protein, wreaking havoc by its mere presence causing the production of more of the wrong stereoisomer.
So, Maybe if microwave radiation does not affect DNA, what about the proteins found around it that function to repair and monitor damage ? How about turning them into stereoisomers and stopping them from functioning ?
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, apparently all headset wires will act as an antenna for cell phone signals, even in models where that's not part of the designed functionality. Studies have shown that using a wired headset can increase your exposure to cell phone radiation by up to 3X. However, clipping a ferrite bead on the wire is suffcient to dampen radio coming off it to negligible levels. These beads are really easy to find online.
Perhaps a bluetooth headset can minimize the energy which your DNA in the brain has to absorb.
A bluetooth headset does use significantly less
power than a cell phone. I believe the SAR for a bluetooth headset is less than 0.1 W as opposed to the 0.6-1.2 W for an average digital cell phone.
Re:Brown and Williamson (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Original paper author has moved on (Score:3, Informative)
Microwaves & Magnets (Score:3, Informative)
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 [i-sis.org.uk].
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes.
On any phone that gets a dial tone, you can call 911. And when you 'disconnect your service' you still have a dial tone...and can only call 911 or the phone company.
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:5, Informative)
The flip side is how little the heart can repair itself. Recovery from heart attacks is consequently poor. Heart tissue dies, and it stays dead. The undamaged heart muscle can compensate somewhat. The dead tissue may weaken and even rupture. Using stem cells to regrow heart tissue may work someday. A few clinical reports have been promising.
Lung cancer would be rare, although not as rare as heart cancer, if not for cigarette smoking.
Re:Original paper author has moved on (Score:2, Informative)
"# Why aren't cancer rates much higher in nations with significantly more cell phones/coverage- say, Japan for example?
# Why hasn't brain cancer increased in the last 20 years as cell phone usage has gone from near zero to a major percentage of the population? I also don't hear much about "cancer of the hip"..."
Cancer rates don't have to shoot up for something to be a problem. An increase of one premature death in 10,000 is considered the maximum allowable by most standards. You would'nt notice such an increase without a broad epidemialogical study. Just because everyone with a cell phone isn't walking around with cantalope-sized tumors growing out of their heads, doesn't mean everything is fine. And like others have pointed out, cancer takes time to develop.
"Why is it that hundreds of millions microwaves are in use today? Why is it that dozens of words tossed around in tin foil articles articles are made-up, like "d-Nitrosodienthanolamines"? Google that, and notice that the only place google can find it is in the same sentence: "d-Nitrosodienthanolamines, a well known carcinogen". If it's so well known, how come you can only find references to it in Tin Foil Hat articles?"
Which one was the "Tin Foil Hat article", the UW article, or the peer-reviewed Bioelectromagnetics journal article? Here's some info about N-nitrosodiethanolamine [osha.gov]. I hope OSHA isn't too tinfoil hattish for you. Sorry you lack any knowledge of organic chemistry and the ability to effectively use google.
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:3, Informative)
I did not say that higher ferquencies were more dangerous. I was making the point that bluetooth operates at a frequency whereby 70% of our body mass (water) will/might/could absorb this energy.
Re:Original paper author has moved on (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just like radium watches and flouroscopes. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't actually doubt the fundamental idea of your post. That things such as radium clock dials and x-ray shoe size machines were potentially harmful and that today we consider them stupid. People in the future could very well consider our current generation's cell phone usage stupid. But I want to point out the scientific fallacies that your post.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding about the word radiation in everyday speech. The most general definition is the transmission of energy through a medium. So a campfire generating heat is giving off radiation. The light coming off of your computer monitor is your CRT emitting radiation. When people say radiation they can mean a lot of different things. More confusing are when you add terms like radioactive.
When a nuclear particle such as radium or iridium decays it gives of particles. These particles were given the names alpha, beta, and gamma by early physicists. Today we know that nuclear decays give off helium nuclei (alpha), electrons (beta), photons (gamma), and neutron (no Greek name). When a particle decays some of it's energy is carried off into space by these particles. It is this loss of energy by an emission of a particle that is called radiation. Perhaps a more precise term is "nuclear radiation." When an element naturally gives off radiation it is called radioactive. All four of these particles can do harmful damage to human tissue. However, alpha particles are so heavy that even your clothes (and even air) can block their transmission.
Beta, gamma, and neutrons can be dangerous because they can cut your DNA strands in the nucleus of your cells. Although you cells can repair a cut strand, exposure to thousands of particles can cut a strange many times, which results in the cell being unable to divide, and the death of said cell. Now I've only described one type of damage that can occur. The human body is a complex mechanism that can receive complex radiation damage. I am not an expert in this field.
The word radiation becomes confusing when you move to the realm of photons. Recall that the electro-magnetic spectrum is made up of frequencies ranging from the very high (gamma-rays, x-rays) to the very low (radio waves). When your turn on a light bulb, the photons that are emitted are in the visible and infrared ranges. That is why you see "light" and feel "heat." Radiation is responsible for both of these phenomenon. In this case radiation refers to the emission of photons with energy. The amount of energy emitted is described by a very simple formula:
So high energy photons, such as gammas that nuclear decays emit, carry a lot of energy. This is why gamma-rays and x-rays can be harmful. But low frequency waves such as infrared, microwaves, and radio waves carry much lower amounts of energy. The difference between a gamma-ray and a microwave can be almost 10 orders of magnitude.
Cells phones transmit their signals on microwaves. Cell towers emit radiation in the form a microwave photons and cells phone also emit radiation in the form of microwave photons. I use the term microwaves here not because the frequency of the cell phone transmission is the same as the waves in your kitchen microwave, but because they are higher in frequency than radio waves but smaller in freq. than infrared waves. They carry much less energy than the x-rays mentioned in your post. Cell phones also don't emit any alpha, beta, or neutrons in appreciable numbers.
So after reading all this are cell phones dangerous because they emit photons? Does the energy of said photons affect the human brain? I have no idea. But I just want you (guys) to understand the physics behind the word radiation. As we see it took a long post to explain what exactly a word that is often used but frequently misunderstood.
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:2, Informative)
Indeed, any form of muscle cancer is very rare. Cancer of the bicep or perhaps abdominals anyone?
Higher-order terms (Score:2, Informative)
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).
Re:marked "insightful" by an idiot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So ? (Score:3, Informative)
There is a reason for that. The sky can't suddenly develop a crack or leak and expose him to deadly doses of radiation in minutes.
Umm, no. The dosimeter a Navy nuke wears will (reasonably) accurately indicate radiation doses in the range it was designed for - which is about three orders of magnitude below the level of "deadly doses of radiation in minutes".
And, frankly, if a reactor had a hole that will allow you to die of radiation exposure "in minutes", you'd have a bigger problem with being parboiled by the escaping steam.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
They don't even have to do it directly. There have been studies recently suggesting significant effects of microwave radiation on the blood-brain barrier, which could cause any number of brain-damaging compounds to cross the barrier. The studies I saw covered wireless router / bluetooth wavelengths and power levels, and indicated potentially harmful effects there, but I haven't seen any yet at cell phone wavelengths.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
Ionizing radiation (ultraviolet light and above) is known to damage DNA. It does so because individual photons carry enough energy to disrupt chemical bonds. Microwave photons are too low energy to do this, so if they damage DNA, they must do so by another, novel mechanism.
Are tumors, cancers and other symptoms of damaged DNA normal?
In a sense, yes. First, we are all exposed to some ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and from decay of natural radioactive minerals. DNA can also be damaged by chemical reactions with reactive chemicals. Cellular metabolism actually "leaks" reactive free radicals. There are mechanisms to clean them this cellular pollution, but much as in the external world, there is a cost to this, and beyond a certain point, cleaning them up just isn't "cost-effective," evolutionarily speaking, so a certain amount of cancer risk is accepted.
Re:Trivial solution ... (Score:5, Informative)