Printed copies of "Wheel on Trial" are available for $12.50 each ($15 outside the U.S.)
Contact Information
(quantity discounts available)
April 28… Another Interphone researcher is expressing concern over the tumor risks associated with the long-term use of mobile phones. "I think the evidence that is accumulating is
pointing towards an effect of mobile phones on tumors," Professor Bruce Armstrong of the University of Sydney School of Public Health told
"TodayTonight," an Australian current affairs show on Channel 7, a national network.
"I would not want to be a heavy user of a mobile phone," Armstrong said. "People might be shocked to hear that the evidence does seem to be coming more strongly in support of
harmful effects."
The ten-year Interphone data has clearly changed Armstrong's outlook. A few years ago, he told the Sydney Morning Herald that
"there is no consistent evidence that there is an increased risk of cancer," but even then he allowed that "it could be 15 years before we see an effect."
Armstrong, who is leading the Australian component of the Interphone project, is the second principal investigator of the 13 country teams to urge precaution. Last December,
Siegal Sadetzki of the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel told Haaretz, a national
newspaper, that, "The time is past when it could be said that this technology does not cause damage; apparently it damages health."
Neither the Australian nor the Israeli results on brain tumor or acoustic neuroma risks have yet been made public. Sadetzki has reported a significant increase of parotid gland tumors after
ten years of cell phone use. Her paper appeared in the February 15th issue of the
American Journal of Epidemiology.
Meanwhile, the final Interphone paper is still not finished. Just a few days ago, Elisabeth Cardis, who leads the overall Interphone study, told Microwave News that she hopes
that the combined results from all 13 countries will be submitted for publication "in the not too distant future." Cardis recently left IARC to join the Center for Research in
Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona.
The nine-minute piece also features an interview with Chris Zombolas, the technical director of EMC Technologies. In
measurements commissioned by the TV show, Zombolas found that a number of cell phones do not meet the 2W/Kg SAR standard when placed in a pocket and used with a hands-free
set or a BlueTooth transmitter. The worst of the four phones tested was a Nokia E65. Zombolas
measured an SAR of 3.35W/Kg at 1800MHz and an SAR of 5.84W/Kg at 2100 MHz. The Australian SAR standard is 2W/Kg.
[As of May 4, the TodayTonight segment, "Health Fears over Mobile Phones," can no longer be viewed on the program's Web page, only a brief synopsis is now available. Next-Up, the European activist group, has posted the complete video on its Web site, and it may also be viewed on a Yahoo video site.]
April 10… Vini Khurana hit the big time last week. The Australian neurosurgeon parlayed a 69-page
literature review on cell phones and brain tumors into a spot on the U.S.
NBC Nightly News. Call it the power of the sound bite.
The centerpiece of Khurana's report is his prediction that cell phone radiation would turn out to be a worse public-health disaster than either
smoking or asbestos. On March 27th, the Canberra Times, his hometown newspaper, wrote it up under the headline,
"Mobiles May Be a Death Sentence." This prompted
some chatter among EMF bloggers, but the big break came the following Sunday when the U.K. Independent ran its own story:
"Mobile Phones 'More Dangerous than Smoking'.''
Equating cell phones and tobacco is indeed provocative since we all know that smoking is a killer while the jury is still out on the health risks associated with using
a hand-held phone. In fact, this was not the first time a major British newspaper had drawn a parallel between the two. Last year the Times asked,
"Could [Mobile Phones] Be the Cigarettes of the 21st Century?"
The question may have been rhetorical, but the Times left nothing to the imagination. "Absolutely," it added.
The Times story was definitely noticed, but it was the Independent that touched a nerve. Minutes after the Web editors at the
Independent posted the story, it became one of the lead stories on the "Drudge Report," a favorite among those in search of the latest hot news and gossip. It didn't take long for Khurana's
warning to become the #1 most popular story (most read and
most e-mailed) on the Independent's Web site. It was still on the list, albeit at #10, a week later. In the meantime, hundreds, if not thousands,
of other publications and Web sites repeated the claim that using a cell phone might be worse than smoking.
Few American newspapers went along, but on April 3, Bob Bazell, NBC's chief science correspondent, aired an interview with Michael Thun of the American
Cancer Society on the Nightly News. The ACS has long maintained that the link between cell phones and cancer is nothing more than a "myth" (see MWN,
M/J03 and August 3, 2007), yet this time Thun allowed that there is some
"legitimate uncertainty" over what might happen following long-term, cell-phone use. (At this writing, the segment is still on the
NBC News Web site, look under "Health.")
Bazell was skeptical at best. Citing unnamed U.S. "experts," he dismissed Khurana's conclusions as "absurd" and concluded that there is "no evidence of danger."
Nevertheless he closed his piece with a precautionary hedge against the unknown. "It's never a bad idea to use your earpiece to get the antenna away from your head,"
he advised.
Why did Khurana's report get so much more media play than, for example, the BioInitiative Report,
which offers a much more detailed analysis of EMF health risks by some of the leading researchers in the field? Part of the reason is that Khurana is
a brain surgeon and it is only natural for people to think that he would know about brain tumor risks. (Hey, it is brain surgery!) That his report
offers little that is new may have been missed by those who never ventured beyond the "Key Messages" in its first few pages.
Another way to think about it is that the episode offers another lesson on the vagaries of what becomes news. Few can predict what stories will
catch the public's imagination, though a provocative sound bite always helps. Yet, a receptive audience is an important part of the equation. One
sure lesson of the Khurana episode is that the public, even though enamored by cell phones, has a latent concern about the long-term risks.
March 14… The Interphone saga gets weirder and weirder.
The latest chapter comes with the release, earlier this week, of a status report on EMFs and health by the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority (SSI).
Recent Research on EMF Health Risks, the fifth annual
report by an independent expert group, covers what was learned about various types of EMFs, from ELF to RF, in 2007. Here we address only what it says about
the latest Interphone results —or more precisely, what it does not say.
For reasons that we cannot begin to understand, the group headed by Anders Ahlbom
of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm never mentions what is arguably the most important cell phone study published last year: the Lahkola study, an analysis of the Interphone data from five northern European
countries. It points to a long-term risk of a brain tumor on the side of the head the phone was used. (See our post of January 22, 2007).
It is impossible that the SSI panel did not know of this meta-analysis. The second author of Lahkola, Anssi Auvinen of Finland's University of Tampere, is a member of the panel, and the
Karolinska's Maria Feychting, another Lahkola coauthor, is its scientific secretary. Indeed, Ahlbom is himself associated with the Interphone project and could hardly be unaware of Lahkola.
The Lahkola study was posted online on January 17, 2007 —at the very beginning of the year. For a moment, we thought it might have been included in last year's
SSI report. Not so.
Nor was the Lahkola paper the only Interphone study to be ignored by the SSI committee. The French and Israeli papers were also somehow left out. Both indicate a possible long-term tumor
risk. (We do allow that the Israeli study was published in December when this report was being finished, though we suspect that Auvinen and Feychting as members of the Interphone project would likely have been
aware of those results and the fact that they would soon be published.)
The panel did cite two new Interphone studies —a German one on acoustic neuroma and
Norwegian one on brain tumors. Neither showed an elevated risk.
Why were the three Interphone papers suggesting cell-phone tumor risks shunted aside while those showing no risks included? Is this about the power of money to keep the lid
on the cell phone health debate? Is this about political interference?
Whoever or whatever is responsible, it goes much deeper than Sweden's SSI. Of the seven members of the panel, five have strong ties to ICNIRP:
Three are members of the commission (Ahlbom, U.K.'s Richard Saunders and France's
Bernard Veyret), and two others are members of its standing committees (Finland's
Jukka Juutilianen
and U.S.' Leeka Kheifets).
The report is a reflection of the leadership of the EMF community and it indicates a need for change.
But first, we need an answer to the question: How could these studies have possibly been ignored?
February 15… If anyone is still not convinced that the completed
Interphone study should be released as soon as possible (see January 30), they need
look no further than how the Interphone results from Japan were handled last week.
A team led by Naohito Yamaguchi, Toru Takebayashi and Masao Taki reported that there was no increased risk of brain tumors among regular users of mobile
phones in Japan. Well, actually, that's not quite true. They found that the odds of developing one type of brain tumor (a glioma) was close to six times higher among especially heavy users,
but they decided that this result was unreliable. Their paper will be published by the British Journal of Cancer and was posted
on its Web site on February 5.
At the same time, Cancer Research UK, a charitable organization and the publisher of the British Journal of Cancer, issued a press release to help the media put the new findings
into some kind of context. "So far, studies have shown no evidence that mobile use is harmful, but we can't be completely sure about their long-term effects," explained Lesley Walker,
its director of cancer information.
Perhaps, director of cancer misinformation would be more appropriate. We will not go over —yet again— all the studies that point to a long-term tumor
risk. We most recently spelled them out on January 30. But we will repeat that when the Interphone data from five Northern European countries were analyzed
together, they did point to a higher risk of two different types of tumors and that the U.K. was one of those five countries.
It's true that Walker left open the possibility of long-term effects, but this is just her "get out of jail free" card. She's ignoring the findings already published in peer-reviewed
journals on what happens to people who use a cell phone for long periods of time, especially ten years or more. No one is saying there's conclusive proof that cell phones lead to cancer, but to say that there is "no
evidence" is nonsense.
Walker and others at Cancer Research must know better. Why is the cancer establishment —and Cancer Research UK lies at its summit — so intent on burying the possibility of a cell-phone cancer risk?
Why is it behaving just like an industry lobby group?
We should note that despite all the reassuring headlines prompted by the new Japanese paper (and its accompanying press release), it adds practically nothing to our understanding
of the long-term risks. For gliomas, the type of brain tumor found elevated in past studies, there were only seven cases who had used a cell phone for more that
six-and-a-half years and only two cases for ten years or longer. Even the Japanese acknowledge that the ten-year numbers are "very small." The total study population included 83
cases with a glioma.
We hear that some progress is being made towards breaking the deadlock and completing the final Interphone paper. Elisabeth Cardis, the Interphone study director, leaves IARC in just over
a month. That's not much time to maneuver if the paper is to be submitted before she decamps for Barcelona.
February 12... Dariusz Leszczynski has been applying the powerful new techniques of molecular biology
(specifically, proteomics) to better understand EMF effects. A couple of years ago he predicted
that they would "help in the discovery of the biophysical and biochemical mechanisms."
Now, Leszczynski and collaborators at Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) in Helsinki have shown that relatively low-power
mobile phone radiation can alter the production of proteins in human skin. Ten women volunteered to have their forearms irradiated with 900 MHz GSM radiation for
one hour at an SAR of 1.3 W/Kg —well below the European cell phone exposure standard of 2.0 W/Kg. A small sample of skin was then removed and analyzed. The levels of eight different proteins
(out of a total of 580) were found to be significantly changed.
Perhaps most tantalizing is that two of these proteins were changed in all ten subjects. This might one day
lead to a marker for an EMF-specific response.
The function and significance of these altered protein levels are at this point unknown. But, as Leszczynski pointed out in a press
release, issued by STUK earlier today, this is the first time anyone has examined whether RF radiation can cause changes in protein expression in living people. "Mobile phone radiation has
some biological effect," he said. "Even if the changes are small, they still exist."
"All this means that the human body recognizes this low-level radiation and reacts to it," Leszczynski told Microwave News. These effects are similar to those Leszczynski has previously
observed in human cells grown in the lab.
The next step, he said, is to extend this pilot study to 50 or as many as 100 volunteers. But first, he has to find the necessary funding.
These new findings appear in BMC Genomics, an open access journal, which allows free downloads of both the
abstract and the complete paper.
January 30... It's time to end the deadlock. It's time to release the results of the Interphone study, the largest and most expensive cell phone epidemiological study ever attempted. Any further delay would be close to scandalous.
A draft of the final paper with the combined data from the 13 participating countries was completed close to two years ago. One member
of the Interphone team —Canada's Dan Krewski— has said that the holdup is due to disagreements over editing the manuscript, that is,
changing a comma here or a comma there. We doubt that what's going on. Krewski told us this close to six months ago and the paper has still
not been submitted for publication.
The real reason, we believe, is that the study shows that there are tumor risks following long-term use of a mobile phone and that some of the
Interphone researchers don't want to go public.
Why? As Elisabeth Cardis, the Interphone study director, explained last October, the interpretation of the data is "not straightforward"
(see our October 9 post). This allows one faction
to hold up the process by arguing that there is no point scaring the public if the elevated risk estimates may be spurious.
At the same time, the worldwide wireless industry —now worth on the order of a trillion dollars— and the
governments that tax them are applying pressure, subtle or otherwise, to keep the lid on.
The willingness of some Interphone players to downplay the risks has been apparent for a long time. Here's how U.K.'s
Tony Swerdlow, advised the press on an Interphone acoustic neuroma
study back in 2005: "The results of our study suggest that there is no substantial risk of in the first decade after starting use. Whether there are
longer-term risks remains unknown…" This was, to put it kindly, outright misdirection. The published paper indicated a statistically significant
increased risk after ten years on the side of the head the phone was used. That finding was even in the study's abstract. The next day's headlines were predictable. "Mobile Phone Cancer Link
Rejected," the BBC announced.
This 2005 study was based on the pooled data from five Interphone countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the U.K. Last year, researchers from
those same five countries reported a
parallel elevated, ipsilateral risk for brain tumors after ten years.
Add to those five, the German and the French
Interphone groups. Both have also reported increased risks of brain tumors after long-term use (see our
January 29, 2006 post and
September 19, 2007 post, respectively).
A few weeks ago, the French Ministry of Health called for precaution with respect to the use of mobile phones by children.
In December, the Interphone team from Israel brought a third type of tumor —of the parotid gland— into play. (The gland lies just under
the skin in the area of the cheek near the ear.) One striking finding was the "exceptionally heavy" use of mobile phones among Israelis. Not only was there an elevated tumor risk,
but it showed up earlier, often in less than ten years.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Siegal Sadetzki,
the leader of the Israeli Interphone group, also called for a precautionary approach to cell phones. "The time is past when it could
be said that this technology does not cause damage; apparently it damages health," she said.
We asked Sadetzki what she could tell us about the risks of brain tumors and acoustic neuromas among Israelis.
She declined to comment saying only that these results had not yet been submitted for publication. They may well be a key indicator of the long-term
risks and need to be made public.
The absence of the Interphone paper has made it easy to avoid dealing with all the signals that point to a cancer risk. A good example is the list of
research priorities from the National Academy of Sciences, released on January 17. It skirted the critical data from
seven different Interphone countries because, we were told, the Interphone final report was not yet in hand (see below).
Just how absurd the situation has become was apparent at a workshop on Dosimetry Meets Epidemiology hosted by the Swiss National Research Program on Non-Ionizing Radiation (NFP57) in Zurich on January 11. Many of those attending were working on,
or had some connection to, the Interphone study, including four of the principal investigators (Anssi Auvinen, Elisabeth Cardis, Maria Feychting and
Joachim Schüz). Yet, Interphone was never discussed. Everyone ignored the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
It's easy to see why some people are getting more and more nervous about long-term cell phone use. If Interphone does in fact point to a tumor risk as many observers
now believe, the public should be informed. Parents should warn their children. Two billion cell phone users deserve to know what only a select few know now. The next step
would be to fund more research.
The code of silence about Interphone must end. Public health demands it.
Elisabeth Cardis is leaving IARC on March 21st to join the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology
(CREAL) in Barcelona. The Interphone
paper should be submitted for publication before she leaves Lyon —in a journal which can expedite the review process. The sooner the results are
posted on the Internet and available to all, the better.
January 25... "Are there any biological effects that are not caused by an
increase in tissue temperature (nonthermal effects)?" That was one of the "overarching issues" considered by the NAS-NRC committee at the workshop
it hosted last August (see p.11 of the its final
report, as well as January 17 below
and our August 10 post). At the time, France's Bernard Veyret,
the member of the committee who led the discussion, expressed skepticism that such effects had been reliably documented.
Now comes the February 2008 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering with a short
paper describing such a nonthermal effect on
human white blood cells. The applied 900 MHz RF signal is quite weak —only 0.4V/m. The research team, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, states, "The calculated temperature change resulting
from the RF exposure was less than one microdegree" (one-millionth of a degree).
The corresponding author of the new paper is Frank Barnes, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the chair of the NAS-NRC
committee that wrote the report released last week.
January 23... Nancy Wertheimer, who more than any other epidemiologist was responsible for identifying the association between
magnetic fields and childhood leukemia, died at the age of 80 on Christmas day. The cause was complications following hip replacement surgery, according to Ed Leeper, her life partner
and long-time collaborator.
In 1979, Wertheimer and Leeper reported that children living near
high-current electrical wiring had a higher than expected rate of leukemia. At the time, the association was seen as a curiosity and
was largely discounted and ignored. That all changed in 1988, when a study sponsored by the
New York State Department of Health supported their hypothesis. Later work confirmed the link and extended it to measured power-frequency magnetic fields.
"Nancy was a real pioneer," said David Carpenter, the director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany, NY. In the 1980's, Carpenter ran the health department's
New York Power Line Project. Wertheimer and Leeper's final vindication came in 2001 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)
classified power-frequency magnetic fields as a possible human carcinogen on the basis of a
large body of epidemiological evidence, all stemming from Wertheimer and Leeper's 1979 landmark paper. "It is rare that a scientist opens a whole field of research, which is what Nancy Wertheimer
did," Carpenter told Microwave News.
In her later years Wertheimer moved on to other projects. "She felt it was time for younger people to work out what it all really means, including understanding the biophysical mechanism," Leeper said.
"Nancy always said that the risks we had found are small but that we may not have identified the real risks, which could, under certain circumstances, be larger, or that we may
not be looking at the right end points." That is, we still don't understand what types of fields are responsible and what are they doing.
"Nancy was fascinated by how the body reacts to magnetic fields," Leeper said. "She was a scientist not a public health advocate. People tried to portray her as a dedicated reformer,
but that was not her style." Once we uncover the biophysical mechanism —the part of the EMF puzzle that remains unresolved— Wertheimer believed that new applications could be devised,
Leeper said, and that medical benefits might follow.
January 17... The NAS-NRC
report, released today (see January 15 below), presents a laundry list of research needs to better understand the possible health effects of RF
radiation. What's missing is any sense of priorities. The NAS-NRC committee that prepared the report fails to indicate whether characterizing a child's exposure from
a cell phone is more important than doing an epidemiological study of children who use them; or whether mechanistic
studies are more important than laboratory toxicology experiments.
"We were told not to put priorities on the research needs," Frank Barnes,
the chair of the NAS-NRC panel, told Microwave News in a telephone interview from his office at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "They were quite strict about this." When
asked who "they" were, Barnes replied that he is not sure whether the order came from the NAS-NRC or from the FDA, which requested the report. "It does not make much
sense to me," Barnes said, "I would have defined our mission differently."
Another notable omission is a discussion of the results from the Interphone
project. Barnes explained that this was because the final Interphone paper is not yet available. But that's only part of the story. The report does comment
on an Interphone methodological analysis —suggesting that selection bias would lead to underestimating the tumor risks— yet it does not acknowledge that
published papers from a number of the participating countries, either alone or in a group, have found that long-term users of cell phones have higher rates of two types
of tumors (acoustic neuromas and brain tumors). The Israeli study
pointing to an increased risk of a third type of tumor, of the parotid gland, among heavy cell phone users came too late (December 6) to be included, according to
Barnes.
The report does allow that, "The pending results of the Interphone study... are likely to have a major influence on the direction and scope of future research concerning the use
of cellular phones and cancer." But why did the NAS-NRC panel not address the disquieting findings published to date? They too would have prompted an imperative to do more research, especially
if the panel had noted that the Interphone results are largely consistent with the Swedish studies of Lennart Hardell and Kjell Hansson Mild.
Most close observers now believe that the epidemiological data show that a health risk from mobile phones can no longer be dismissed. (That's what a senior
and well-connected member of the bioelectromagnetic community told us recently.) No one involved with this new report, not the committee, not the NAS-NRC, not the FDA
and certainly not the cell phone industry, which paid for it, had any interest in fostering a sense of urgency to step up the pace of health studies. This is especially true
in the U.S., where RF research is moribund.
The NAS-NRC committee may not have wanted to highlight the epi findings but it was not reticent about dismissing the controversial and, for many still unresolved, field of RF genotoxicity. The
panel favored Vijayalaxmi's and Joe Roti Roti's view that RF radiation cannot cause DNA breaks, and thereby rejected the work of Henry Lai, among others. "[M]ost investigators in the field
agree that no compelling body of evidence exists to support the hypothesis that RF fields are genotoxic," they wrote.
Other studies pointing to effects on DNA —such
as those from Austria and China— are not cited. The only panel member with direct experience with the RF–DNA work is France's Bernard Veyret, who has openly feuded
with the Austrian group, led by Hugo Rüdiger at the University of Vienna. Score one for Veyret.
Lai, Roti Roti and Vijayalaxmi each gave a talk at a workshop hosted by the NAS-NRC panel last August (see our
August 10 post). Barnes told us that the report was "mostly"
based on what was presented at the August workshop. Who at the NAS-NRC selected the workshop speakers is not known. Barnes could not shed any light on this but said that, "We
tried to have as much diversity of opinion as we could."
Nor is it clear who picked the reviewers of the committee's report. What does come across is that the NAS-NRC was unmoved by those who urged it to limit industry influence. At the time the
committee's membership was made public, some asked that Leeka Kheifets, a long-time associate of EPRI, the research arm of the electric utility industry, be removed from the panel. The
NAS-NRC not only rejected this appeal but later sought advice from another EPRI staffer, Gabor Mezei. The other surprising choice for a reviewer is
Teri Vierima of Resources Strategies Inc., a consulting firm that lists EPRI and a host of wireless companies as
clients.
Rick Jostes, the NAS-NRC study director, no doubt played a key role in selecting both the workshop speakers and
reviewers of the panel's report. Jostes, widely viewed as a skeptic of low-level RF biological effects, retired on December 31.
January 15... On Thursday, January 17, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) will release
its report on what types of research, if any, are needed to address potential health effects of radiation used for wireless communications. The report, which was requested by the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH),
marks the closing chapter of the cooperative research agreement (or CRADA) between the
CTIA, the trade association of the cell phone and wireless industries, and the CDRH.
The CTIA sponsored the project. Frank Barnes of the University of Colorado, Boulder, chaired the
NAS-NRC committee that
wrote the report. Back in June, the Center for Science in the Public Interest criticized the makeup of the panel for
being too heavily weighted with physicists and engineers at the expense of biologists and for having ties to industry. The NAS-NRC hosted a workshop last summer to review gaps in knowledge of
RF biological effects (see our August 10 comment.)
January 9... It's a new year and maybe, just maybe, it signals a new outlook at
Radiation Research, a journal with a reputation for publishing negative findings (see, for instance,
"Radiation Research and The Cult of Negative Results.")
The journal's January issue features two reports that point to non-thermal effects of RF radiation. The first
paper, from Israel's Tel Aviv
University, shows that 800 MHz radiation at SARs of 2.9 W/Kg and 4.1 W/Kg can cause chromosomal aberrations in human blood lymphocytes
following a 72-hour exposure. The second paper, from a group in Limoges, France, implicates 900 MHz RF radiation in apoptosis (cell death).
The Tel-Aviv group includes Rafi Korenstein, who has long been
working on genotoxic effects of electromagnetic radiation. The Israelis advise that their new results "should be taken into consideration when assessing
the health risk after continuous exposure to RF radiation at an SAR close to the current threshold set by
ICNIRP."
December 12... PERFORM A is a washout. The eight-year, $10 million industry research project that was supposed to answer the question, "Does cellphone
radiation cause cancer in animals?" instead promises to sow more confusion and mistrust.
The project consists of six long-term experiments, carried out on mice and rats in four European laboratories. Most everyone connected
to PERFORM A—from the researchers who did the work to the cell
phone industry that sponsored it—says that it sounds an all-clear: Cell phones are cancer-safe.
In fact, the studies tell us practically nothing. They are impossible to interpret because of a flaw common to all six experiments. The animals
were restrained in a fixed position during the radiation exposures and that restraint had a profound impact. There is now no way to disentangle
the effect of the exposure system from that of the radiation.
That an exposure system can confound an experiment is nothing new. What is surprising is that the managers of the PERFORM A project
disregarded numerous warning signs. Their own preliminary studies pointed to the fact that animals suffered from restraint stress, as could
have been predicted from reading the easily accessible scientific literature. And when confronted with the final results of their six experiments,
which showed that something had gone terribly wrong, the project team simply looked the other way.
What follows is a story that illustrates what happens when engineering takes precedence over biology and when inconvenient scientific
findings are ignored. But most of all, it shows the perils posed by industry-sponsored research where those in charge are pushing for the
desired results.
Read the complete story, "Wheel on Trial".
Details on the 19 animal studies on cell phone radiation, 1997-2007, are available here.
