News & CommentKey Documents
March 11, 2005... The March issue of the University of Washington alumni magazine, Columns, features a well-deserved tribute to
Henry Lai and his colleague, N.P. Singh, who have demonstrated that low-level microwave radiation can lead to an increase in DNA breaks in the brain cells of rats
(available online). The headline of the piece tells
the story: “Wake-Up Call: Can Radiation from Cell Phones Damage DNA in Our Brains? When a UW Researcher Found Disturbing Data, Funding Became Tight and One
Industry Leader Threatened Legal Action.”
The article later identifies that “industry leader” as George Carlo who ran Wireless Technology Research (WTR) on behalf of the CTIA, the trade association
of the cell phone industry. Of course, most people, except those on the industry payroll, now concede that WTR was misnamed. Something like “Whatever Happens Do
As Little Research As Possible and Take As Long As Possible Not To Do It” would have been far more appropriate (even though it’s hard to make an elegant
acronym out of all that).
One important fact is left out of the story —for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. The piece begins with Lai recollecting how, back in 1994, someone
had tried to stop his DNA-microwave work by calling the National Institutes of Health and alleging that Lai was misusing his research grant by carrying out unauthorized
experiments. After Lai explained what he was up to, the NIH was satisfied that nothing was amiss. Lai was allowed to go back to work, though he lacked the funds to do as
much he would have liked.
The snitch is not named in the article but should be revealed. It was Bill Guy, who had received three degrees from the University of Washington, including his doctorate,
and then spent much of his professional life at its Department of Bioengineering. No wonder the alumni magazine was squeamish about identifying him.
For more than ten years, Guy and Lai had worked together at the university’s Bioelectromagnetics Research Lab. They were coauthors on close to 20 research papers.
But that did not stop Guy from trying to sabotage Lai’s research. At the time he made the call to Mike Galvin of the National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences, Guy was one of two key advisors to George Carlo, and was helping him map out the strategy for CTIA’s $25 million cell phone-health research project.
Separately, he was also a consultant to the CTIA. Guy would stay on the WTR payroll for another three years.
Guy is a former president of the Bioelectromagnetics Society and the recipient of the d'Arsonval Award, its highest honor. Despite a lifetime in RF research, despite
the fact that he chaired the committee that wrote the 1982 ANSI RF exposure standard, despite the fact that he chaired the committee of the National Council on Radiation
Protection and Measurements that wrote the council's 1986 (and its most recent) report on RF biological effects, Guy’s first impulse on hearing about some important
new experimental finding that questioned the safety of a product that would soon be responsible for exposing more than a billion people to a constant stream of RF radiation
was to blow the whistle and try to impugn Lai.
Does anyone still believe that the mobile phone industry ever made an honest attempt to get to the bottom of the cell phone safety question?
March 10, 2005... The Karolinska group’s paper
showing no increased risk of brain tumors among those who used a cell phone for ten or more years appears in the March 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. We
first reported this result in December based on a brief announcement from Stockholm,
but the published paper offers many more details. One interesting item is the finding of a somewhat elevated risk of developing a glioma (a 60-80% increase) on the same side
of the head as the phone was used. But, the Karolinska researchers also saw a lower than expected glioma risk on the opposite side of the head. Stefan Lönn, Maria
Feychting and Anders Ahlbom posit that these results don’t make sense. “It is not biologically plausible that RF exposure from mobile phone use would increase the brain
tumor risk on the side of the head where the phone is usually held and protect against brain tumors on the other side of the head,” they write. Lönn’s team previously
reported an increased risk of acoustic neuromas among this same population of long-term
phone users (both studies are part of his doctoral dissertation, and, in turn, they are part of the 13-country Interphone study coordinated by IARC in Lyon, France). For neuromas, there
was no apparent protective effect on the opposite side of the head. All this means that the new paper, in their words, “strengthens the finding of an increased risk of acoustic
neuroma.” The number of Swedes who used a phone for more than a decade is small, and so we anxiously await the results from other Interphone study groups. It is quite possible,
however, that the Interphone study will not adequately resolve the neuroma risk. After all, the Scandinavian countries were quick to adopt mobile phones and some of the participating
countries may have a smaller proportion of subjects who used them for more than ten years. The recent Stewart report (see below) recommended more research, and made specific mention
of a need for an international cohort study of mobile phone users. The editors of The Lancet endorsed this idea. Writing in the January 22 issue, they warned, “With
more than one billion people, in more than 200 countries, now using a mobile phone, any risk, however small, could conceivably affect thousands of people.”
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