Fwd: No effect Found for RF Radiation (and need for further research)

[John Jacobus <crispy_bird@YAHOO.COM>]

>From another list server I subscribe.  As I read it,

it shows (1) why research needs to be done, and, more

importantly, repeated to confirm the results. (2)

Regulatory problems are political.  



It is long, but here is the original link.

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24121



--- Jim Hoerner <jim_hoerner@hotmail.com> wrote:

> To: Know_Nukes@yahoogroups.com

> CC: downwinders@yahoogroups.com

> From: "Jim Hoerner" <jim_hoerner@hotmail.com>

> Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 21:11:58 -0400

> Subject: [Know_Nukes] No effect Found for RF

> Radiation

> 

> It's good to talk

> 

Mays Swicord spent 26 years searching for a health

effect of radio-frequency radiation. He tried and

tried to falsify the notion that this radiation - the

kind emitted by mobile phones - has no effect. He

failed. He changed sides, and for the past 8 years he

has been working for the mobile phone maker Motorola.

Now he is trying to convince us that mobile phones are

safe, and that enough research is enough. David Cohen

caught up with him when he visited London

 

I see you have two mobile phones on your belt...



One is for the US, and one is for travel.



Do you ever worry about radiation from them?



Never. I have probably had hour-long conversations on

a mobile phone. I wouldn't worry about it in terms of

health - just in terms of the discomfort of holding a

phone against my head for an hour.



Have you ever had that feeling of your ear getting

warm?



Well, yes. But hold your hand against your ear. It

gets warm, right? It's because your ear is normally

cooled by the air. Put an insulator against it, and it

will warm up closer to body temperature. Older phones

lost a lot of power from electric circuits heating up.

Neither kind of warming comes from the radio-frequency

(RF) emissions.



The standards are very conservative about that. 

Theoretical studies estimate the temperature rise in

body tissue from RF radiation to be around 0.1 °C.



Was there a crucial event that changed your attitude 

after all those years?



It was gradual. You don't arrive at this point by

overnight conversion.



In 1984 you published a paper claiming a non-thermal

effect of low-level RF radiation on DNA. What

happened?



We thought we saw a change in the structure of

purified DNA that varied with the frequency of the

radiation we exposed it to. You would expect this kind

of frequency dependence from a non-thermal effect. We

got all excited about it, and so did the research

community in general.  Then the normal scientific 

process took place. Several people tried to replicate

our results.



And what did they find?



Nothing. No one managed to reproduce our result. We

were unable to go back and look at the work ourselves

because we had moved on to looking at extremely

low-frequency (ELF) radiation.



Were you disappointed?



When two or three people try to repeat your work and

cannot, even if you help them with their work, even

when they visit you to go over what you have done -

then you have to say, "OK, it was a fluke." The

scientific process always does this.



Did you find another explanation for what you saw?



Not really. We had used an old piece of equipment

called a network analyser, and some people suggested

the frequency dependence came from this, not the DNA.

I know of no better explanation.



Did you see any work that suggested RF effects?



Let me answer that in a different way. On the World

Health Organization (WHO) website you'll find a

database set up by the IEEE (the US Institute of 

Electrical and Electronics Engineers) containing

thousands of papers, reports and reviews since 1950,

all of them about non-ionising radiation in some way.

Almost 1300 of them are peer-reviewed publications

dealing with the issue of biological effects. Of

course, a lot of them report that radiation does have

an effect. But I don't know of one that is confirmed

or replicated by independent researchers.



But don't people say that if so many studies by

reputable researchers are reporting measurable

effects, then there must be something there?



That's not the way the body of science grows. One of

the reasons for trying to replicate others' findings

is because you don't want to waste energy testing a

prediction based on a freak result. You need a

repeatable phenomenon to study. That's why, when I was

at the US Food and Drug Administration, I started

trying to do replication studies to get to the bottom

of whether or not these were repeatable phenomena. If

they were, we could build on them. But that's just not

happening.



Why do you think it's not happening?



After 35 years in this business, I must conclude that

there is nothing there. What else can I conclude? Even

when people say, "we've found something new", you go

back to that database and you'll find people have 

already done something related and haven't been able

to prove it as a predictable phenomenon.



What about the UK government's Stewart report, which

advised that children should not use phones because of

the potential for developmental problems?



I don't think the Stewart report really considered all

the relevant data. No one has exposed children and

cheched to see what happens. That would be unethical.

But there is a study of prenatal RF exposure of a

monkey. It wasn't a cellular telephone signal, but I

really think that's immaterial; it was still in the RF

range. The monkey was exposed prenatally and then 

throughout its young life with no effects whatsoever.



What about pregnant women?

 

Temperature is an issue: you would probably not want

to raise the fetus's temperature. But phones just

don't produce enough heating for that to happen to a

significant extent. We have no indication that there

are any other, non-thermal effects.



But aren't thermal effects themselves a justifiable

concern?



Sure, if you heated enough. But if you run a marathon

you'll find your ear can rise to 40 °C. So you can

take temperature increases without ill effect. With

mobile phones we're talking not about degrees, but

tenths of degrees of temperature rise. There are now

serious attempts to really think through what

temperature rise could cause a problem, but whatever

it is, right now there is a safety factor.



Do you feel the same way about the new generation of

3G phones?



Well, some people say we need to do a whole new

assessment because of the coming of 3G. But you can't

just say, "Hey, it's a new signal, give me $50 

million and let's do it." How is 3G supposed to be

different from the current system? Is it the higher

frequency? There have been studies across all

frequencies from 400 megahertz to 2450 megahertz. Some

suggest the modulation patterns that encode data on

the base frequency have distinct effects. A good

physicist will say it's impossible to have

rectification in tissue above about 1 megahertz,

therefore modulation can't make any difference. But

even if it could, it's at the same levels in both

systems.



You are gaining a reputation as a debunker of myths...



Really? I don't think I'm a debunker. I started my

career looking for effects. I spent a lot of time

cooperating on biological research to find something

that could be repeated. We did one study in the

millimetre-wave range, some studies in the RF range

and some in the ELF range. All failed. And you could

say, "Well, that's because you're a poor researcher."

But I think we did quality work.



Could we be missing something obvious?



We can never prove the null hypothesis. If we took 

all the funds in the world and spent them on this

issue, we would still have questions left over which

we could pose scientifically. We can't keep driving

the public to spend more money on an issue that should

be brought to closure at some point.



That's quite a change for a man who a few years ago

got excited by finding a potential RF effect.



It comes down to having a public conscience. We have a

public responsibility because we are spending public

funds. Whether the money comes through industry or

through the government, we pay - either through the

cost of devices or in taxes. So we have a

responsibility to say when enough is enough. The

public wants to know whether there is a health issue.

If there isn't one, then we should stop wasting money

looking for it. There are other more pressing health

issues in the world. People are still starving out 

there.



Won't people see that as sour grapes?



Well yes, that is always a possibility. If there

really were an effect, I'd have to say: "Alright, I

confess my incompetence." But you have to look at 

what other people have done. Has anybody been able to

replicate any of these findings? The answer is no. At

some point we have to say: "This is it." We have to

define an end.



How would you define that end?



We need to stick to the WHO research agenda. There are

classical approaches to this. For example, there are

standard procedures for assessing cancer risks. Most

important are human studies - epidemiology. If the

epidemiology is weak - which is not true for RF, there

is a very large epidemiology study under way right now

- then we do a lifetime study on an animal, a

so-called bioassay. If those studies raise issues,

then we need to clarify that with more research. If

they don't raise issues then we should say: "We have

enough to cover it."



I would go further, and say we should stop spending

money, whether it comes from government or industry.



Why should the public trust a scientist in the pay of

a company with a vested interest in selling mobile

phones?



Well, you are from the UK, a country that has greater

distrust of government and of industry than most

others. It's not a uniquely British problem, but it is

more of a problem for you than in America. I think

that there is a responsibility to say: "Here's what's

rational, let's stop reacting to things that don't

make sense, let's go back to a scientific base, let's 

analyse things and come up with the appropriate

approaches and appropriate answers."



But there is a perception by the public that you have

a conflict of interest.



I understand that. But academic researchers also have

a conflict of interest in that they want to promote

their own research. So one has to look at what makes

sense in terms of science, or in terms of public

health. We cannot get away from who we are or who we

work for. We have to ask just what scientific process

should be followed.



Can you blame the public if they take a "better safe

than sorry" attitude?



We have to go to a neutral forum, the WHO. If the 

public don't take advice from the public health

officials, then who are they going to take advice 

from? The public have to realise that everyone has

some sort of conflict of interest. It's our

responsibility to educate the public that it is

through the scientific process that the truth will

emerge, not through the political process, which

serves special interests.



Do you see yourself as a reluctant campaigner?



Trying to deal with science issues with the general

public becomes more political than scientific in terms

of how you phrase things, how you put things forward.

It's a bit of an uncomfortable situation for me. I

would much prefer to go sit in the laboratory and get

back to twiddling knobs and working out equations. I

am not longing to become a politician, though I may 

do some day. I wouldn't rule anything out.



http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24121







=====

"May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion." 



Dwight D. Eisenhower  



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

e-mail:  crispy_bird@yahoo.com



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