Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next
to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the
evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So
why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?
Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was
diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He's a
managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was
put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was
writing a story about the potential dangers of
cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if
his name wasn't used, so I'll call him Jim. He explained
that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and
was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is
about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his
diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of
his intense cell-phone usage. "Not for nothing," he
said, "but in investment banking we've been using cell
phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach
kind of phone." When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was
on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan,
about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the
doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and
more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen
who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he
believed the industry had discredited studies showing
there is a risk from cell phones. "I got a sense that he
was pissed off," Jim told me. A handful of Jim's
colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more
reports he encountered of young finance guys developing
tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn't a
coincidence. "I knew four or five people just at my firm
who got tumors," Jim says. "Each time, people ask the
question. I hear it in the hallways."
It's hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone
radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
This is especially true in the United States, where
non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation
protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges
has long been in place, and where our lives have been so
thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to
suggest it might be a problem—maybe, eventually, a very
big public-health problem—is like saying our shoes might
be killing us.
Except our shoes don't send microwaves directly into our
brains. And cell phones do—a fact that has increasingly
alarmed the rest of the world. Consider, for instance,
the following headlines that have appeared in highly
reputable international newspapers and journals over the
past few years. From summer 2006, in the Hamburg
Morgenpost: are we telephoning ourselves to death? That
fall, in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin: mobile
phones affect the brain's metabolism. December 2007,
from Agence France-Presse: israeli study says regular
mobile use increases tumour risk. January 2008, in
London's Independent: mobile phone radiation wrecks your
sleep. September 2008, in Australia's The Age:
scientists warn of mobile phone cancer risk.
Though the scientific debate is heated and far from
resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of
Europe's premier research institutions, of cell-phone
and PDA use being linked to "brain aging," brain damage,
early-onset Alzheimer's, senility, DNA damage, and even
sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell
phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip).
In September 2007, the European Union's environmental
watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that
cell-phone technology "could lead to a health crisis
similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead
in petrol."
Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary
results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored
by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in
Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took
part in the study, the United States conspicuously not
among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008
that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of
getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the
head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40
percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel
have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the
parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an
independent study in Sweden last year concluded that
people who started using a cell phone before the age of
20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor.
Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent
increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the
acoustic nerve.
As more results of the Interphone study trickled out, I
called Louis Slesin, who has a doctorate in
environmental policy from MIT and in 1980 founded an
investigative newsletter called Microwave News. "No one
in this country cared!" Slesin said of the findings. "It
wasn't news!" He suggested that much of the comfort of
our modern lives depends on not caring, on refusing to
recognize the dangers of microwave radiation. "We love
our cell phones. The paradigm that there's no danger
here is part of a worldview that had to be put into
place," he said. "Americans are not asking the
questions, maybe because they don't want the answers. So
what will it take?"
To understand how radiation from cell phones and
wireless transmitters affects the human brain, and to
get some sense of why the concerns raised in so many
studies outside the U.S. are not being seriously raised
here, it's necessary to go back fifty years, long before
the advent of the cell phone, to the research of a young
neuroscientist named Allan Frey.
In 1960, Frey, then 25,
was working at General Electric's Advanced Electronics
Center at Cornell University when he was contacted by a
technician whose job was to measure the signals emitted
by radar stations. At the time, Frey had taken an
interest in the electrical nature of the human body,
specifically in how electric fields affect neural
functioning. The technician claimed something
incredible: He said he could "hear" radar at one of the
sites where he worked.
Frey traveled to the facility and stood in the radar
field. "And sure enough, I could hear it, too," he said,
describing the persistent low-level hum. Frey went on to
establish that the effect was real—electromagnetic (EM)
radiation from radar could somehow be heard by human
beings. The "hearing," however, didn't happen via normal
sound waves perceived through the ear. It occurred
somewhere in the brain itself, as EM waves interacted
with the brain's cells, which generate tiny electrical
fields. This idea came to be known as the Frey effect,
and it caused an uproar in the neuroscience community.
The waves that Frey was concerned with were those
emitted from the nonionizing part of the EM spectrum—the
part that scientists always assumed could do no outright
biological damage. When Frey began his research, it was
assumed that the only way microwaves could have a
damaging biological effect was if you increased the
power of their signals and concentrated them like sword
points—to the level where they could cook flesh. In 1967,
this resulted in the first popular microwave oven, which
employed microwave frequencies at very high power,
concentrated and contained in a metal box. Aside from
this engineered thermal effect, the signals were assumed
to be safe.
Allan Frey would help pioneer the science that suggested
otherwise. At the vanguard of a new field of study that
came to be known as bioelectromagnetics, he found what
appeared to be grave nonthermal effects from microwave
frequencies—the part of the spectrum that belongs not
just to radar signals and microwave ovens but also, in
the past fifteen years, to cell phones. (The only honest
way to think of our cell phones is that they are tiny,
low-power microwave ovens, without walls, that we hold
against the sides of our heads.) Frey tested microwave
radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the
eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he
found troubling results. In one study, he triggered
heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of
the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with
microwaves—stopped the hearts dead.
Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power
could affect living systems. First, there was the
carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for
example, the same frequency of many cell phones today.
Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in
the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds,
words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add
information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second
signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This
is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any
number of modulations, even those that match the
extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates
(between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation,
Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of
biological effects. But how this happened, on a neuronal
level, he didn't yet understand.
In a study published in 1975 in the Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences, Frey reported that microwaves
pulsed at certain modulations could induce "leakage" in
the barrier between the circulatory system and the
brain. Breaching the blood-brain barrier is a serious
matter: It means the brain's environment, which needs to
be extremely stable for nerve cells to function
properly, can be perturbed in all kinds of dangerous
ways. Frey's method was rather simple: He injected a
fluorescent dye into the circulatory system of white
rats, then swept the microwave frequencies across their
bodies. In a matter of minutes, the dye had leached into
the confines of the rats' brains.
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