Subject: Cell Phones and Human Health (fwd)
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 185742 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru@hotmail.com
--------------------------------------------------
Hi everybody:
I am forwarding a message from a new "joiner" below. As he
tells you, he is a physicist who has some obvious misgivings
about the EMF/health issue. This time, however, his misgivings
appear to run counter to what we usually hear from the physics
community. Or -- perhaps I should refine that to say: "one
physicist, in particular, who regards himself as the voice of the
community."
In any case, I have decided to remove all identification info
from the following message to give this new member an opportunity
to first "learn for himself" what we are all about here. Then,
when he becomes comfortable with us ... he may identify himself if
he wishes....
We cannot immediately respond to all the questions he brings in his
first message. (That's a good sign!!!) But, in due time, I believe we
will address them all, and he will decide that he has come to the right
place....
Unfortunately, much of what he seems to be interested-in is material
we have been through (more than once) over the past two or three
years. And we all know that we'll be going through it again in due
time.... I have to believe that each time ... we get it a little
better! Anyway, let us make him feel welcome!!!!
One last item. This is perhaps a good time for me to remind all that
I will be away from my computer for about a week starting Friday.....
I will be attending the EMF RAPID wrap-up session in Minneapolis.
Cheerio.....
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org..............http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html
................................It is better to light a single candle ...
than to curse the darkness...............................................
DO YOU KNOW ANYONE ELSE WHO SHOULD BE ON THIS LIST??????
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 16:45:23 -0600
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Subject: Cell Phones and Human Health
Greetings:
An individual with whom I regularly correspond on the net has told me about
EMF Guru, but I don't know what your list is about - in general. I am a
physicist with an electromagnetics PhD (in EE) and some interest in (but very
little knowledge about) the interaction of electromagnetic fields with
biological tissue. I am especially concerned about the unwitting experiment
which is being carried out on several 10's of millions of people who use
cellular phones all over the world.
I recently attended (at my own expense) a meeting of the Radiation Research
Society. This is an organization of radiation biologists, radiologists,
biophysicists, etc. What bothered me most about this meeting was finding out
(in a special session on cell phones and human health) that 1) there is no
program objective to identify a dAmage mechanism that might link to the
reported cases of brain cancer in some cell phone users - instead, program
objectives are simply to prove cell phonmes are safe - and 2) the
multinational effort to study effect of cell phones on human health is being
jointly funded by individual governments and by the worldwide
telecommunications industry. The research program, however, is coordinated -
if not directed - by the telecommunications industry. This seems to me to be
a built-in conflict of interests!
As far as I can tell now, the only incontrovertable evidence for an adverse
effect of cell phone use on human health falls into two classes: 1)
Experiments (on rats or mice) that show that individuals who are genetically
predisposed to cancer are statistically significantly more likely to get
cancer when subjected to a microwave field approximating exposure to cell
phone radiation by humans for several hours a day for an extended period and
2) Observations of blood DNA taken from rats exposed to both chemical
carcinogens and microwave radiation show significantly more DNA breaking when
microwave exposure is present than when it is absent - though some individuals
have criticized the conduct of this experiment on the grounds of timeing and
order in which certain parts of the experiment were carried out.
Rats and mice are generally considered good models of human beings for
toxicological experiments, but I fear that they may not give the best
interpretation of interactions of microwaves with biological material. In
particular, I note that the human head, treated as a multiple layered
structure with overal approximately spherical shape of the cranium, will
probably resonate weakly with microwaves at frequencies near 1 Ghz, and I
would expect some internal focusing of the incident radiation to occur in some
brain structures. This means that I would expect a spatially nonuniform
microwave field to occur inside the head of a cell phone user. Some FTDT
calculations have been carried out in head models containing 37 different
tissue types to try to estimate the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the
heads of humans of various ages. It may be interesting to ask if anyone in
this audience knows what the implications of this model are concerning the
spatial distribution of the internal radiation field (actually, the quantity
of interest should be the power density - i.e., the field which represents the
Poynting vector).
The other item about which I would like to inquire is the method of internal
energy transfer within complicated biological molecules - such as DNA.
Specifically, I would like to know whether microwave energy absorption into
internal modes can be concentrated by internal energy transfer into a single
mode and thus cause bond breaking. To understand this process, consider a
simple polyatomic molecule that has, say, five vibrational modes, each of
which stores insufficient energy to beak a bond, but the total of which store
more energy than a typical bond energy. I dimly remember (from 35-40 years
ago) having seen a formula that expresses the probability (per unit time) that
sufficient energy transfer will occur (by internal, collisionless energy
transfer) to concentrate the total energy of these modes in a single bond,
leading to dissociation of the molecule. The competing process is usually
de-excitation of some of the internal modes by collisions. Taking into
consideration the rate of collisional deexcitation and the rate of internal
energy transfer, one can calculate - on the average - the fraction of
originally excited molecules that will suffer bond breaking in a given
interval of time.
The argument is usually made by radiation physicists that the energy of a
microwave photon is far too small to cause either thermal effects (heating of
biological tissue) or bond breaking. I suspect that multiphoton absorption of
microwave radiation into various normal modes of the DNA molecule can, by
internal energy transfer, eventually lead to bond breaking, and that this
might be a plausible damage mechanism for an adverse effect of cell phone
radiation fields on human health. Would anyone care to comment on this?
--
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........just "Bill"
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html