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Comment by manifestsilence | Hacker News Reader

This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect.

As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.

Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.

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There's plenty of ways that non-ionizing radiation can result in increased cancer rates. For example, they can induce currents in the DNA (DNA is s molecular wire) which might jam the base excision repair system and prevent it from detecting DNA damage (which is a redox-driven process).

What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in highly controlled lab settings, since it requires a second factor - a contaminating primary mutagen - to manifest its effect.

Maybe, possibly, but does this potential mechanism have any impact on our huge, complex, self-righting bodies, that every hour successfully defend from onslaught of scores of adversarial microorganisms and their chemical warfare targeted at us and each other and environmental factors like background ionizing radiation and completely natural toxins that we breath in and choose to ingest and our bodies own complexity that leads to many. many errors in functioning that are roughly corrected and worked around on the fly to keep us alive not for hours, which would be a feat in itself, but for decades.

Aren't some forms of cancer also overreactions by the imune system? Some kind of Leukemia comes from phagocytes, I just read in another thread this morning

they can induce currents in the DNA

By what mechanism (and it's likely not limited to DNA then)?

EMF radiation can induce a current in any condutor. Try putting a piece of tin foil in a microwave.

It's far from limited to DNA, but it's not hard to imagine why people care more about DNA than other conductive molecules.

Any photon is basically "something which induces motion in a charged particle". That's what it means to be electromagnetic radiation. The intensity to which that occurs has to do with the electrical potential landscape around that charged particle and the wavelength of that photon. If these two values are close to each other (coupled) then the motion of the charged particle is more likely.

Microwave radiation (especially in the GHz range) illuminating DNA has been long known as a phenomenon, of course it does depend on which frequency band in the GHz range you're in, too.

alright, I'm getting downvoted, so I'll put some important references here:

Generally, the research of Jackie Barton showing that DNA is a conductor and speculating about the role fo 4Fe4S cluster in the BER mechanism was emergent in the late 2000s back when I was a biochemist and not a programmer, but they're now (last 2 years) publishing papers that are fleshing out that hypothesis:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jkbgrp/Research.htm

Specific papers: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-bioche...

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00566

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acschembio.8b00347

etc.

This is quite interesting (I'm a biochemist and programmer as well), but I don't see any evidence that non-ionizing radiation could affect DNA repair pathways - that seems like a killer experiment that could (and should) be run to support or disprove this hypothesis. Induce some double strand breaks or DNA nicks, and look at how non-ionizing radiation affects repair rates

I agree that it's a killer experiment and someone should do it.

But BER doesn't sense double strand breaks. It senses changes in the curvature of the dna induced by point mutations that are solvable by extracting the base and replacing it templates by the other strand. So you'll want to induce damage with something that causes thymidine dimerization or DNA alkylation.

Wait, so a -30 dBm signal (pretty strong) will induce something like 7mV across a 5 cm antenna. Your cell nuclear is up to 10 microns wide. That's 1.4 microvolts. I'm having a really hard time believing that a 1.4 uV potential across any molecule at STP can have a measurable effect without a lot of energy going into amplifying the signal.

Energy doesn't scale with distance in that way, with quantum mechanics. A "mismatch in size" (roughly speaking) will result in a different quantum efficiency, not a lowered energy, and also keep in mind that DNA is a highly coiled molecule so the resonance frequency could be deceptive. The straightened length of DNA in a cell is on the length order of meters. (Though that doesn't mean that it will resonate with meter long waves, it will have a higher efficiency with wavelengths much longer than a micron)

wouldn't all that depend on tge specific signal transmitted? If you just look at random memory access, you'll find that it's not prone to corruption. That didn't stop rowhammer for example.

> As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.

Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.

(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)

There are actually a lot more of the traditional maritime pirates these days operating off the Somali coast than there were in 1919.

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