UC Berkeley: Cellphone radiation is harmful, but few want to believe it | Hacker News Reader

UC Berkeley: Cellphone radiation is harmful, but few want to believe it

news.berkeley.edu

> For more than a decade, Joel Moskowitz, a researcher in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health, has been on a quest to prove that radiation from cellphones is unsafe.

Implicit in this is that, despite the decade-plus quest, he has done nothing like proving it.

And that seems to be the case.

The most telling refutation is despite the low-quality research Moskowitz cites showing potential harm, the explosion of cellphone use has not led to an increase of the harms that are supposedly associated with it in that research.

Adding to this, the "I want to find a proof for my idea" attitude is very different from "let's see objectively what is going on".

Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. How can that possibly cause brain cancer? Shouldn’t we be seeing an epidemic of brain cancer if this were true? Wouldn’t the much stronger sources of radio waves we’re exposed to produce even more cancer? What about WiFi?

I think the theory is that effects like heating or pulsing might interfere with physical chemistry of biological mechanisms, rather than ionizing atoms directly. But I doubt we'll see these correlations taken seriously unless these interferences can be observed.

Yeah: the models I have seen involve either vibrations that either change how the DNA is folded (the epigenetic behavior) or cause direct DNA damage due to some kind of resonance with hydrogen atoms. (That said: all of the papers I have personally seen on this are with high-powered and very high-frequency sources... specifically all terahertz.)

The local heating one always seemed much simpler, particularly as you didn't even need to have the heating come from the antenna, as I remember old cell phones--which you usually kept next to your head while talking (how quaint ;P--also routinely getting hot to the touch just from heat dissipation from the battery. There were tons of other explanations for the effects people found, though (which were stuff like "while we didn't find more brain tumors, if you got one it tended to be on the side you held your phone").

Another possibility is interference with DNA repair. DNA molecules are conductive. Some researchers believe this is used as part of the mechanism for detecting damage. Damage tends to reduce or eliminate the conductivity in the area of the damage. They believe the repair mechanism located damaged areas by essentially trying to send a current between two points and if it can then there is no damage between those points.

If a passing electromagnetic wave were to cause current in the DNA right when the damage detection and repair machinery is checking things out that might interfere making it miss some damage, which could result in cancer.

In that case the electromagnetic radiation would not cause the cancer, but it would make some other thing that can cause cancer more effective.

You'd probably never be able to see this if you studied an average population looking for signs of increased cancer in cell phone users. Where you need to be looking is populations that have a high cancer rate, where their bodies are already near the limit stopping DNA damage from turning into cancer, and see if adding cell phones increases cancer rates.

Can a passing electromagnetic wave cause current in DNA? It should be possible. The real question is what wavelengths can do it. DNA is pretty small, so you'd expect that you would need a very short wavelength--several orders of magnitude shorter than 5G.

But DNA is actually a very long molecule that is twisted and curved to pack it into a tiny space. If it could be laid out in a line it would be around 2 m.

Weird things happen when you take an antenna and fold it into a smaller area, especially when the shape it undertakes has a lot of self similarity, including handling longer wavelengths than you might otherwise expect. Would that be enough in the case of DNA to increase the wavelength that can cause currents into cellphone range?

If I had to bet, I'd bet "no", but I wouldn't place a large bet.

Or even (especially?) light bulbs. Visible light is far more energetic than radio- or microwave radiation.

While this is true, it overlooks the selection pressures that exist on nucleotide selection. If I recall correctly, the canonical bases are relatively robust to radiation in the ir, visible, and uv spectrums when compared to other nucleotides. http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/4181368 Not sure if that's the correct article, but it's a good starting point on selection pressures for nucleotides and heterocycles.

That is to say - just because visible light is more energetic does not mean it is guaranteed to cause more damage.

(I briefly worked in Tor's lab - a truly incredible chemist and teacher)

During my rather short stint in a synthetic chemistry lab in college, I learned that it was a relatively standard practice for folks to "nuke" their reactions in a microwave in an attempt to speed things up. Certainly, nobody wanted anything to get ionized in these situations... So, to me the idea that biological systems may be able to pick up additional energy from local RF fields, and that this increase could potentially have adverse side effects, does not seem totally implausible.

By "nuke their reactions" you mean heating things up... Usually when there is more heat chemical reactions are faster (higher energy means higher chances for the right stuff to bump into each other)

Well, yes and no. If they just wanted to heat things up, they'd throw the reaction over a Bunsen burner or some other appropriate heating element. So while I agree that the reactions are speeding up due to an increase in available energy, I'm hesitant to say it's the same as simply "heating things up".

Thermal cycling is a big part of PCR. My understanding is that the cycle length is related to the length of the DNA/RNA you want to amplify.

At some point there's just so much noise you'll probably find carcinogens everywhere.

> Joel Moskowitz

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...

"Don’t Fall Prey to Scaremongering about 5G"

He claims 17 minutes of daily phone use increases brain cancer risk by 60 percent yet brain cancer incidence has been relatively flat for the last thirty years.

https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html

He's either a shyster or a goddamned moron.

The National Cancer Institute has a whole page debunking this: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r....

I wouldn't call that debunking. It says there are studies underway that take years. Sounds like the jury is still out to me. I think it would be wrong to just assume there are absolutely no risks.

Brain cancer incidence since 1992: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html

Cell phone subscribers since 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#/media/File:Mobil...

The article claims cell phone radiation causes brain cancer. So where is it?

Cellphone use has gone from basically nothing to ubiquitous in the US from ~1995 to 2015, with a particularly steep incline in the middle of that range (2000-2005 is when I'd estimate the biggest increase was). With more or less of a lag depending on how well-developed a country is, this is also true for most of the world--even in poor, underdeveloped countries, cellphone use is pretty damn ubiquitous today.

Were there a major risk of brain cancer from cellphone usage, it would have shown up in actual statistics. Hell, if the risk were as small as an extra one per million chance, we should still be able to find it (note that we're able to observe side effects that rare in the current COVID-19 vaccination drive). While the real world data is an uncontrolled study, the study size is so large that it has enormous statistical power in its own right.

I don’t get how non ionizing radiation can cause cancer…but let’s say it did, would be much more useful to give some risk profile rather than just fear mongering that we don’t choose to believe. Almost everything we do can contribute to cancer but by how much?

Is the brain cancer risk increase associated with any cell phone use or specifically holding it up to your ear while talking to someone

I'm more worried about prostate cancer since my phone is sitting next to my crotch 16 hours a day

A microwave oven is non-ionizing radiation but you wouldn't want to stick your hand in there. It's in the same 2.4GHz band as WiFi.

I personally know a couple people who went blind from looking at radio sources (one was a wave-guide the other was a radar dish; oops). That's one reason I never watch my food cook in a microwave.

As a kid we used to cook hotdogs using an antenna and transmitter.

So yeah, radio waves can have an effect on you no doubt. As for cancer, well, anything that damages your cells theoretically has a chance at cancer. Whether that risk is higher than normal with common radio sources like cellphones is up for debate but I think it's possible.

Edit: Most Wifi is very weak so at even a small distance unlikely to damage cells. Cellphones can be more powerful and you hold it right up against your body. Does it actually damage cells? I think the jury is still out but again I think it's possible..

Microwaving cooks food by applying enough power to heat it up to a higher temperature. Moskowitz is explicit that his claim is not about raising temperature, but rather some other mechanism related to bodily signals that is not fully understood.

What about bluetooth headphones?

I remember back in the early days of BT single ear headsets, there used to be a booklet that warned of prolonged use "drying out your eyeball"...

This was on an Ericsson from memory. old unit that hooked around your ear. I think I got it with a T28 great phone for the day.

Firefighters in California had a law passed that prevents cell phone towers from being placed on fire station property[0]. They complained of headaches and nausea from living near the antennae.

As a species and a culture, it seems we're just finding out about the precautionary principle. We should be more careful.

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (search for "fire")

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