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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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").

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)

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