Friday, Febuary 25, 2011
Last week in item 2, I made a serious error. The final sentence said, "The
AAAS later backed out, but it serves to remind us that, however obtained, a
disproportionate share of the world's wealth, even in the hands of the well-
intentioned, threatens us all." The sentiment was right-on, but the AAAS
had not backed out of the deal with Templeton; the terms were merely
altered. It is now called the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and
Religion. I have been a Fellow of the AAAS for most of my adult life and
have no plans to resign. I will gladly work with other AAAS scientists to
terminate this program. Science, with its insistence on openness and
physical evidence, has a responsibility to inform the world of what has
been learned even when people would prefer not to hear. This is not easy
in a world carved into 193 sovereign nations, but political boundaries can
be penetrated far more easily than the superstitious barriers that make up
of the world's religions. The result is a planet in crisis; religion is a
major part of the problem.
There has been no increase in brain cancers in the UK since the
proliferation of mobile phones in the 1990s. his firm conclusion comes
from a study released by the University of Manchester this week. All the
researchers required were laptops to access publicly available data from
the UK Office of National Statistics. Contrast that with the 10 year, $14
million case-control study of cell phone use in 13 countries carried out by
the World Health Organization. The costly study seemed unable to draw any
firm conclusions,http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN10/wn052110.html
. An important branch of medicine, epidemiology is concerned with the
distribution of disease, but in the case of electromagnetic radiation (EMF)
it got off to a bad start. In 1976 an unemployed epidemiologist, armed
with a list of addresses of childhood leukemia victims, drove around Denver
looking for common environmental factors. She saw a lot of power lines.
Environmentalists saw brain cancer. Tort lawyers saw class-action
lawsuits. Epidemiologists saw full employment. But cell-phone radiation
just doesn't cause cancer. Do cell phones have any observable effect on
our brain? Let's see.
Cell phones went from zero to ubiquity in a single decade. The Journal of
the American Medical Association this week reported an NIH study of 47
healthy recruits injected with a glucose solution and then exposed for 50
min to radiation from a hand-held mobile phone. The side of the head the
phone was held against was switched randomly. Positron Emission Tomography
(PET) scans exhibited changes associated with glucose metabolism on the
side of the brain closest to the cell phone. This was said to demonstrate
that exposure to cell phone radiation activates the brain, but "the
clinical significance of this finding is unknown." Hmm, that's sort of
limp. I am hopeful that someone will explain to me how the effects of
metabolism are distinguished from changes in blood flow associated with
thermoregulation. The only effect of microwave photons is to excite
molecular vibrations (heat). Blood serves as a coolant to keep the
temperature of the brain nearly constant in spite of cell phone radiation.
|
