Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal–the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases–young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”
It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem–maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem–is like saying our shoes might be killing us.
Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains.
We don’t like to ask questions we don’t want to hear the answer to. If I had to give up my cellphone, life as I’ve gotten used to it over the past decade would be very hard to continue. I wonder if using the microphone-equipped earbuds provided with the iPhone (and which allow you to keep the phone itself in your pocket, or elsewhere on your person) would help?
But it’s not merely cell phones themselves, but cell phone towers and Wi-Fi systems. Excerpt:
All of these concerns–the danger of microwaves issuing from the phones we place next to our skulls, the danger of waves emitted by the cell towers that dot our landscapes–also apply to the Wi-Fi networks in our homes and libraries and offices and cafés and parks and neighborhoods. Wi-Fi operates typically at a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (the same frequency as microwave ovens) but is embedded with a wider range of modulations than cell phones, because we need it to carry more data. “It never ceases to surprise me that people will fight a cell tower going up in their neighborhoods,” Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer’s Guide to the Issues and How to Protect Ourselves, told me. “They they’ll install a Wi-Fi system in their homes. That’s like inviting a cell tower indoors.”
In the summer of 2006, a super-Wi-Fi system known as WiMAX was tested in rural Sweden. Bombarded with signals, the residents of the village of Götene–who had no knowledge that the transmitter had come online–were overcome by headaches, difficulty breathing, and blurred vision, according to a Swedish news report. Two residents reported to the hospital with heart arrhythmias, similar to those that, more than thirty years ago, Allen Frey induced in frog hearts. This happened only hours after the system was turned on, and as soon as it was powered down, the symptoms disappeared.
Allan Frey is the neuroscientist who first discovered decades ago that microwaves could affect the brain. He says today that the whole debate around cellphones, microwaves and the human body, which few people are willing to talk about and which industry has done a lot to discourage, is a perfect example of science being stopped in its tracks by people feeling too threatened by the information it might uncover. Furthermore, says Frey:
“A human being is a complex organization of electrical fields. Electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms, for example, measure these fields. Every cell has an electrical field across the cell membrane, which is a regulatory interface and controls what goes into and out of the cell. All nerve signals are electric. And between the nucleus and the membrane there is an electrical field, you can measure voltages of individual cells! Electricity drives biology. We evolved in a particular electromagnetic environment”–the magnetic fields from the earth’s iron core, the terrestrial magnetism from lodestones, visible light, ultraviolet frequencies, lightning–”and if we change that environment as we have, we either adapt or we have trouble.”
This is a well-researched story. Read the whole thing. (Thanks to reader mm for sending it along).
posted February 14, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Excellent article.
The incidence of brain cancer has definitely been rising and there must be reason, or reasons, for it.
btw, rod, how do we email you now?
posted February 14, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Unsubstantiated crapola.
posted February 14, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Tom, you can email me at rdreher (at ) templeton.org. I look forward to hearing from you.
posted February 14, 2010 at 9:13 pm
One big way to decrease radiation is to use what are called air tube or blue tube headsets (not bluetooth). I plan on getting one when I buy a cell phone.
The dangers are very real, and the evidence is growing. For example, there’s one study showing that people nearly always get the tumor on the side of the head they use the phone on.
I hope the wifi effect is no so bad….this could eventually become a big problem for many people, if it is not already.
posted February 14, 2010 at 9:38 pm
The tumor increase could also be the result of increases in consumption of Aspartame. This is also a controversial subject
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
I can only speak anecdotally, but I have two friends who for years have been drinking 3 or 4 cans of diet soda every day and both of them got brain tumors in their 30′s.
posted February 14, 2010 at 9:52 pm
I’ve heard this study before. I have one cell phone that is kept strictly for emergencies and I need to buy more minutes for it. I probably use the thing once a month. I think I’m safe. I hate how rude people are with the damn things and how many accidents they cause because kids can’t stop texting long enough to keep their eyes on the road.
posted February 14, 2010 at 10:38 pm
first of all I wouldn’t put a whole of faith in a GQ article. I would though look through the links found here
http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/cellphonecancer.php
I would also take a look at this Michael Fumento article published in 1993
http://fumento.com/ibdcell.html
here is a followup he did published 13 years later
http://www.fumento.com/media/cellphone.html
and here is what he posted to his blog on Dec 30, 2009
http://www.fumento.com/weblog/archives/2009/12/no_yet_again_ce.html
posted February 15, 2010 at 10:10 am
“We don’t like to ask questions we don’t want to hear the answer to.”
Yes, like could it be something even more central to the lifestyle of these finance guys that could be the source?
posted February 15, 2010 at 11:51 am
In a past life I spent a little time studying physical and analytical chemistry (which is basically quantum mechanics applied to chemistry; the analytical side is how to take advantage of the phys chem stuff to do qualitative analysis—i.e. figuring out what compound you have—as well as some quantitative analysis—how much of a particular compound you have).
One of the main tools we used for organic analysis was infrared spectroscopy. In other words, you beam infrared light at your sample and see which frequencies it absorbs and which it transmits. Certain types of chemical bonds absorb infrared light at certain frequencies. By matching the absorption spectrum, you can figure out what compound you’re dealing with.
What’s happening there is that the IR light that the bond absorbs increases in the energy state of the electrons in the bond to a higher level. In the IR region, this corresponds to bending and stretching frequencies; you’re actually causing the molecular bond to bend and stretch a little bit. As the energy state falls back, the energy it has absorbed is rereleased as heat.
This is how your microwave works: it’s tuned to the frequency absorbed by water and fat molecules. They absorb the microwave light, and then rerelease it as heat, cooking your food from inside out. This is why microwaves don’t work well with dry, low-fat foods. It’s also why they are dangerous to living tissue: they’ll cook that just as effectively.
But it’s important to note that the microwaves do not actually break any chemical bonds. It takes light of a higher wavelength than that (mostly in the ultraviolet range) to do that. This means that there’s no chemical change being made by your microwave. The substances involved, whether they are water, fat or DNA, remain exactly the same (unless enough heat builds up to cause a chemical reaction, and that takes a lot of energy, far, far more than a cell phone produces).
Radio waves have even less energy than IR and microwaves. They can’t affect bending and stretching frequencies, merely rotational frequencies. So there’s even less potential for actual chemical changes (i.e. the type that might cause cancer) there.
So I’m a bit skeptical of all of this “radio waves gave me cancer!” stuff. Cancer is a rare enough disease that epidemiology is notoriously hard to do. A single extra case may indicate something weird in the environment or simple bad luck. Sorting out anecdote from real evidence is really, really hard to do.
So until we either have
(a) a hard and fast epidemiological study that goes beyond the anecdotal, or
(b) a mechanism that explains just how radio waves might actually be causing the chemical changes that lead to cancer
I’m personally going to put the “OMG cell phones cause cancer!!1!” theory into the same file as “OMG vaccines cause autism!!1!”. In other words, the realm of kooks preying on the uneducated.
posted February 15, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Use a blue-tooth head-set with your cell phone. The EMI from the blue tooth is far lower energy than that of a cell phone itself.
posted February 15, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Have you read Robert Heinlein’s “Waldo”?
Interesting — RAH got much right, and a bunch of stuff wrong, but it’s still worth considering.
Given that you can’t get a clear answer on the aftereffects, physical or mental, of abortion, with 50 million plus over 37 years, I’m not optimistic that we’ll get a clean, undisputed shot at an answer on this one. Not that I’m comparing cell phones and abortion, except for James’ 10:10 am point — there’s what we don’t want to know the answer to, and there’s what we’re fighting hard to keep not thinking about, to the degree that we don’t even remember that we aren’t.
posted February 15, 2010 at 3:16 pm
I wouldn’t be surprised. But on the plus side, they may prevent Alzheimer’s:
http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Lifestyle/could_cell_phones_cure_alzheimer_s_disease_0701100702.html
Pick your poison.
posted February 16, 2010 at 4:36 am
I don’t know if what I’m doing would eliminate all risk, but I use my cellphone for very short (less than a minute) calls for logistical purposes: where/when to go somewhere, what to buy from the store, etc.
I have only once had a long conversation that lasted 15 minutes (it was an emergency that required substantial discussion).
If it’s brief usage of cellphones, I think that would really cut down the exposure and (whatever) harm.
posted March 2, 2010 at 3:33 am
Rod Dreher,
Consider yourself a valuable asset to humanity. I applaud your intentions and efforts to inform the public on a grave and dangerous issue, one that so few have yet to even acknowledge.
Myself, I do not use a cell phone or any other mobile device and look forward to the day I can live far removed from any so-called technical advances in “science.”
Please do not allow silly, critical remarks from others to dissuade you from seeking the truth and from helping your fellow mankind.
One thing is certain, the more dependency is nurtured, the less people will think for themselves.
Best regards,
John Barremore
Houston, TX
posted March 3, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Glad to see you’re reporting on this issue. The GQ article was written over the course of almost a year, and as you stated, it is very well researched.
@ Lindsey Abelard – be careful using Bluetooth. It’s true that the power emitted is much weaker than cell phones but the energy is directed right into the inner ear, even more so than when holding a phone to your head.
posted March 8, 2010 at 12:05 pm
I think, phones are not giving us cancer
posted May 18, 2010 at 1:45 pm
After a 16 hour surgery a few years back, my son who constantly used cell phone had huge tumor on his right side that involved his carotid artery and thyroid gland. He now dawns a 12″ scar. He stated at the time, this doctor stated, he had never seen so many right sided tumors on necks and ears and brain things going on. My son was just 25 years old. Eats good home cooked food, and very extremely health conscious. He now uses a head set. But, still all this stuff is very scary.
Sticking to my dial up phone. China will kill us one way or another.