Allen Frey Publishes “Opinion: Cell Phone Health Risk?” in New Scientist

Security concerns during the Cold War may have led to the generation of misinformation on the physiological effects of microwave radiation from mobile phones.”

Online at https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/opinion-cell-phone-health-risk-40449

Excerpt

“Hiding data

During the Cold War, a group at Brooks Air Force Base (AFB) was tasked with reassuring residents when the Air Force wanted to install radar (microwaves) in their neighborhood. To meet that responsibility, the Brooks group hired contractors to write Environmental Impact Statements to justify the placing of the radars—an obvious conflict of interest. Even worse, when a scientist did publish findings that might indicate a risk, Brooks selected contractors to do experiments that suggested the scientist’s research was invalid or not relevant to the safety of Air Force radar.

For example, after my colleagues and I published in 1975 that exposure to very weak microwave radiation opens the regulatory interface known as the blood brain barrier (bbb), a critical protection for the brain, the Brooks AFB group selected a contractor to supposedly replicate our experiment. For 2 years, this contractor presented data at scientific conferences stating that microwave radiation had no effect on the bbb. After much pressure from the scientific community, he finally revealed that he had not, in fact, replicated our work. We had injected dye into the femoral vein of lab rats after exposure to microwaves and observed the dye in the brain within 5 minutes. The Brooks contractor had stuck a needle into the animals’ bellies and sprayed the dye onto their intestines. Thus it is no surprise that when he looked at the brain 5 minutes later, he did not see any dye; the dye had yet to make it into the circulatory system.

Another Brooks AFB responsibility that further incentivized the spreading of misinformation was to lead a lab on a classified microwave-bio weapons program. Competition between this effort and the microwave-bio research programs undoubtedly going on in other nations at the time would explain the Brooks group’s attempts to block and discredit unclassified research in the microwave area and the subsequent publication of the results: it did not want advances in knowledge to appear in the scientific literature where the USSR could benefit from it. This is not unlike the recent uproar over whether bird flu results should be published—or even done at all—because of the fear that they may help terrorists develop biological weapons.”

Read the full article online at https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/opinion-cell-phone-health-risk-40449