News Center: Short Takes Archive
Declassified Intelligence Report Renews Concern over RF Weapons
A newly declassified, though heavily redacted, report from the intelligence community has put renewed emphasis on the possibility that the condition known as “Havana Syndrome” could be caused by pulsed RF energy.
“Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics [of Havana Syndrome, also called ‘anomalous health incidents’] although information gaps exist,” the intelligence panel concluded.
The report, Anomalous Health Incidents: Analysis of Potential Causal Mechanisms, was prepared for the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, and the Deputy Director of the CIA, David Cohen. It was released to attorney Mark Zaid at the James Madison Project in Washington, DC. Salon broke the news yesterday evening.
The names of the authors of the report were censored. “The panel comprised experts from inside and outside the U.S. Government with expertise in relevant areas of science, medicine and engineering,” according to the report. All had top secret clearances.
Symptoms of Havana Syndrome include hearing loss, vertigo, headaches, nausea and various other unexplained neurological complaints.
Support for 2020 Findings of the National Academy of Sciences
The new report, dated September 2022, supports the conclusions of a 2020 assessment by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, chaired by Stanford University professor David Relman. That panel found:
Considering the available information and the possible mechanisms, the committee felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations reported by Department of State employees “are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”
Only about a third of the members of Relman’s group had security clearances. Linda Birnbaum, the former director of NIEHS and the NTP, was a member of the NAS panel.
Two years later, Relman was still concerned about RF radiation. “We have identified an area of science and medicine that I think is very important that we really don’t know a whole lot about,” he told CNN. “How does the human body interact with electromagnetic energy? We really need to understand that better.”
Others believe that Havana Syndrome is a form of mass hysteria. For instance, just last week, Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist, writing in Psychology Today called the whole controversy a “fiasco.” All those symptoms were “not caused by a secret weapon, but an array of health conditions and anxiety,” he argued.
Key Findings
The key conclusions of the new intelligence committee report are:
• “The signs and symptoms of AHIs are genuine and compelling.”
• “A subset of AHIs [has] a unique combination of core characteristics that cannot be explained by known environmental or medical conditions and could be due to external stimuli.”
• “Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics, although information gaps exist.”
• “Ultrasound also plausibly explains the core characteristics, but only in close-access scenarios and with information gaps.”
• “Psychosocial factors alone cannot account for the core characteristics, although they may explain some other reported incidents or contribute to long-term signs and symptoms.”
• “Ionizing radiation, chemical and biological agents, infrasound, audible sound, ultrasound propagated over large distances, and bulk heating from electromagnetic energy are all implausible explanations for the core characteristics in the absence of other synergistic stimuli.”
Here are three noteworthy snippets from the new report (unfortunately, the references are not included in what was released):
On the blood-brain barrier (p.7):
On the auditory effect first described by Allan Frey (p.25):
On low-frequency modulation/high-frequency carrier (p.28):
Professor Allowed Back on Campus; No Action Taken
The University at Albany in New York State has closed its investigation of Professor David Carpenter, the director of its Institute for Health and the Environment, without taking any disciplinary action.
After being barred from going to his office most of last year, Carpenter may now once again “teach and conduct research on campus,” according to a statement released by the University on Tuesday evening.
The full text of the statement is below:
On Wednesday, Carpenter issued his own statement, in which he says that he’s “very proud of [his] work with plaintiffs around the country who seek to hold Monsanto responsible for the damage done by its products.” And that he is “humbled and deeply appreciative of the thousands of people who heard about my situation and supported me.” (Full text, below.)
Carpenter Placed on “Alternate Assignment”
Just over two weeks ago, on February 5, the Albany Times Union reported that Carpenter had been “quietly placed on alternate assignment” as the University conducted a “disciplinary investigation” of his work as an expert witness on the health effects of PCBs, a family of highly toxic chemicals, formally known as polychlorinated biphenyls. They were manufactured by Monsanto until they were banned by the EPA in the late 1970s. (More about PCBs here.)
While this investigation was going on, Carpenter was “instructed to not visit any campuses and perform his duties from home,” according to the Times Union.
It is not clear what Carpenter is accused of doing wrong. He donated all his consulting fees, except those for travel expenses, to fund scholarships for his students, with, as the Times Union spells out, “the consent of top university officials.”
His suspension prompted widespread protests. A petition decrying Monsanto’s attacks on Carpenter —posted on Change.org— has been signed by more than a thousand supporters. A rally to draw public attention to his predicament was scheduled to be held at the state capitol in Albany on Thursday, February 23.
Among the professional groups speaking out for Carpenter are the Ramazzini Institute, based in Bologna, Italy, and the International Commission on the Biological Effects of EMFs (ICBE-EMF). The Commission’s release states that Albany’s attempt to silence Carpenter “brings shame to this University.”
In an editorial, Environmental Health News accused the university of helping Monsanto silence Carpenter.
“UAlbany reiterates in the strongest possible terms our full commitment to unfettered academic freedom,” the University stated in its public announcement.
The university’s investigation was prompted by a records request by the Shook Hardy & Bacon law firm, working on behalf of Monsanto, in its litigtion on PCBs. (What remains of Monsanto is now owned by Bayer.) Monsanto is also the maker of Round-Up, a glyphosate herbicide, which has been and continues to be at the center for another major health controversy.
In 2015, IARC classified PCBs and dioxin-like PCBs as a known (Class 1) human carcinogen.
David Carpenter, photo by Paul Buckowski, Times Union
On February 13, the Times Union published a follow-up story detailing how Shook Hardy was using the university’s investigation to try and silence Carpenter in an ongoing case in which he is serving as an expert witness for the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. The tribe is suing Monsanto for PCB contamination of its lands, that are adjacent to a chemical dump.
A Major Force in EMF/RF Research
In addition to his work on toxic chemicals, for over 40 years Carpenter has been a leading force in efforts to study and regulate the health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and radiation.
He led the New York Power Line Project in the early 1980s, which resulted in the confirmation of the landmark epidemiological study by Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper, which first linked power line EMFs to childhood leukemia. The NY project report, issued in 1987, brought international attention to the power line cancer risk. Fifteen years later, in 2001, IARC classified power-frequency fields as a possible (class 2B) carcinogen.
In 1994, Carpenter and Sinerik Ayrapetyan coedited a two-volume collection of review papers, under the title, The Biological Effects of Electric and Magnetic Fields, published by Academic Press.
Carpenter is the coeditor, with Cindy Sage, of the BioIniative Report, which promotes stricter exposure standards for EMFs and RF radiation. First issued in 2007, the Report has been regularly updated.
More recently, Carpenter has raised questions about the safety of 5G radiation, the latest generation of cell phone technology. For this, he was harshly criticized in two separate articles by William Broad, a science reporter at the New York Times. They were published just a few months apart in 2019 (see our “A Fact-Free Hit on a 5G Critic” and “Open Season on 5G Critics”). At about the same time, the Times announced that it had “joined forces with Verizon to create the 5G Journalism Lab.” (See this paid post on the New York Times website.) Verizon is one of the largest telecom companies in the world with revenues on the order of $150 billion a year.
Carpenter, who is 86-year-old, is one of two editors-in-chief of Reviews on Environmental Health, a journal published by De Gruyter.
The Times Union story on Carpenter’s reinstatement is here.
See also: “Professor Says He Was Barred from Campus After FOIA Inquiry,” Inside Higher Ed, February 20.
Abraham Liboff, a biophysicst and journal editor, died on January 9 at the age of 95.
Abe was a wonderful and generous man. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, I wrote an appreciation of his work. You can read it here.
Tribute in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine
March 21, 2023
Joseph Salvatore and Henry Lai, the current and former editors-in-chief of the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, have published a tribute to Abe Liboff.
Liboff was the editor of the journal from 1998 to 2010.
“His work has inspired generations of nonionizing-electromagnetic field (EMF) researchers,” they write. “His influence will be felt for many years to come.”
Their tribute is open access.
ANSES, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety, has issued a request for proposals for studies on RF radiation. Topics under study are:
- Mechanisms of action at molecular & cellular level;
- Physiological & health effects;
- EM hypersensitivity;
- Exposure characterization.
Letters of intent are due by January 17, 2023. Selected projects will be announced in September.
Further details:
- Full RfP.
- Press release.
Next week, ANSES and IARC are hosting a one-day workshop on RF and health in Paris.
Is This a Substitute for IARC’s RF Cancer Reassessment?
Two influential health agencies, both based in France, will host a one-day meeting on RF–health research, November 23 in Paris. The public is invited to attend in person or online. Registration is free.
The conference, organized by ANSES, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety, and IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, will focus on potential effects of RF radiation on the brain and on cancer risks. The theme is “Research in a Fast-Moving Environment.”
Among the scheduled speakers are: Giuseppe Curcio of the University of L'Aquila (Italy), Isabelle Deltour and Joachim Schüz of IARC in Lyon, Emilie van Deventer of the WHO in Geneva, Joe Wiart formerly of France Telecom (now Orange) and Wout Joseph of Ghent University (Belgium).
The provisional agenda is here.
IARC Skeptical of RF–Brain Tumor Link
The two sponsors do not necessarily share a common outlook on RF health risks.
In 2011, a panel assembled by IARC classified RF radiation as a possible human (2B) carcinogen. That decision was based on epidemiological studies which found more brain tumors among long-term phone users. But, for now many years, Deltour and Schüz have been openly skeptical that those links are real. Schüz is the head of IARC’s Environment and Lifestyle Epidemiology Branch.
Their latest effort comes in an open access paper published in August by Environment International. There they argue that the increased risks are “implausible” —in effect, challenging the legitimacy of the 2B designation.
Among their coauthors are Sweden’s Maria Feychting and Denmark’s Christoffer Johansen. They too have long doubted the cancer risk.
For more on how this has been playing out, see “IARC and RF: What’s Next?”
ANSES Favors Precaution
ANSES, on the other hand, appears to be far more cautious about discounting risks.
The agency has published numerous health reports on RF radiation over the last 20 years. In 2019, for instance, it recommended precautionary steps to limit radiation exposures from mobile phones. ANSES advised not carrying mobile phones in shirt or trouser pockets, where they would be flush to the body, that is with no separation distance allowing greater radiation absorption.
Most recently —in the spring of last year— ANSES issued an “Opinion” stating that 5G systems in the 3.5 GHz frequency band were “unlikely” to pose any new health risks. It cautioned, however, that there were not enough data on the 26 GHz band (millimeter waves) to allow drawing any conclusions.
More on ANSES’ RF reports, released 2003-2016, here.
Will IARC Reassess the RF Cancer Risk?
In 2019, following the release of the NTP and Ramazzini RF–animal studies showing increased tumor counts after long-term exposure, IARC was urged by one of its own advisory committees to convene a new panel to reassess that “2B” classification. More than a few interpreted this as a call for an upgrade to “2A”, that is, RF would become a probable human carcinogen.
The committee asked that this second look be done sometime between 2022 and 2024.
IARC itself has been silent on whether it is acting on that recommendation.
A new evaluation has not been scheduled, Véronique Terrasse, a communication aide to Elisabete Weiderpass, the Director of IARC, told Microwave News earlier this month. Weiderpass will give opening remarks at the November RF conference.
The question, some people are now asking, is whether the November conference is a substitute —temporary or otherwise— for an indepedent IARC reassessment of RF cancer risks.
Forty Years Later, Not Much Has Changed
A Challenge to ICNIRP
Close to 40 years after its first publication, The Microwave Debate, Nicholas Steneck’s history of research and regulation of microwave health effects, is back in print —this time in Norwegian.
The new translation comes with an epilogue by Thomas Butler, a professor at Ireland’s Cork University Business School, who has contributed seven chapters —about 30,000 words— to bring Steneck’s history up to the present.
The centerpiece of Steneck’s story is how the microwave exposure limit, known as the 10 milliwatt or Schwan standard, came about in the mid-1950s and continued to hold sway for decades. A four-member team, led by Steneck, published “The Origins of the U.S. Safety Standards for Microwave Radiation” in Science magazine in 1980.
Butler continues this thread with a focus on how the standard evolved after 1984, and the parts played by ICNIRP, the IEEE and the FCC.
The translation is the brainchild of Einar Flydal, formerly with Telenor, a telecom conglomerate serving the Nordic and many other countries. He has also been a consultant to the Norwegian Ministry of Education and an adjunct professor at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU). After retiring in 2011, Flydal turned to speaking and blogging on EMF/RF health issues, including dirty electricity, smart meters, and most recently 5G. He lives in Oslo.
The Norwegian (2022) and the original U.S. (1984) editions
Asked why he had undertaken the translation, Flydal explained that as he was digging into EMF history he became fascinated by the work of Robert Becker and Andrew Marino, two biophysicists who, separately and together, wrote a number of books. Becker’s The Body Electric, which came out in 1985, a year after Steneck’s Debate, is considered a classic. It’s still in print.
Along the way, Flydal spotted a reference to The Microwave Debate and how it offered details on the origin of the U.S. exposure limit. Last year, he located a copy in a second-hand bookstore in San Diego. “I quickly realized that while it may be out of print, it’s not out of date,” Flydal told me. “I then spent most of the winter translating.” He also reached out to Butler, who, like himself, is highly critical of ICNIRP: Butler has described the Commission as carrying the torch “to protect the thermal view.”
Flydal said that the translation was worth the effort. The potential audience is larger than one might assume, he explained. “All Scandinavians can read Norwegian —although Swedes and Danes find it a bit odd. Icelanders can too.” (The total population of these four countries is over 22 million.)
Tom Butler Einar Flydal
Unlike Steneck, who presents a largely neutral description of microwave history, Butler is an advocate for change. He sees what has transpired over the last 40 years as ample grounds for a new approach, one that does not include ICNIRP.
ICNIRP: “An Immoral Group”
“In my opinion,” Butler stated in an email from Cork, “ICNIRP is an immoral group of scientists who knowingly distort scientific truth to protect industry interests over the public good.” He added: “Given the weight of evidence on oxidative stress, and the ubiquity of wireless devices in homes, we may be looking at an increase in chronic and systemic illnesses.” Butler describes himself as a social scientist and technologist.
Flydal’s new book has received an improbable endorsement from Lars Klæboe of the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority. He calls it a “formidable effort.” This blurb on the back cover is surprising in the ever-polarized world of RF and health. Klæboe, a member of the original Interphone study group, is skeptical of RF health risks. He has long worked with Maria Feychting, a former vice chair of ICNIRP, and Joachim Schüz of IARC, two other skeptics.
Butler is planning a “much slimmed down” version of his epilogue, some 8,000 words, for publication in an English-language journal.
Neither Butler nor Flydal is a stranger to the political machinations of the RF world —and of course there’s a lot about that in Steneck’s book.
A couple of years ago, Butler filed a complaint against the Irish Times after the newspaper reprinted an article from the New York Times: “The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t,” by William Broad. Butler charged that Broad had distorted the facts and the Irish Press Ombudsman agreed. The NY Times shrugged it off. (More on Broad’s distortions here: “A Fact Free Hit on a 5G Critic.”)
Flydal recently published —with Else Nordhagen— an analysis showing that ICNIRP’s 2020 RF/MW exposure limits are based on scientific reviews by a small clique, most of whose members have close ties to ICNIRP itself (they call this “self-referencing authorships”). Nordhagen and Flydal detail how Their paper was posted by Reviews on Environmental Health on June 27.
Steneck was a history professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when the Microwave Debate was published in 1984. After becoming emeritus, he became a consultant in the field of scientific integrity.
I asked Steneck for some thoughts about where the Debate stands today. Here’s part of what he told me:
“In the book, I showed that science was influenced by values and politics, but that message was not accepted. So now, 40 years later, we are still relying on ‘science’ to make decisions, not realizing or admitting that the RF field is plagued by the same problems that existed in the 1980s. When contacted about the translation, I was pleased to know that some understood and appreciated what drives and shapes the research we use to set policies. I am not optimistic that this new translation and update will make much of a difference. Today’s social media generation will not tolerate any limitation of 5G.”
_______________________
Debatten on Mikrobølgene is available online and in local bookstores with a list price of 460 NOK (US$45), though Flydal says it can usually be had for 410 NOK ($40).
Runs over 200 Pages and Includes More Than 1,000 References
WHO Webinar on ELF EMF and RF Effects on F&F
A detailed examination —likely the most exhaustive ever attempted— of the environmental effects of non-ionizing radiation has been published in Reviews on Environmental Health.
“Effects of Non-Ionizing Electromagnetic Fields on Flora and Fauna” is in three parts, the last of which was posted today. They are:
- Part 1. Rising Ambient EMF Levels in the Environment
- Part 2. Impacts: How Species Interact with Natural and Man-Made EMF
- Part 3. Exposure Standards, Public Policy, Laws, and Future Directions
Taken together, the three papers run over 200 pages in the journal and include more than 1,000 references.
The authors are Blake Levitt, Henry Lai and Albert Manville. Levitt is a science journalist, based in Connecticut, and the author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues and How To Protect Ourselves, first published in 1995. Lai is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Seattle. In the 1990s, he and N.P. Singh were the first to show that ELF (60 Hz) EMFs and RF radiation could lead to DNA breaks. Manville is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and, formerly, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“We approached it from the biology/environmental ecosystem level, rather than the typical physics and/or human physiology side,” Levitt told Microwave News.
She added that they are planning to publish a book on the topic for the lay reader.
WHO Webinar: EMF Effects on Flora & Fauna
April 21, 2022
The World Health Organization (WHO) will host a webinar on April 27 on Electromagnetic Field Effects on Flora and Fauna. There is no charge for listening in, but you must register by April 26. The one-hour session will be recorded and made available to those who register.
The speakers will be Blanka Pophof of the German Federal of Radiation Protection (BfS) and Arno Thielens of Ghent University in Belgium.
May 2, 2022
A video recording of the one-hour webinar has now been posted. Go to:
http://bit.ly/39yaFzt
and use passcode:
6Fn#pDVS.
A transcript is also available.
Fourth Paper by Levitt, Lai and Manville
November 25, 2022
Today, Levitt, Lai and Manville published a new paper (their fourth) of EMF/RF effects on wildlife and plants in Frontiers of Public Health.
They write: “Long-term chronic low-level EMF exposure guidelines, which do not now exist, should be set for wildlife... We have a long overdue obligation to consider potential consequences to other species... The evidence requiring action is clear.”
This new paper is open access. Here’s the abstract:
Strict Standard Seen as Barrier to 5G Development
Italy’s 6 V/m RF exposure standard, one of the strictest in the world, may soon fall victim to 5G.
The Italian limit, adopted more than 20 years ago, is widely perceived as standing in the way of the build-out of 5G infrastructure, which will require the installation of many more RF antennas. The proposed solution is to make the standard ten times weaker and bring it in line with ICNIRP’s 61 V/m guideline.*
The standard is a target of Italy’s post-pandemic national recovery plan (known as the Next Generation Italia or PNRR). The plan allocates over €40 billion (~US$48 billion) to advance the digitization of the country, including promoting 5G technology and increasing broadband speeds nationwide, currently among the slowest in Europe.
All the major political parties, except one, favor loosening the 6 V/m limit, according to La Repubblica, the second most widely read (non-sport) newspaper in Italy. The one holdout is the Fratelli d’Italia party (Brothers of Italy), a far-right, neo-fascist group —and even it is on record as wanting to make the siting of antennas easier for telecom operators.
The proposal has galvanized a coalition of Italian environmental researchers and activists, as well as members of the international RF research community. They have appealed to the government to save the 6 V/m limit. (See Tweets below.)
One appeal, sent to Mario Draghi, the recently installed prime minister, on April 26, had been signed by more than 8,700 supporters within a couple of days, according to Fiorella Belpoggi. She is the scientific director of the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna and is helping coordinate the campaign.
Italy has long been a hotbed of anti-5G activism. A petition calling for a moratorium on 5G, launched two years ago, has garnered more than 63,000 signatures. The Italian Stop 5G Alliance has been a major force in promoting this petition.
The protests —including a hunger strike by over 150 people— appears to have softened the government’s approach. When the lower house of the Parliament approved the recovery plan at the end of April, the proposal to eliminate the 6 V/m limit had been dropped and replaced by a call to review the standard.‡ But, Belpoggi told Microwave News, “the door for a change remains open.”
All Eyes on Vittorio Colao
Much of the public furor at the potential weakening of the exposure limit has been directed at Vittorio Colao, the Harvard-educated minister for innovation, technology and digitization in the new Draghi government.
Colao was the chief executive of Vodafone, the largest telecommunications company in Europe, for ten years, ending in late 2018. The following year he became a director of Verizon, the second biggest telecom in the world (after AT&T) and, like Colao himself, a major promoter of 5G technology. Colao has now stepped down from the Verizon board. He has been praised as a “strategic visionary.”
Colao played a major role in designing the PNRR. He was commissioned by the previous Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to devise a post-COVID recovery strategy, which became known as the Colao plan. It included investments in infrastructure.
That plan, delivered to Conte last June, proposed raising Italy’s exposure limits to those recommended by the EC† (that is, the ICNIRP limits), according to Livio Giuliani, the former director of research at Italy’s National Institute for Prevention and Occupational Safety (ISPESL, now INAIL). The 2020 plan‡ also favored giving national authorities the right to veto local ordinances that block antennas.§ (This would be similar to the federal preemption of local laws in the U.S.)
The new digitization initiative, which Colao would most likely implement, accounts for about 20% of the total outlays under the €200 billion PNRR.
In a meeting with legislators in April, Colao acknowledged that a weakening of the 6 V/m limit is “unpopular.” He committed to striking a balance between the number of antennas and the health and welfare of the citizenry, pledging that, “the scientific evidence would be evaluated,” according to La Repubblica.
When the 6 V/m standard took effect in 1999, Italy had the most restrictive standard in Europe. A year later, Switzerland adopted a 4 V/m limit for cell tower radiation and a 3 V/m limit for radio and TV transmitters (details here).
The 6 V/m limit is approximately the same as the Soviet/Russian exposure standard of 10 μW/cm2.
It is not clear what impact the Italian standard may have had on the build-out of the mobile phone network or would have on 5G antennas.
The April 26 appeal to Draghi concludes:
“Italy has led the world for the last 20 years in demonstrating that their lower and more health protective exposure limits for RFR can be reached by the Italian Telecommunications industry without significant economic or technical barriers to their expansion into 4 and 5G systems.”
___________________
Here’s a thread of Microwave News Tweets, posted last week as some of this story played out:
Link to press release
Link to letter
Link to letter
______________________
* How much weaker is the ICNIRP standard than Italy’s 6 V/m limit? It depends on whether you are looking at the electric field or power density. The 6 V/m electric field standard is approximately ten times stricter than ICNIRP’s 61 V/m. In terms of power density, the Italian limit is about a hundred times stricter than ICNIRP (10 μW/cm2 v. 1 mW/cm2). The reason: Power density is proportional to the square of the electric field strength.
† In 1999, the EC recommended that member states follow the ICNIRP guidelines. From the Italian Parliament on March 24, 2021: “Consider adjusting the current Italian limits on electromagnetic emissions to the European ones.” (Item #15 on p.76.)
‡ See also the July 2020 report on 5G from a committee of the Italian Parliament.
§ See item #27 on p.22 of the June 2020 Colao plan. Some 500 municipalities have policies that make it hard to site antennas, La Repubblica reported last year.
Alexander Lerchl Has Received $5 Million in Research Grants from German Government
Alexander Lerchl’s bogus campaign against the REFLEX project and members of Hugo Rüdiger’s lab did nothing to harm his career. Just the opposite, Lerchl thrived as he gained stature and a succession of rich research grants from the German government.
Over the last 20 years, Germany’s Federal Office of Radiation Protection —the Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, or BfS for short— has given Lerchl $5 million in contracts. Lerchl has been the best-funded RF lab researcher in Germany, Europe, and, most likely, the world (see Table below).
“Invalidating the REFLEX study and showing that mobile phone radiation is harmless are in the interest of his patrons —the BfS and the mobile communication industry,” Franz Adlkofer told Microwave News. “Both have embraced him.” Adlkofer ran the REFLEX project and supported Elisabeth Kratochvil’s lawsuit against Lerchl that led to his censure in a December court decision (see accompanying story).
The BfS is also the principal sponsor and institutional home of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). In each of the last three years, it has contributed 70-80% of ICNIRP’s annual income. Like Lerchl, ICNIRP has refused to recognize, and has often dismissed, the cancer risks associated with mobile phones.
In 2008, as he was waging his campaign against the Rüdiger lab, Lerchl was appointed to a two-year term as chairman of the Non-Ionizing Radiation Committee of the German Radiation Protection Commission, known as the SSK, and was reappointed in 2011. For four years, 2009-2012, Lerchl was, effectively, the most senior advisor on EMFs and RF radiation to the German government. (The SSK advises the BfS.)
As early as May 2013, the directors of Diagnose:Funk, a German-Swiss environmental and consumer protection group, issued a public statement calling for Lerchl to be disavowed by the BfS management and other scientific, governmental and academic officials. They asked:
“For how long is this man still to be tolerated by the scientific community as a research project leader, by the Jacobs University Bremen as a tenured professor, and by politicians as an advisor?”
In an interview with Diagnose:Funk, posted online on February 4, Adlkofer echoed those same eight-year-old sentiments. Politicians “must ask themselves whether they can afford to continue working with a man who has been exposed as an unscrupulous slanderer,” Adlkofer stated.
Lerchl Silent on BfS’ Two Failed REFLEX Follow-Ups
In 2005, the BfS sponsored two projects to test the REFLEX findings. Both were beset with missteps and delays.
The first was a million-dollar (€832,000) contract to a young researcher, Petra Waldmann, at the College of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. It appeared to be an obvious attempt to engineer a negative finding. Waldmann was tasked with using a cell type that Rüdiger and Kratochvil had already shown to be unresponsive to mobile phone radiation. At the time, Adlkofer had warned the BfS that “you won’t see an effect” with those cells. She didn’t. Inexplicably, Waldmann took seven years to publish her negative results in Radiation Research.
To save face the BfS soon commissioned a second project, also in Darmstadt, at a cost of $700,000 (€566,000) which called for exposing the same type of cells in which Rüdiger had seen DNA breaks. No effects were found. These results are not easily accessible. They were never published in a peer-reviewed journal and the final report was not released for six years —not until 2014, eight years after the first Rüdiger paper. The report runs 268 pages and is available in German only, with a one-page abstract in English.
Amid his never-ending criticism of REFLEX, Lerchl came to see himself in the role of policing the EMF/RF literature to weed out what he saw as bad science and misconduct. Yet, he never once called out either group of Darmstadt researchers, or his benefactors at the BfS when they decided to use an inactive cell type, or when the Darmstadt group failed to publish its findings.
Importantly, Lerchl never acknowledged that a 15-minute walk from the Rüdiger lab, across the MUV campus, Wilhelm Mosgöller’s group was exposing the same cells to the same radiation and seeing changes in DNA repair. That is, Mosgöller was showing independent evidence of the claim at the heart of the Vienna controversy: RF radiation can affect DNA (more here).
Lerchl is a professor of biology at Jacobs University. He also has an appointment as a professor of ethics of science and technology.
Slow-Walking Cancer Studies
In 2011, while Lerchl was still chairman of the SSK NIR committee, the BfS awarded him over $500,000 (€458,000) for an animal experiment to repeat a German study which showed that 3G radiation can promote cancer. To just about everyone’s surprise, in 2015, Lerchl announced that he had confirmed the earlier finding.
A replication study has always been held as the sine qua non for regulatory action. Yet, BfS remained silent. It called for no reevaluation of the RF–cancer risk. Nor is there any indication that the BfS asked ICNIRP to investigate.
The BfS followed up with another contract, this time for $200,000 (€164,000), to allow Lerchl to see if he could better understand how RF promotes tumors. Though it ended in May 2017, Lerchl only published his findings late last year.
By then, the BfS had given Lerchl yet another contract, this time for close to $1.5 million (€1.2 million) for work on 5G radiation. News of this award was not without irony. Lerchl, who was known as an animal researcher, would now be following up Rüdiger’s cell culture studies. He would be doing the experiments that Adlkofer had lost due to the fallout of the Vienna Affair.
In a statement following the Bremen decision, Diagnose:Funk urged the BfS to cancel Lerchl’s 5G contract.
Others have called on Japanese and Korean officials to remove Lerchl from the advisory panel for the partial repeat of the U.S. NTP animal-cancer study.
See also: German Court Moves To Silence Relentless Critic of RF DNA Studies
and Lerchl’s Unattainable Prize: The IARC RF Panel
Cited Theory To Reject Low-Level EMF Effects
Robert K. Adair, the former chairman of the physics department at Yale University and a leading critic of any and all claims that weak EMFs can have biological effects, died on September 28. He was 96.
A particle physicist, Adair held one of Yale’s prestigious Sterling professorships. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. To the public, Adair is best known as the author of The Physics of Baseball.
During the 1990s, after retiring from teaching, he took a professional interest in the work of his wife, Eleanor Adair, who studied the physiological effects associated with microwave heating at the John B. Pierce Laboratory, also in New Haven (and later at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas). Over the next decade, Robert Adair published a series of scientific papers and commentaries, in which he maintained that, as he wrote in a 1992 letter to Science magazine, health risks associated with exposure to weak EMFs are an “imaginary problem.”
One of Adair's central arguments was that low-level fields could not affect biological systems because they are so much weaker than the natural thermal fluctuations in living systems (this is known as the “kT problem”). He once compared worrying about EMF health effects with being concerned that a cat will damage a tree by breathing on it during a howling wind storm.
In a letter to Physics Today in 1991, he wrote that “good scientists” consider very weak 60 Hz fields harmless “because their effects on the cellular level are very, very much smaller than thermal noise.” Earlier that same year, he presented his argument in a 10-page paper in the Physical Review under the title, “Constraints on Biological Effects of Weak Extremely-Low-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields.” He also published his views on EMFs in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. See, for instance, this 1994 paper on interactions with magnetite.
Adair had influential allies within the Yale physics community, notably Allan Bromley, who was also a Sterling professor and a chairman of its physics department. Bromley was the science advisor to President George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bromley delayed the public release of an EPA report that classified power-frequency EMFs as a probable human carcinogen and microwave radiation as a possible carcinogen. Those cancer classifications were removed from the report prior to release and never officially acknowledged or acted on.
Frank Barnes, for one, has publicly disagreed with Adair. In an interview with Microwave News in 2016, Barnes said: “Bob Adair’s calculations are not wrong — they just don’t deal with the situations we are dealing with,” referring to the potential for RF radiation to promote cancer. Barnes is a distinguished professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a long-time member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Eleanor Adair died in 2013 at the age of 86.
The Yale Department of Physics has posted an obituary for Robert Adair, under the title, “Explorer of Strange Particles —and Baseballs.” A shorter obit appeared in the New Haven Register.