More from Löscher's Lab: Importance of Genetic Variations

At a conference in the summer of 2002, Maren Fedrowitz of Wolfgang Löscher’s group at the Hannover Medical School in Germany explained why the Battelle labs in the U.S. had been unable to repeat Meike Mevissen and Löscher’s experiments showing that EMFs can promote breast cancer in rats. It was because of genetic variations among substrains of rats, she said.

[You can now download our report on the conference from the J/A02 issue of Microwave News (p.2) at no charge.]

In a just-published paper, Löscher and Fedrowitz present lots of details to back up this argument. “The use of [magnetic field]-sensitive and -resistant strains or substrains of rats offers a valuable approach to search for genetic factors or genetic predisposition that may underlie the sensitivity to cocarcinogenic or tumor-promoting effects of [magnetic field] exposure,” they write in the January 1 issue of Cancer Research. See also our commentary, "It's Genetics, Stupid".