A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

2022 Articles

Corruption of the Scientific Literature Continues

July 20, 2022
Last updated July 22, 2022

My wife and I spent a few days in Basel, Switzerland, earlier this month. One afternoon as we were walking through town, I spotted a carefully crafted warning on the side of an otherwise unremarkable building. “The Odious Smell of Truth,” it called out.

With a little Googling, I learned that the expression comes from the title of an exhibition held at the Royal College of Art in London in the spring of 2017. The show was organized by Peter Kennard, a noted British political artist, and his students. They called themselves the Rage Collective. What does it mean, they wanted to know, to tell the truth in a world of false news and social media misinformation.

As it happens, a few days later, I received an email from Peter Hensinger, the scientific director of Diagnose Funk, with a commentary he had just published which was sharply critical of Martin Röösli, an associate professor at the University of Basel.

David Grimes, Oxford, The Wellcome Trust
and the Art of Name Dropping Junk Science in a JAMA Journal

February 16, 2022
Last updated April 21, 2022

David Robert Grimes is a “got lemons, make lemonade” kind of guy. Or as his famous Irish countryman Oscar Wilde quipped more than 100 years ago, “a grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.”

Well, actually, though that line is attributed to Wilde on countless websites, he never said or wrote it. The first documented use was more than a decade after he died in Paris in 1900. But given so, it seems all the more appropriate to mention it in the context of the Grimes affair.

I bring all this up because I’m still trying to understand why JAMA Oncology would have commissioned or accepted a manuscript on a hotly controversial subject —a review of radiofrequency (RF) radiation and cancer— by a junior Irish academic-cum-columnist without any relevant qualifications, David Robert Grimes, at the time of Dublin City University.

Former Director of NIEHS Endorses Removal

January 25, 2022

Senior environmental health scientists are calling for JAMA Oncology to retract a review of RF radiation and cancer by David Robert Grimes, a physicist at Dublin City University.*

Grimes’s paper, which was posted on the journal’s website on December 9th, has prompted a barrage of letters of protest to Nora Disis, the editor of JAMA Oncology.

Among those calling for retraction is Linda Birnbaum, who, for ten years, 2009-2019, was the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Ronald Melnick, who led the team that designed the NTP RF–cancer study, is another harsh critic.

Open Letter to Editor-in-Chief, AMA Journals

January 18, 2022
Last updated April 21, 2022

Dear Dr. Phil Fontanarosa,

As you are already keenly aware, on December 9th, JAMA Oncology, part of the AMA family of journals, published what purports to be a review of radiofrequency (RF) radiation and cancer by David Robert Grimes.

Grimes’s paper is rife with distortions and omissions. It is a disservice to the AMA and to all those who care about public health. I urge you, as the current editor-in-chief of all AMA journals, to retract this paper.

Here are four reasons why you should set the record straight as soon as possible...

How RF Research on the Blood-Brain Barrier
Was Shut Down — Again
Reflections on Leif Salford’s 80th Birthday

January 10, 2022
Last updated May 7, 2022

Leif Salford celebrated his 80th birthday on December 7. An emeritus professor at Sweden’s Lund University and a noted neurosurgeon, Salford spent much of his career treating patients with brain tumors. Over the years, he became frustrated as, all too often, he was unable to save them with a scalpel.

In 1987, Salford came across a paper in Neuroscience Letters from a group at the University of Western Ontario, who had found that rats undergoing the equivalent of a routine MRI scan showed changes in their blood-brain barrier. The BBB is a membrane that keeps potentially toxic substances in the bloodstream from getting into the brain. It’s not a perfect barrier —it can leak. The Canadians reported that something about the electromagnetic exposures during the MRI scan had increased the permeability of the rats’ BBB. It had become more porous.

If microwaves used in the MRI were responsible, Salford thought....