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We don't spend much time writing about microwave ovens, but the "Really?" column in today's New York Times science section prompts a few comments.

The columnist, Anahad O'Connor, asks whether people face a radiation risk from standing too close to a microwave oven and concludes that it's "not dangerous." That's about the same finding reached a couple of years ago by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) —see "Microwave Myths" which appeared in its newsletter, Nutrition Action.

It’s become axiomatic that wide acceptance of non-thermal effects will come from developing biomedical therapies rather than from studying potential hazards. The health effects work is mostly sponsored by those who don't want to find any. And they usually don't (cf: the USAF, EPRI, CTIA, FGF, MMF, etc.) So no one should be surprised that the latest advance comes from a small high-tech Israeli company, Novocure, which is looking for innovative ways to treat cancer. It's a breakthrough —most likely a major breakthrough.

Novocure uses weak 100-200 kHz electric fields —the company calls them tumor treating fields or TTFields— to stunt the growth of cancer cells, either by slowing down their proliferation or by killing them off entirely. The company has now demonstrated this in four different cancer cell lines. Even more impressive is that tumor growth has been curtailed in mice, rats and, in a small pilot project, ten human patients with recurrent brain tumors (glioblastoma).

Norm Sandler is dead at the age of 53. He was found in his Washington, DC, apartment last Monday; the cause has not yet been determined. Until recently, Sandler had been Motorola's principal spokesman on the cell phone health issue. He had previously worked for UPI and Powell Tate, a Washington PR firm.

Every now and then a new paper comes along that gives hope that one day we'll make sense of the conflicting results that have become the hallmark of EMF research. A team of Finnish researchers from the University of Kuopio has published such a paper. It's in the June issue of the International Journal of Radiation Biology.

Anne Höytö, Jukka Juutilainen and Jonne Naarala have shown that the type of cells used in in vitro studies can determine whether they will respond to RF radiation. They ran the same experiment with primary cells —those taken directly from an organism— and with secondary cells —those that have been grown in a petri dish. They exposed both types of cells to two different RF signals, CW and modulated (GSM), at various intensities (SAR =1.5, 2.5 or 6 W/Kg) for various amounts of time (2, 8 or 24 hr), and then measured the activity of ODC (ornithine decarboxylase), an enzyme related to cellular growth and differentiation.