David Carpenter: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

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.

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 9^th, 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.

Simply saying that more health research is needed on 5G —the latest generation of cell phone technology— can be hazardous to your reputation.

Last May, the New York Times tried to take down David Carpenter, a public health physician and the country’s most prominent 5G critic. Veteran science writer William Broad painted Carpenter as a willing tool of a disinformation campaign promoted by RT America, a Russian TV network. Two months later, Broad was back for another hit on Carpenter. Much of what Broad wrote was fiction.

Now Scientific American has ambushed Joel Moskowitz, one of the few other academics willing to state the obvious: No one knows whether 5G is safe.

Last Tuesday, July 16, the New York Times devoted most of the front page of its science section to William Broad’s latest attack on those who challenge the dogma that wireless radiation is absolutely safe.

“The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t” is the catchy headline of the Web version of his article. It is followed by “How one scientist and his inaccurate chart led to unwarranted fears of wireless technology.”

Broad focuses on two letters* written about 20 years ago by Bill Curry, a consulting physicist, who openly disapproved of putting Wi-Fi in classrooms.

The incidence of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the deadliest type of brain tumor, more than doubled in England between 1995 and 2015, according to a new analysis of national statistics. During that time, the number of cases of GBM rose from 983 to 2,531.

“We found a sustained and highly significant increase in GBM throughout the 21 years and across all ages,” said Alasdair Philips, the lead author of the study, which has just been released online by the peer-reviewed, open access, Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

“The incidence rate of GBM, the most aggressive and quickly fatal brain tumor, is rising dramatically in England while the rates for lower grade tumors have decreased, masking this dramatic trend in the overall data,” Philips told Microwave News from his home in Beeswing in southern Scotland, not far from the English border.

Today is Abe Liboff’s 90^th birthday. Liboff is a physicist —he was the chairman of the physics department at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, for many years, and, before that, a professor at NYU. He used to be a coeditor of the journal, Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine.

As long as I have known him, Liboff has been asking questions about the world he sees all around. When possible, he runs experiments to test out his ideas. He continues to have a lively correspondence with those who share his interests in electromagnetic field effects, especially the role of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Back in 1984 when I first got to know him, Liboff had recently completed a two-year fellowship at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He was back at Oakland but continued to collaborate with a psychologist at NMRI, John Thomas, who was doing research for the New York Power Line Project.

Liboff’s work at NMRI led to two startling experimental findings.

”“The Microwave Syndrome or Electro-Hypersensitivity: Historical Background,” Reviews on Environmental Health, posted online November 10, 2015.

“The weight of evidence indicates that EHS is a real syndrome induced by exposure to either ELF or RF EMF. In some cases it results from a brief, high intensity exposure, whereas in others it appears to reflect ambient exposures, especially those of increasing intensity and perhaps of certain waveforms.” By David Carpenter. The paper is part of a special issue of the journal on “idiopathic environmental intolerance.”

”Still worried about power lines and cancer? That’s so retro, says the New York Times. You’re just stuck in the 1980’s.  

This is what the “newspaper of record” wants you to know about the risk of childhood leukemia from power lines: A “fairly broad consensus among researchers holds that no significant threat to public health has materialized.”

The full message is told in a new 7+ minute video, produced by the Times’ RetroReport, which boasts a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors, led by Kyra Darnton. The video even credits a fact checker. What was missing is the common sense to do some digging when reporting on a controversial issue.

Today’s New York Times revisits the EMF controversy, with reporter Kenneth Chang looking back at a Science Times story about power-line EMFs and cancer that ran in July 1989.

Both now and then the Times quoted David Carpenter. Here’...