A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

DNA breaks: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

April 15, 2013

“GSM 900 MHz Cellular Phone Radiation Can Either Stimulate or Depress Early Embryogenesis in Japanese Quails Depending on the Duration of Exposure,” International Journal of Radiation Biology, posted online April 10, 2013, from a group in the Ukraine.

“Taken together, this suggests that the low intensity radiation emitted by a commercial GSM 900 MHz cell phone can result in either decrease of DNA strand breaks; or otherwise induce substantial DNA damage in cells of the developing bird embryo depending on the duration of the exposure. See also the group's earlier paper in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine.

March 25, 2013

“Physiologic Brain Activity Causes DNA Double-Strand Breaks in Neurons, with Exacerbation by Amyloid-ß,” Nature Neuroscience, posted online March 24, 2013:

“Our study shows that exploratory activity, which is associated with physiological increases in neuronal activity and the encoding of new information, causes widespread increases in neuronal DSBs.”

January 31, 2013

“Cell Type-Dependent Induction of DNA Damage by 1800 MHz RF EMFs Does Not Result in Significant Cellular Dysfunctions,”

PLoS1, published online January 23, 2013, from Zhengping Xu's lab in Hangzhou, China.

May 18, 2012

We haven't posted many new items recently because we've been too busy fixing up the new Web site. In the process, we've been rereading many of our old stories. Last night, we came across an item from five years ago under the title "Cell Specific Responses to RF." It highlighted some new research from Finland, which found that cell phone radiation affected the activity of ODC, a biologically important enzyme, in...

April 14, 2011

Next Sunday, the New York Times Magazine will feature a long piece titled “Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer?” by Siddhartha Mukherjee (it’s already on the Times' Web site). It’s a well-written article, as might be expected by his well-received book, Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Yet an important part of the...

November 15, 2010

If you want to see just how misguided the ICNIRP enterprise really is, take a look at its new EMF exposure guidelines in the December issue of Health Physics. [See also our November 10 post.]

Start at the end with the footnote that discloses the composition of its five-member ELF Task Group (p....

August 16, 2009

It's the strongest warning yet. John Aitken, a well-known fertility researcher, is advising men who want to have children not to keep active mobile phones below their waists. This issue, he says, "deserves our immediate attention."

March 3, 2009

Getting a handle on EMF and RF effects is a frustrating business. A new paper in the March 9 issue of Mutation Research from Finland's University of Kuopio tells the story. The Kuopio research group found that mobile phone radiation, at 5W/Kg, can amplify the DNA damage caused by a chemical mutagen. This is far from the first time an RF-induced genotoxic effect has been reported (see our September 3, 2008 post).

December 15, 2008

This could be a breakthrough, a major breakthrough. It could explain how power lines promote childhood leukemia. It could identify which children are at greatest risk. And it could shed new light on the pivotal role played by EMF-induced DNA breaks.

Chinese researchers have found that children who carry a defective version of a gene that would otherwise help repair damaged DNA are much more likely to develop leukemia if they also live near power lines or transformers. Xiaoming Shen and coworkers at the Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai have reported that children with this genetic variant —known as a polymorphism or snp (pronounced "snip") —and who lived within 100 meters of these sources of EMFs had over four times more leukemia than neighboring children with a fully functional version of the same gene.

November 27, 2008

Science has conceded the error: More than one lab has in fact shown that cell phone radiation can cause DNA breaks.

Back in August, reporter Gretchen Vogel claimed that Hugo Rüdiger at the University of Vienna medical school was the only one (see our September 3 post). Now, Vogel allows that a team from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, had previously observed DNA breaks in cells exposed to GSM radiation.

September 3, 2008

Making sweeping statements about scientific knowledge is always challenging, especially when writing about an unfamiliar field of research. Take, for example, this opening sentence from an article, “Fraud Charges Cast Doubt on Claims of DNA Damage from Cell Phone Fields” by Gretchen Vogel in this week’s Science magazine:

May 29, 2007

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.

July 31, 2006

Radiation Research is a scientific journal whose primary focus is on ionizing radiation, with only a minority of papers devoted to the non-ionizing side of the electromagnetic spectrum. Its June issue, however, features five papers, all of which claim to show that EMFs of one type or another have no biological effects.

September 29, 2005

Research scientists in China have found that relatively low-level RF radiation can lead to DNA breaks, according to a briefing paper prepared for the cell phone industry obtained by Microwave News.

At the 4th International Seminar on EMFs and Biological Effects, held in Kunming China, September 12-16, Zhengping Xu of the Zhejiang University School of Medicine reported that cells exposed to a pulsed 1800 MHz RF radiation at an SAR of 3 W/Kg for 24 hours showed a statistically significant increase in DNA damage. The Mobile Manufacturers Forum (MMF), an industry lobbying group based in Brussels, circulated the news in a September 22 Research Briefing.

March 29, 2005

Bill Guy says that he didn’t do it, that he didn’t call NIH, that he didn’t try to shut down Henry Lai’s work on microwave-induced DNA breaks. (See “Wake-Up Call.”)

In a letter to Microwave News, Guy wrote: “I most vehemently and unequivocally deny that I, or anybody that I am aware of, made any calls to NIH...”

March 11, 2005

The March issue of the University of Washington alumni magazine, Columns, features a well-deserved tribute to Henry Lai and his colleague, N.P. Singh, who have demonstrated that low-level microwave radiation can lead to an increase in DNA breaks in the brain cells of rats (available online). The headline of the piece tells the story: “Wake-Up Call: Can Radiation from Cell Phones Damage DNA in Our Brains? When a UW Researcher Found Disturbing Data, Funding Became Tight and One Industry Leader Threatened Legal Action.”

December 21, 2004

The final report of the REFLEX project is now available on the Web site of the Verum Foundation. The report summarizes the work of 12 research groups in seven European countries. The total cost of the project, which investigated the effects low-levels of RF radiation on cellular systems, was approximately $3 million.

Experimental data generated in a number of the labs showed that RF radiation could increase the number of DNA breaks in exposed cells, as well as activate a stress response —the production of heat shock proteins. Many of these effects have been reported at scientific conferences over the last few years (see, for example, MWN, J/A01, p.8; N/D01, p.1; and M/A03 p.7).

January 30, 2004

The ability of ELF magnetic fields to damage DNA may be getting clearer (see item below) —but not so for microwaves. Over the last ten years, the battle of the Washington universities has been raging, with Joseph Roti Roti of Washington University in St. Louis at odds with Henry Lai and N.P. Singh of the University of Washington, Seattle. Roti Roti is now claiming the upper hand in the February issue of Radiation Research.

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