
Scientists Sue FCC for Ignoring Cell Phone Radiation Risk - elorant
https://lawandcrime.com/administrative-law/scientists-sue-fcc-for-dismissing-claims-that-cell-phone-radiation-causes-cancer/
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AWildC182
RF software person here. I strongly encourage anyone reading this headline to
take it with a MASSIVE grain of salt. There hasn't been any conclusive science
on the issue and people aren't dropping dead from cell phone death rays left
and right.

The RF emitted by cell phones and even 5G systems is _many_ orders of
magnitude lower energy than the light you're exposed to all day. The only
connection we know of at the moment would be through RF heating but that
requires way more radiated power than anything you will likely interact with
unless you stick your head in a microwave oven.

Edit: also, things RF can interact with are dependent on feature size. 5GHz
has a wavelength of ~6cm so in the same way that you can't see a virus with a
microscope because it's too small for light to interact with, it's just not
going to be able to cause localized heating on anything smaller than about
3cm. The _singular_ scientist in the article is mostly just taking issue with
the testing methodology and wants software to minimize RF emissions to the
lowest level possible for communication which _is already the case_ as
otherwise your battery would be depleted very rapidly.

~~~
carapace
> There hasn't been any conclusive science on the issue

Isn't that the reason for the suit?

> ”The FCC has for years failed to protect public health by relying on
> 24-year-old safety tests designed when phones were the size of a shoe and
> used by few,” Davis told Law&Crime via email. ”We filed this appeal in order
> to insist that the agency take full measure of the U.S. government and other
> scientific evidence that cellphone radiation can be harmful.”

> Davis continued, noting the FCC’s hands-off approach to cell phone-related
> regulation over the last three presidential administrations.

> ”The agency has dismissed hundreds of scientific studies submitted to its
> inquiry on wireless radiation and the advice of the American Academy of
> Pediatrics, and others, without providing any rationale for doing so,”

~~~
AWildC182
That's not really how science works. You can't prove anything _doesn 't_ cause
cancer in any way, but nobody has been able to demonstrate RF causing cancer.
If you just assume everything causes cancer then you get California prop 65
style warnings on EVERYTHING and nobody takes anything seriously anymore.

~~~
calibas
It's important to note that while a causal link hasn't been established, but
there's a number of studies that have shown higher RF is connected to higher
cancer rates, though results are mixed.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907669/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907669/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29530389](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29530389)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28472042](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28472042)

~~~
braindongle
Publication bias is rampant. Bad science is everywhere. You have to read the
papers. The last reference is indeed worth noting. But even there, look at the
main finding.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907669/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907669/)
This is a correlational study with multiple comparisons and no statistically
significant results. In the only outcome reported between cases and controls,
cell phone use was (insignificantly) _protective_ for tumor incidence. As for
the case-case comparisons, in the best case those are highly susceptible to
confounding, and, contrary to the implication in the abstract, they didn't
find anything.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29530389](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29530389)
This is a rat model study wherein rats were exposed to cell-range RF from
before birth to death, for 19 hours per day. The positive finding was at 50
v/m , 40% higher than the highest measured value (during an outgoing call)[1]
that I could find offhand. So yeah, if you strap your phone to your head and
have an outgoing call going all day every day, and your phone's field strength
is crazy high, and you're a rat, you might have a problem.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28472042](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28472042)
"No association between mobile phone use and glioma risk was observed across
the total population (OR 0.98; 95% CI = 0.88–1.10)..., there was an
association between long-term mobile phone use and glioma. However, the
analysis was limited by significant heterogeneity between trials and the
paucity of data on long term use (10 years)." The funnel plot, an indication
of publication bias, does not look good. This is in a reputable journal and
appears to be a legit systematic review. Their positive finding can't be
dismissed offhand.

[1]
[https://thescipub.com/pdf/10.3844/ajeassp.2009.771.774](https://thescipub.com/pdf/10.3844/ajeassp.2009.771.774)

~~~
godelski
Hopefully you can still edit, but the way these links are formatted they don't
work

------
kstrauser
"Nobel co-laureate Devra Davis" is interesting, as it's not mentioned on her
Wikipedia page. Factually, she was one of 400 scientists in the group that was
co-awarded the 2007 Peace Price
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Nobel_Peace_Prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Nobel_Peace_Prize)).
Which is still pretty cool, mind you, and far above any award I've ever
gotten! But I still think that description is a little disingenuous, as I
think it was meant to imply that she and a few coworkers were awarded a prize
for work they'd personally done.

~~~
duskwuff
It's outright misleading. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), which was a co-recipient of the 2007 Peace Prize, has specifically
stated that the the prize "was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not
to any individual associated with the IPCC", and that "it is incorrect to
refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a
Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner". For a member of the IPCC to describe
themselves as a "Nobel co-laureate" or "a Nobel Prize-winning scientist"
borders on fraudulent misrepresentation.

\--
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150525014000/http://www.ipcc.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150525014000/http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/nobel/Nobel_statement_final.pdf)

~~~
garmaine
Wouldn’t the Nobel committee be the one to decide on that?

~~~
duskwuff
The Nobel Committee has never awarded a prize to more than three recipients.
It would have been _highly_ irregular for the committee to award a prize
jointly to a panel of hundreds of scientists.

~~~
garmaine
That’s missing the point. What does it mean to award a prize to a committee of
scientists? Only the Nobel Committee can say because they awarded it.

------
bluGill
Anyone can sue for anything, and it is a jury who decides not sound science.
Thus this means nothing, and the result - either way - means nothing.

A few groups are trying to fight that with some success. Doctors often lose
malpractice suits even when they did follow best practice because tears mean
more than best practice in court, so they tend to speak up. The supreme court
has overturned some lawsuits because some testimony wasn't scientifically
accepted fact. However in the end tears are worth more to a jury than facts
which means the truth isn't a defense in court.

------
godelski
This comes up all the time and every time it's debunked. Did something change?
As someone who's worked on radiation shielding, my understanding is that rf
doesn't really heart up cells enough to cause lasting damage. I mean this
isn't even ionizing radiation. The sun puts out A TON of rf radiation all day
and it's the UV that causes skin damage. So did something change?

~~~
deftnerd
I don't personally believe that non-ionizing radiation can cause any damage,
but if I put on my "brainstorming" hat, I can think of some things to test to
at least rule them out.

Non-ionizing radiation doesn't have the power necessary to remove charged
particles like electrons from atoms, but it does have the energy necessary to
physically move or manipulate atoms. It's probably not enough to actually
remove atoms from molecules (although, I'm curious how much energy would be
necessary to do that)...

But, if certain atoms are able to have their motion or position in molecules
affected, even in minute amounts, could that affect biological processes such
as the energy necessary for cellular machinery to split DNA? Or to work with
RNA? Or could it affect protein folding? Just how sensitive is our biological
machinery to small adjustments of those reliable constants? And would that
cause any problems, or just make our cellular machinery use a tiny bit more or
less ATP?

Overall, I think the cellular processes in all the life on earth are likely
very robust. the tiny amount of inefficiencies (possibly) brought on due to an
increasing background RF level likely has no effect at all, but it wouldn't
hurt to check it out.

It would be like asking "how does the introduction of a single drop of water
in a car gas tank affect performance". The answer is probably "pretty much not
at all", but it gives an opportunity to design some exciting and useful
testing methods that could be used for other purposes in other experiments.

Learning how to determine energy used by cellular machinery with that kind of
precision could be very useful for a lot of biological science and drug
research. Learning how, and what kind, of RF can affect different atomic bonds
might yield useful information like how to slightly strengthen or weaken
molecules temporarily, which might open up possible chemical reactions that
were previously "almost possible".

------
deftnerd
I'm of the personal belief that most likely, non-ionizing radiation has no
affect on living tissue, but I don't see anything wrong with more open and
peer-reviewed research into the subject.

It would be nice to know what dangers the most extreme amounts of non-ionizing
radiation causes living tissue and biological systems to at least get a modern
perspective on the range that things are finally being affected (if at all).

Then we'll be able to more easily say "no effects were found until X amount of
energy, and this phone puts out 0.000004% of that" to calm the public down.
Until there is a documented reference point that is actually dangerous, people
are hesitant to believe any figures showing how safe something is.

~~~
bluGill
I see something wrong with more research: opportunity cost. All the scientist
taking time to study this are not spending their time on paths of research
that could result in some new knowledge.

------
_bxg1
Everyone has had smartphones for 10 years, cell phones for 20 years. There's a
massive sample group. If they caused cancer there would be an incredibly
obvious global uptick in people getting cancer around their ear and/or hands.

~~~
tialaramex
It's like the second coming of Jesus. When a group says it'll definitely
happen next week, they get breathless reporting. Then it doesn't happen - do
they realise they know nothing? Nope, they're now convinced it'll be in two
weeks time, rinse and repeat.

Religious movements have been known to spend a whole lifetime saying Jesus is
definitely coming next week, only to then go er, actually maybe the week
after. You won't find any where the group of believers went "We were wrong".
That's hard for individual people and essentially impossible for groups.

Even actual scientists are not always great at this. Michelson-Morley (the
experiment to look for the aether against which all things have absolute
position) is the best example I can think of scientists going "OK, we were
wrong" (there is no absolute position, see Einstein) but there are lots where
all you see is incremental shifts to be gradually less wrong, one scientist at
a time, nobody outright saying (metaphorically) that Jesus isn't coming.

------
unlinked_dll
What is a Nobel co-laureate? I can't find any information that the person
mentioned has been awarded a Nobel prize.

~~~
briefcomment
The climate change panel she was a part of won the peace prize in 2007.

[https://www.un.org/en/sections/nobel-peace-
prize/intergovern...](https://www.un.org/en/sections/nobel-peace-
prize/intergovernmental-panel-climate-change-ipcc-and-albert-arnold-al-gore-
jr/index.html)

------
ars
"Unlike France and Israel, many Americans are ignorant of the fact that phones
are two-way microwave radios that are tested while held inches away from the
body."

Curious what's different in France and Israel that they get called out
special? Don't they sell the same phones there?

~~~
lioeters
A quick search brought up this possibly relevant snippet:

> The World Health Organisation in 2011 [classified] mobile phone radiation as
> a “possible” human carcinogen and the governments of the United Kingdom,
> France and Israel issued warnings against mobile phone use by children.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/14/mobile-
ph...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/14/mobile-phones-
cancer-inconvenient-truths)

------
zadkey
This article would be massively better if it cited some of the studies that
the scientists were using in their argument.

Leaving out these important details can unfairly undermine their argument.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
As it should, since they have no hard evidence.

------
jwkane
Note -- nobel peace prize 2007 as part of the Gore team for work on climate
change. There is no implied credibility regarding RF or biology.

------
briefcomment
I don't know what to think, and there is likely tons of misinformation on both
sides from perverse incentives. For anything that may have long term effects
from chronic exposure, as opposed to obvious effects from acute exposure,
there is always going to be an uphill battle to correctly regulate it. That's
sad. Wish more decision makers would take the precautionary principle to
heart.

