Part 8 The Body Electric ...Maxwell's Silver Hammer

The Body Electric

by Robert O. Becker

Fifteen 

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

In considering questions as remote as the origin of life, science must skate toward new shores across the thin ice of speculation, but it also has a duty to warn us of present dangers as specifically as possible. Since the earth's electromagnetic activity has such a profound effect on life, the obvious question is: What are the consequences of our artificial energies? 

Electromagnetism can be discussed in two ways—in terms of fields and in terms of radiation. A field is "something" that exists in space around an object that produces it. We know there's a field around a permanent magnet because it can make an iron particle jump through space to the magnet. Obviously there's an invisible entity that exerts a force on the iron, but as to just what it consists of—don't ask! No one knows. A different but analogous something—an electric field—extends outward from electrically charged objects. 

Both electric and magnetic fields are static, unvarying. When the factor of time is introduced, by varying the intensity of the field as in a radio antenna, an electromagnetic field results. As its name implies, this consists of an electric field and a magnetic field. The fluctuations in the field radiate outward from the transmitter as waves of energy, although somehow these waves simultaneously manage to behave as streams of massless, chargeless particles (photons). As to just how this happens, again—don't ask! Sometimes the phenomenon is called an electromagnetic field (EMF), to emphasize its connection with the transmitter; sometimes it's called electromagnetic radiation (EMR), to emphasize its outward-flowing aspect. However, the two terms refer to the same phenomenon and are interchangeable. The only meaningful distinction is between static and time-varying fields. 

Each energy wave consists of an electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to each other, and both at right angles to the direction the wave is traveling. The number of waves formed in one second is the frequency; the distance the energy travels (at the speed of light) during one oscillation is its wavelength. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and vice versa. 

EMR spans an enormous range of frequencies. The shortest gamma rays, a tenth of a billionth of a millimeter long, vibrate sextillions of times a second. These, along with X rays and the shortest ultraviolet wavelengths, are termed ionizing radiation, because their high photonic energy can knock electrons away from atoms, creating highly reactive ions where they don't belong. Much of the damage from nuclear radiation is caused in this way. All lower frequencies, beginning with the longer ultraviolet wavelengths, are non ionizing. 

Next comes the only energy we can see—the narrow band of visible light vibrating hundreds of trillions of times a second—and then the infrared waves we feel as radiant heat. Below these lie the waves we've harnessed for communication. They begin with microwaves (MW), whose frequency is measured in gigahertz or megahertz—billions or millions of cycles per second—and extend through the radio frequencies (RF) down to ELF waves, whose frequency converges on zero. The MW and RF spectrum is arbitrarily broken up into a further alphabet of extremely high, superhigh, ultrahigh, very high, high, medium, low, very low, and extremely low frequencies (EHF, SHF, UHF, VHF, HF, MF, LF, VLF, and ELF respectively). As we have seen, ELF waves approximate the dimensions of the earth; at 10 hertz one wave is about 18,600 miles long. 

Except for light and infrared heat, we can't perceive any of these energies without instruments, so most people don't realize how drastically and abruptly we've changed the electromagnetic environment in just one century. Working at Cambridge University, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed mathematically in 1873 that light was but a small part of the vast undiscovered realm of radiation. Heinrich Hertz first found some of the radio waves in 1888. Meanwhile, Edison had set up the first commercial electric-power system in New York in 1882. 

For billions of years before then, the energies that life grew up among were relatively simple. There was a weak electromagnetic field modulated by micropulsations within it and further sculpted by the solar and lunar cycles. There was a burst of static centered at 10,000 hertz and reverberating over the whole earth whenever lightning flashed in the scores of thunderstorms in progress at any one time. There were a few weak radio waves from the sun and other stars. Light, including some infrared and ultraviolet, was the most abundant form of electromagnetic energy. At higher frequencies, living things absorbed only small amounts of ionizing X rays and gamma rays from space and from radioactive minerals in rocks. Large parts of the energy spectrum were totally silent. 

We'll never experience that quiet world again. In 1893 Nikola Tesla lit the Chicago World's Fair with the first AC power system, and two years later he began the modern era of electrical engineering by harnessing Niagara Falls. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi sent a radiotelegraph message across the Atlantic, using without acknowledgment a machine designed by the prolific Tesla. The invention of the vacuum tube in 1907 led to the first voice transmission by radio in 1915 and the first commercial station in 1920. Until then many people still ate supper by candle or kerosene, and the ambient forces remained a reasonable facsimile of earth's pristine field. 

The greatest changes have all come in the one generation since World War II. The trend toward use of shorter and shorter radio waves, bounced off the ionosphere for long-distance communication, had begun before the war. The fight for survival against fascism impelled the development of microwave radar, which helped win the Battle of Britain, allowed allweather bombing of Germany, and gave the American Navy a decisive edge over the Japanese. The conflict also produced other electronic devices of all types. In 1947 Bell Telephone set up the first microwave phone relay towers between New York and Boston, the same year the first commercial television broadcasts, also transmitted by microwaves, began. Since then nearly every human involved an electrical appliance, and today we're all awash in a sea of energies life has never before experienced, of which the following list of sources only skims the surface: 

Everything that runs on a battery produces a DC magnetic field— from digital watches, cameras, flashlights, and portable radios to car ignition systems. 

Strong magnetic fields are used in industry to refine ore, concentrate and recycle scrap iron, purify sewage, soften water for steam boilers, and many other tasks. 

The starting and stopping of an electric train turns the power rail into a giant antenna that radiates ELF waves for over 100 miles. 

Electromagnetic fields vibrating at 60 hertz (50 hertz in Europe and Russia) surround nearly every person on earth from appliances at home and machines at work. 

Over 500,000 miles of high-voltage power lines crisscross the United States. Innumerable smaller lines feed into every home, office, factory, and military base, all producing AC or DC fields. Metal objects near the lines concentrate the fields to higher levels. In addition, high-voltage lines are, in effect, gigantic antennae operating at 60 hertz in the ELF band, the largest "radio" transmitters in the world. Switching stations, where the current is changed from one voltage or type to another, emit radio-frequency waves as well. 

AC magnetic fields vibrating at 100 to 10,000 hertz emanate from anti theft systems in stores and libraries, and from metal detectors in airports. 

Low-frequency radio waves are used for air and sea navigation, time references, emergency signals, some amateur radio channels, and military communications. 

Medium frequencies between 535 and 1,604 kilohertz are reserved for AM radio transmitters, which are limited to 50,000 watts in this country but are sometimes much more powerful abroad. 

HF and VHF channels are filled with chatter from the nation's 35 million CB radios, as well as shortwave bands for more ham radios, air and sea navigation systems, military uses, spy satellites, and police and taxi radios. VHF television and FM radio also inhabit this region. There are now over ten thousand commercial radio and TV stations in the United States alone, and 7 million other radio transmitters, not counting the millions operated by the military. 

Weather satellites, some kinds of radar, diathermy machines, upward of 10 million microwave ovens, more cop and cab radios, automatic garage-door openers, highway emergency call boxes, and UHF television compete for the low microwave frequencies. 

Higher microwave bands are crowded with more military talk channels and radar, navigational beacons, commercial communications satellites, various kinds of walkie-talkies, and America's two hundred fifty thousand microwave phone and TV relay towers. 

Like the infrared rays above them in the spectrum, radio waves and microwaves produce heat when directed in high-intensity beams. Hence they're used for all sorts of industrial chores— bonding plywood, vulcanizing rubber, manufacturing shoes, sterilizing food, making plastics, and heat sealing the trillions of plastic-wrapped products in our stores, even opening oysters. Modern electronics would be impossible without the perfect silicon and germanium crystals grown in microwave furnaces. 

The human species has changed its electromagnetic background more than any other aspect of the environment. For example, the density of radio waves around us is now 100 million or 200 million times the natural level reaching us from the sun. Nor is there any end in sight. When superconducting cables are introduced, they'll increase the field strength around power lines by a factor of ten or twenty. Electric cars, magnetically levitated transport vehicles, and microwave-beam satellites for transmitting solar power to earth would each add strong new sources of electromagnetic contamination. A proposed electromagnetic catapult that could shoot satellites into space from mile-long rails built up the side of a mountain would require the combined output of the country's thousand generating stations for the few seconds of each launch. 

A few years ago most investigators believed that each wavelength interacted mainly with objects comparable to it in size. This was a comforting notion that theoretically limited each frequency to one type of effect and predicted that really troublesome problems for humans would come from only one portion of the spectrum—the FM band. Now, however, we know there are primary effects on all life-forms at ELF frequencies, and in other parts of the spectrum there can be consequences for specific systems at any level, from the subatomic to the entire biosphere as a unit. 

Of course, a change at one level may well trigger secondary changes throughout an organism, so that the original one is hard to identify. Moreover, the impact of EMR ar any particular frequency is often related to its power density, the amount of energy streaming through a certain area. When discussing biological effects, this is best measured in microwatts (millionths of a watt) per square centimeter, a unit we'll simplify to microwatts. There's often no direct relationship between dose and effect, however; a low power density sometimes does things that a  higher one does not. Furthermore, we can't tell how much energy from a given power density is actually absorbed, or what part of the body receives it. The same holds true for electric and magnetic fields, whose study is further complicated by the fact that animals of different shapes distort the fields differently. Likewise, fur, feathers, skin thickness, bone size, and the general shape of an animal complicate RF and MW absorption beyond our capacity to gauge it. Therefore, reactions seen in one species cannot be assumed for another. The only way to test for possible damage (or beneficial effects) is to actually do the experiment. 

In a sense, the entire population of the world is willy-nilly the subject of a giant experiment. Electropollution has been the subject of heated public debate for nearly ten years, and unpublicized misgivings for decades before that. Unfortunately, the question of risk has been asked too late. Daily exposure of nearly everyone is a fait accompli. 

Subliminal Stress 

After Howard Friedman, Charlie Bachman, and I had found evidence that "abnormal natural" fields from solar magnetic storms were affecting the human mind as reflected in psychiatric hospital admissions, we decided the time had come for direct experiments with people. We exposed volunteers to magnetic fields placed so the lines of force passed through the brain from ear to ear, cutting across the brainstem-frontal current. The fields were 5 to 11 gauss, not much compared with the 3,000 gauss needed to put a salamander to sleep, but ten to twenty times earth's background and well above the level of most magnetic storms. We measured their influence on a standard test of reaction time—having subjects press a button as fast as possible in response to a red light. Steady fields produced no effect, but when we modulated the field with a slow pulse of a cycle every five seconds (one of the delta-wave frequencies we'd observed in salamander brains during a change from one level of consciousness to another), people's reactions slowed down. We found no changes in the EEG or the front-to-back voltage from fields up to 100 gauss, but these indicators reflect major alterations in awareness, so we didn't really expect them to shift. 

We were excited, eagerly planning experiments that would tell us more, when we came upon a frightening Russian report. Yuri Kholodov had administered steady magnetic fields of 100 and 200 gauss to rabbits and found areas of cell death in their brains during autopsy. Although his fields were ten time as strong as ours, we stopped all human experiments immediately. 

Friedman decided to duplicate Kholodov's experiment with a more detailed analysis of the brain tissue. He made the slides and sent them to an expert on rabbit brain diseases, but coded them so no one knew which were which until later. 

The report showed that all the animals had been infected with a brain parasite that was peculiar to rabbits and common throughout the world. However, in half the animals the protozoa had been under control by the immune system, whereas in the other half they'd routed the defenders and destroyed parts of the brain. The expert suggested that we must have done something to undermine resistance of the rabbits in the experimental group. The code confirmed that most of the brain damage had occurred in animals subjected to the magnetic fields. Later, Friedman did biochemical tests on another series of rabbits and found that the fields were causing a generalized stress reaction marked by large amounts of cortisone in the bloodstream. This is the response called forth by a prolonged stress, like a disease, that isn't an immediate threat to life, as opposed to the fight-or-flight response generated by adrenaline. 

Soon thereafter, Friedman measured cortisone levels in monkeys exposed to a 200-gauss magnetic field for four hours a day. They showed the stress response for six days, but it then subsided, suggesting adaptation to the field. Such seeming tolerance of continued stress is illusory, however. In his pioneering lifework on stress, Dr. Hans Selye has clearly drawn the invariable pattern: Initially, the stress activates the hormonal and/or immune systems to a higher-than-normal level, enabling the animal to escape danger or combat disease. If the stress continues, hormone levels and immune reactivity gradually decline to normal. If you stop your experiment at this point, you're apparently justified in saying, "The animal has adapted; the stress is doing it no harm." Nevertheless, if the stressful condition persists, hormone and immune levels decline further, well below normal. In medical terms, stress decompensation has set in, and the animal is now more susceptible to other stressors, including malignant growth and infectious diseases. 

In the mid-1970s, two Russian groups found stress hormones released in rats exposed to microwaves, even if they were irradiated only briefly by minute amounts of energy. Other Eastern European work found the same reaction to 50-hertz electric fields. Several Russian and Polish groups have since established that after prolonged exposure the activation of the stress sytem changes to a depression of it in the familiar pattern, indicating exhaustion of the adrenal cortex. There has even been one report of hemorrhage and cell damage in the adrenal cortex from a month's exposure to a 50-hertz, 130-gauss magnetic field. 

Soviet biophysicist N. A. Udintsev has systematically studied the effects of one ELF magnetic field (200 gauss at 50 hertz) on the endocrine system. In addition to the "slow" stress response we've been discussing, he found activation of the "fast" fight-or-flight hormones centering on adrenaline from the adrenal medulla. This response was triggered in rats by just one day in Udintsev's field, and hormone levels didn't return to normal for one or two weeks. Udintsev also documented an insulin insufficiency and rise in blood sugar from the same field.

One aspect of the syndrome was very puzzling. When undergoing these hormonal changes, an animal would normally be aware that its body was under attack, yet, as far as we could tell, the rabbits were not. They showed no outward signs of fear, agitation, or illness. Most humans certainly wouldn't be able to detect a 100-gauss magnetic field, at least not consciously. Only several years after Friedman's work did anyone find out how this was happening. 

In 1976 a group under J. J. Noval at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Pensacola, Florida, found the slow stress response in rats from very weak electric fields, as low as five thousandths of a volt per centimeter. They discovered that when such fields vibrated in the ELF range, they increased levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brainstem, apparently in a way that activated a distress signal subliminally, without the animal's becoming aware of it. The scariest part was that the fields Noval used were well within the background levels of a typical office, with its overhead lighting, typewriters, computers, and other equipment. Workers in such an environment are exposed to electric fields between a hundredth and a tenth of a volt per centimeter and magnetic fields between a hundredth and a tenth of a gauss. 

Power Versus People 

Because industry and the military demand unrestricted use of electromagnetic fields and radiation, their intrinsic hazards are often compounded by secrecy and deceit. I learned this lesson in my first encounter with the environmental review process.

As we were investigating the EMF-stress connection in 1969, the Navy decided to build a giant antenna in northern Wisconsin. The plan, called Project Sanguine, was to establish a radio link with nuclear submarines at their normal depth of 120 feet or below. Conventional radio signals couldn't pass through water, so the vessels had to surface or else cruise very slowly a few feet under and communicate by means of a floating antenna at prearranged times. Since this made the subs temporarily vulnerable, the Navy wanted a message system using ELF waves, which penetrate earth and water. 

The original design involved 6,000 miles of buried cable arranged in a grid across the upper two fifths of Wisconsin. A transmitter would pump current into one side; the electricity would emerge from the other side and complete the circuit by traveling through the ground. The device was actually a giant loop antenna using the earth as part of the loop. ELF waves issuing from it and resonating between the earth's surface and the ionosphere could be picked up anywhere on the globe. 

Sanguine was one of the first military projects scrutinized under the Environmental Protection Act. In 1973 the Navy set up a committee of scientists to review fifteen years of naval research on ELF effects, as well as other pertinent work. Captain Paul Tyler of the Office of Naval Research asked me to be one of its seven members. 

The only thing sanguine we found was the name. While the research to date didn't prove there would be grave harm to human health, it showed several dangers. The antenna would produce an electromagnetic field 1 million times weaker than that from a 765-kilovolt power line. It was to broadcast at 45 to 70 hertz, frequencies close enough to the earth's micropulsations that living things are very sensitive to them. Similar fields had been shown to raise human blood triglyceride levels (often a harbinger of stroke, heart attack, or arteriosclerosis), and change blood pressure and brain wave patterns in experimental animals. The generalized stress response, desynchronized biocycles, and interference with cellular metabolism and growth processes—and hence increased cancer rates—were also distinct possibilities. 

Hundreds of thousands of people would be living inside the antenna even in this sparsely populated area; long-term effects on plants and animals were unknown; and, because the signals would resonate throughout the world, the biohazards might be similarly widespread. For these reasons we unanimously recommended that the project be shelved pending answers to the ominous questions it raised. We provided a long list of necessary research, emphasizing further tests on triglycerides, biorhythms, stress, and psychological responses to ELF fields. We also warned that the health of a large part of the U.S. population might already be impaired by 60 hertz power lines carrying vastly more power than the proposed antenna. 

The committee met on December 6 and 7, 1973, generating a report then and there, with a secretary taking down our conclusions. The Navy group in charge was apparently displeased with our findings, The printed proceedings, marked "For official use only,'' went out only to committee members, and the Navy refused to discuss them with anyone else

As soon as I got back from Washington, I found that two power companies were planning a network of 765-kilovolt power lines linking nuclear reactors in upstate New York and Canada. One of the lines was to pass through a rural area near the village of Lowville, where I'd just bought land for a vacation-retirement home. I immediately wrote the head of the state's Public Service Commission. Without releasing the Sanguine report—I felt it wasn't my place to do so, even though its suppression was wrong—I informed PSC Chairman Alfred Kahn of its major conclusions. The commission in turn asked the Navy for a copy of our report but was turned down flat. In mid-1974, however, Andy Marino and I were asked to testify at PSC hearings on the power lines. 

We presented the best evidence then available, some of which seemed to shock the PSC members. ELF fields at power line intensity or less had by then been linked to bone tumors in mice, slowed heartbeat in fish, and various chemical changes in the brain, blood, and liver of rats. Bees exposed to a strong ELF field for a few days in Russian research had begun to sting each other to death or leave the area. Some sealed off their hives and asphyxiated themselves. Attorneys for the power companies hurriedly asked a year's postponement of the hearings, which the PSC naturally granted. 

Andy and I spent that year reading the rapidly accumulating scientific literature on EMF biological effects, including the enormous amount of Russian work becoming available in English. Andy also investigated the stress response further. He ran ten separate experiments with rats, exposing them for one month to 60-hertz electric fields of 100 to 150 volts per centimeter, simulating ground level underneath a typical high-tension line. Three generations of rats bred in this field showed severely stunted growth, especially among males. At lower field strengths (35 volts per centimeter) some of the animals gained more weight than controls, a response we tentatively traced to abnormal water retention, which, like underweight, could also result from stress. A few years later, a study commissioned by the Department of Energy to duplicate this research also produced contradictory but disquieting results. With every known variable controlled in an expensive, high-tech facility at Battelle Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio, one test showed severe growth retardation over three generations, while a second run under exactly the same conditions produced significantly greater weight gain than normal. 

Andy's original work also revealed large increases in the infant mortality rate. Between 6 and 16 percent of the pups born in various tests failed to live to maturity because of the electric field. That is, these percentages were in excess of the normal death rate for newborn rats. 

Various other symptoms consistent with stress were found, including decreased water intake, enlarged adrenal and pituitary glands, and altered protein and hormone ratios in the blood. There was also a very high incidence—ten in sixty—of glaucoma in the early experiments. The disease didn't show up in later runs from which we excluded animals having observable eye defects, suggesting that the electric field had worsened a preexisting problem rather than causing it. 

We expected the utilities to roll out their heavy artillery when the PSC hearings resumed, but we were still unprepared for what actually happened. The companies had hired two microwave researchers, Herman Schwan and Solomon Michaelson, both of whom did most of their work for the Department of Defense, and University of Rochester botanist Mort Miller. Carefully prepared by these three, the company lawyers cross-examined us for seventeen days in December 1975, attacking not only our methods and results but our scientific competence and honesty as well. Michaelson strenuously denied that our rodents had shown signs of stress, even though the biological markers were clear. Even if they had, he contended, stress could be healthful, an idea that Hans Selye later called "far fetched" when applied to a biological challenge that was continuous and not self-imposed.

As far as I know, our testimony was the first ever openly given by American scientists stating that electromagnetic energy had health effects in doses below those needed to heat tissue, and that power lines might therefore be hazardous to human health. We criticized the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy for failing to follow up a tentative 1971 warning by advising the President that some harmful effects from electropollution were now proven. Moreover, although we didn't realize it at the time, we greatly embarrassed Captain Tyler and the Navy by publicly revealing the existence of the Sanguine report, which had been secret until then. 

Among those who heard about it was Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who was understandably furious that his constituents were even then being used as guinea pigs in ongoing ELF tests at an experimental station near Clam Lake, while the document gathered dust in some Navy safe. Quoting Andy and me, he soundly criticized the Navy on the Senate floor. Due to local opposition, the Navy had already moved the site of the full-scale antenna to Mulligan's upper peninsula, modifying the design and giving it a new name—Project Seafarer. Nelson's fury now induced the Secretary of the Navy to ask the National Academy of Sciences for further study of the environmental questions. Harvard's biology chairman, Woodland Hastings, who was picked to head the NAS  committee, wrote Marino a flattering letter asking for his consultation when the members got down to work. Marino then called Hastings to tell him of the large body of data we'd assembled for the power line hearings, and to make sure the NAS body would be willing to consider it thoroughly. Hastings told him, "Heck, you guys will be on the committee." 

Soon the sixteen members were announced, and we were nowhere in sight. Hastings later publicly called us quacks, but to us he said the Navy had specified who was to be on the panel, despite his threats to quit if Andy and I weren't admitted. We were well acquainted with three of the men who were on it: Schwan, Michaelson, and Miller. Obviously they weren't about to find hazards in Seafarer after testifying that a much stronger power line was perfectly safe. They remained on the committee even though all three neglected to mention their New York testimony on NAS conflict-of-interest forms. The rest of the committee was also stacked with people who routinely discounted any evidence of health effects from low-level EMFs. 

The NAS committee took an inordinately long time to issue its report, but we eventually saw a reason for the delay. During the PSC hearings, all evidence was subject to cross-examination. Besides questioning the witnesses, each side could look at the other's papers, including the actual workbooks of experiments. After the testimony, while the commission, assisted by a panel of judges, was deliberating, other evidence could be introduced, but it was no longer subject to review by the opposing side. Oddly enough, the NAS report—which constituted a defense of the then current dogma and tried to discredit most of the disturbing evidence—appeared just after the gavel sounded to close the PSC hearings. It was immediately introduced as evidence, and we couldn't say a word about it. 

Six years later a Navy spokesman explained to me what had "really" happened. He said the Secretary of the Navy had gone to NAS and arranged to pay for the work. Then, when the members of the committee were announced, the Secretary and other Navy brass agreed that the show was rigged. The Secretary protested to NAS and said the Navy wouldn't pay for the study. NAS said that since the authorizations had already been signed, the Navy would have to pay for it. Moreover, the Navy needed a report in four to six months. Of course, NAS had been planning to wait till the end of the New York PSC hearings, which dragged on and on. My informant told me that, in response to Navy pressure, NAS laid in effect, "Go away. We've got the money, and the study is out of your hands. We'll run it our way." By the time the report was issued it was too late for the Navy people to use it, and they considered it too biased to have any value anyway. However, I don't put much faith in this bit of blame shifting. 

The PSC's panel of judges spent nearly a third of their advisory opinion attacking Marino's work and his "argumentative" demeanor at the witness table. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Andy later found that the technical parts of this opinion had been written by one of the judges' paid consultants, Asher Sheppard, then a researcher at UCLA. Sheppard was at that time preparing a monograph, The Biological Effects of Electric and Magnetic Fields of Extremely Low Frequency, under contract to the American Electric Power Company. He concluded that there were no significant biological effects from low to moderate-intensity ELF fields such as occurred around power lines and appliances, despite the fact that he'd been working under W. Ross Adey, whose career has been devoted to studying just such effects. 

Nevertheless, we won. The Public Service Commission specifically contradicted its judicial advisers, commending Marino as a valuable witness, and adopted most of our recommendations. One line already under construction was built, largely because New York Governor Hugh Carey threatened to dissolve the PSC if the commission stopped it, but the utilities were ordered to buy additional land for a wider safety zone along the right of way. They were also forced to invest $5 million in a five-year research program administered by the New York State Department of Health, and to stop encouraging multiple use of the land under power lines, such as leasing it for playgrounds. An additional six or seven proposed lines have been postponed indefinitely. Most important was the plain fact that we raised the issue successfully against great odds and secured a health-conscious verdict from the PSC, gaining time to gather more facts about the dangers. 

The Navy's ELF antenna has also been on hold for many years. Seafarer lost momentum when 80-percent opposition in two 1976 referenda in Michigan's Upper Peninsula forced then candidate Jimmy Carter to oppose it publicly for a while. Once more renamed and redesigned, Project ELF has been heavily funded by the Reagan regime with an eye toward expansion. The first step now would consist of a 56-mile above ground antenna carried on intersecting rows of utility poles in two corridors cut out of the Escanaba River State Forest. In July 1983, the Michigan Natural Resources Commission voted to allow construction. However, six months later a federal district judge upheld the suit of several local groups, on whose behalf I testified, ruling that the Navy must prepare a new environmental impact statement. The Navy lost two  appeals of this decision but won a lifting of the injunction in the third appeal, so construction is, at this writing, going on. 

Fatal Locations 

Subliminal activation of the stress response is one of the most important effects that EMFs and nonionizing radiation have upon life, but it's far from the only one. These unfamiliar energies produce changes in nearly every bodily function so far studied. Many of these alterations are associated with stress, but whether they're a result of, or an additional trigger for, the adrenocortical reaction is an irrelevant chicken-or-egg question at this stage of our knowledge. The most disturbing data come from work on the systems that integrate other bodily functions—the central nervous, cardiovascular, endocrine, and growth control systems. We'll concentrate upon these in the following overview of the biohazards. 

For the most part, no attempt will be made to identify specific effects from microwaves, radio waves, and electric or magnetic fields, for similar changes have been observed from all modalities. The major problems come from extremely low frequencies, but higher frequencies have the same effects if pulsed or modulated in the ELF range. This is very often the case, for, to transmit information, microwaves or radio waves must be shaped. This is done by interrupting the beam to form pulses or by modulating the frequency or amplitude (size) of the waves. Furthermore, today's environment is a latticework of crisscrossing signals in which there's always the possibility of synergistic effects or the "construction" of new ELF signals from the patterns of interference between two higher frequencies. Therefore, experiments in which cells or organisms are exposed to a single unmodulated frequency, though sometimes useful, are irrelevant outside the lab. They're most often done by researchers whose only goal is to be able to say, "See, there's no cause for alarm." 

The Central Nervous System 

Since our work on human reaction time, half a dozen other groups have also found marked CNS effects from ELF fields. Most experiments have shown a decrease in reaction speed, although one researcher noted faster than-normal reactions in humans exposed to very weak electric fields vibrating at beta wave frequencies. The sensitivity of some animals has turned out to be amazing. James R. Hamer of Ross Adey's group at UCLA reported changes in monkeys' response times from ELF electric fields as weak as 0.0035 volts per centimeter, roughly equivalent to the field from a color TV set 60 feet away. 

One of the most telling tests was a simple one done at the Navy's Pensacola lab. R. S. Gibson and W. F. Moroney measured people's short-term memory and their ability to add sets of five 2-digit numbers in the presence of a 1-gauss magnetic field—-the strength found near some high-voltage power lines and many common high-current appliances, such as portable electric heaters. Test scores declined at both the 60-hertz power frequency and the 45-hertz frequency of the Sanguine-Seafarer antenna, but remained normal in control sessions. 

Several studies on both sides of the Iron Curtain have found that rats are generally less active and less exploratory of their environment after being dosed with microwaves, although some frequencies induce restlessness. In contrast, ELF magnetic or electric fields almost always produce hyperactivity and disturbed sleep patterns in rats. 

Obviously the subtle workings of the mind may undergo many shifts that don't show up in these crude behavioral tests. Most of our knowledge of electro pollution's effects on the brain concerns variables that can be more easily quantified, such as changes in biochemistry, cells, and EEG patterns. These studies can't be easily related to changes in thought processes, but most of the results fit in well with the stress response. 

In 1966, Yuri Kholodov found effects on rabbits' EEG's from a few minutes' exposure to fairly strong steady-state magnetic fields (200 to 1,000 gauss). As we'd found in salamanders, there were more delta waves, as well as bursts of alpha waves. He and another Russian biophysicist, R. A. Chizhenkova, also noted a desynchronization, or abrupt shift in the main EEG rhythm, for a few seconds when any field was switched on or off. The same effect has since been confirmed in rats with microwaves. This proved that the brain could sense the field, whether the animal knew it or not. 

The sites of the greatest changes—the brain's hypothalamus and cortex—were cause for concern. The hypothalamus, a nexus of fibers linking the emotional centers, the pituitary gland, the pleasure center, and the autonomic nervous system, is the single most important part of the brain for homeostasis and is a crucial link in the stress response. Any interference with cortical activity, of course, would disrupt logical and associational thought.

In 1973 Zinaida V. Gordon, a pioneer in microwave research working with M. S. Tolgskaya at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences Institute of Labor Hygiene and Occupational Diseases, reported a possible cellular feature of EMR stress. Low doses of microwaves, a mere 60 to  320 microwatts for an hour a day, changed nerve cells in the hypothalami of rats. During the first month of exposure, the neurotransmitter-secreting portions of the cells connecting the brain to the pituitary gland were enlarged. After five months they'd begun to atrophy. When microwave dosage was stopped at that point, however, the cells recovered. J.J. Noval's finding that ELF electric fields changed brainstem acetylcholine levels has already been mentioned. In similar experiments, others have noted a rise followed by a drop to below normal in rat brain levels of norepinephrine, the main neurotransmitter of the hypothalamus and autonomic nervous system. In Soviet work, microwave densities of 500 microwatts or more, delivered in a work-exposure pattern of seven hours a day, gradually reduced norepinephrine and dopamine (another neurotransmitter) to brain levels that indicated exhaustion of the adrenal cortex and autonomic system. 

Two years after the Gordon-Tolgskaya report, Allen Frey, who has studied bioeffects of microwaves for over two decades at Randomline, Inc., a consulting firm in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, found an effect on the blood-brain barrier, the cellular gateway by which specialized capillaries strictly limit the molecules admitted to the delicate nerve cells' environment. Even at power densities as low as 30 microwatts, microwaves pulsed at extremely low frequencies loosen this control, in effect opening up leaks in the barrier. Since some barrier changes occur in response to stress and mood shifts, this could be either a cause or a result of the stress response, or an unrelated effect of pulsed microwaves. In any case, since the blood-brain barrier is the central nervous system's last and most crucial defense against toxins, we must consider this increased permeability a grave hazard until proven otherwise. 

Researchers have noted several other potentially dangerous direct effects of electromagnetic smog on the neurons. In 1980 a group under R. A. Jaffe at Pacific Northwest Laboratories in Richland, Washington, found a general increase in neural excitability, especially at the synapses, in rats exposed to 60-hertz electric fields of only 10 volts per centimeter for one month. That same year A. P. Sanders and co-workers at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, reported as follows on biochemical tests of rat brains subjected to microwaves at two levels, one half and also slightly more than the U.S. safety standard of 10,000 microwatts: "The results suggest that microwave exposure inhibits electron transport chain function in brain mitochondria and results in decreased energy levels in the brain." 

In a series of experiments spanning more than a decade, a group of scientists headed by Ross Adey, first at UCLA and later at the Loma Linda VA Hospital, have studied neuron response to ELF fields and Maxwell's Silver Hammer 287 pulses. Proceeding from Harrier's work on reaction time, they first ascertained that an even weaker electric field, roughly the influence of a light bulb 10 feet away, changed the firing rate of brain cells in monkeys and humans // the field was pulsing at brain wave frequencies. Then, working with radio waves beamed at chick brains kept alive in culture dishes, they found specific pulse rates that decreased or increased the binding of calcium ions to the nerve cells. The flow of calcium ions in and out of neurons controlled the firing rate of impulses in a complex feedback system. Two "windows" of pulsed radio waves (147 megahertz pulsed at 6 to 10 hertz, and 450 megahertz pulsed at 16 hertz) increased the flow of calcium from the cells, interfering with impulse transmission. 

Unfortunately for conceptual simplicity but fortunately for the test animals and the rest of us, the pulsed frequencies that work on isolated brains don't work on whole animals. Adey has publicly expressed his conviction that pulses for changing calcium flow in intact nervous systems do exist, however, and he expects that a calcium efflux would interfere with concentration on complex tasks, disrupt sleep patterns, and change brain function in other ways that can't be predicted yet. This research obviously points toward "confusion beam" weaponry, so effective windows may already have been found, but they haven't been reported in the open literature. Be that as it may, Adey's work remains an important clue to the interaction between EMR and the human CNS at the brain's most sensitive frequencies. Together with the other findings just mentioned, it shows that electropollution can trigger profound and dangerous changes, even if we don't yet know exactly how and when. 

Just how dangerous these changes may be was indicated by a study that Maria Reichmanis, Andy Marino, and I did in 1979, collaborating with F. Stephen Perry, a doctor near the town of Wolverhampton in western England. Perry had noticed that people living near overhead high-voltage lines seemed more prone to depression than others in his practice. Since ELF electric fields changed norepinephrine levels in rat brains and since depletion of this neurotransmitter in certain brain areas was a clinical sign of depression, the connection seemed plausible. We knew from earlier work that, although electromagnetic field strength fell off quickly in the immediate vicinity of a power line, the rate of decrease lessened with distame, so that the field was often well above background levels over a mile away. Reasoning that suicide was the one unequivocal and measurable sign of extreme depression, we plotted the addresses of 598 suicides on maps showing the location of power lines in Perry's locality. Then we statistically compared this distribution with a set of addresses chosen at random. 

The suicide addresses were, on the average, closer to the high voltage  wires. We found the same association with underground power lines, but we couldn't be sure whether more than the statistically expected number of suicides had occurred in areas where the fields were strongest. Since the total field strength was a combination of elements from many sources, we proceeded to measure the actual levels. This confirmed a link. Magnetic fields averaged 22 percent higher at suicide addresses than at the controls, and areas with the strongest fields contained 40 percent more fatal locations than randomly selected houses. 

The Endocrine, Metabolic, and Cardiovascular Systems 

Living things interpret electromagnetic energy for information about time and place, so they must have a means to filter out useless signals, although perhaps not those never before encountered. Many studies have found that the bioeffects of artificial energy stabilize after a few weeks, suggesting that animals adapt so as to live normally in a changed environment. Hence there's a large body of work that's often quoted to "prove" that electropollution isn't dangerous. As already noted, this simplistic viewpoint doesn't take into account the additive effects of stress. Moreover, when a stress is too strong or too persistent, compensation fails, and the effects become obvious and sometimes irreversible. When evaluating research on hazards, therefore, we must always ask whether the experiment was continued long enough to be informative. Otherwise, a short-term study showing harm is likely to be truer than a reassuring one of medium length. 

The primary effect of electromagnetic energy on the endocrine system appears to be the stress responses already described. The major confirmatory study in humans comes from the Soviet Union, where detailed medical tests of seventy-two technicians exposed daily to 1,000 microwatts or less disclosed ominous changes in white and red blood cell counts and an across-the-board decline in immune response. The workers and a group of controls were studied for three years. No human study approaching this in length or completeness has ever been done in the West. 

The only other consistently noted glandular change is in the thyroid. The work of several Soviet groups and one American team in the 1970s has clearly shown that radio and microwave frequencies, at power densities well below the American safety guideline of 10,000 microwatts, stimulate the thyroid gland and thus increase the basal metabolic rate. ELF fields at 50 hertz, on the other hand, have depressed thyroid activity in several experiments on rats. It isn't yet known whether this is a direct effect on the thyroid or whether, like the stress response, it's at least partly caused by alterations in brain function. 

One more link in the bioclock-interference-and-stress response has come from 1980 work at the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Washington. Working with rats, researchers there found that a weak 60-hertz electric field (only 3-9 volts per centimeter) canceled the normal nightly rise in production of the pineal gland hormone melatonin, the main hormonal mediator of biocycles. 

The cardiovascular system responds to electromagnetic energy in at least two ways. The composition of the blood reflects the stress response and concomitant activation of the immune system, while many frequencies exert a direct effect on the electrical system of the heart. 

Soviet scientists have observed a variety of blood changes in animals exposed to microwaves, radio waves, and ELF fields. These include declines in red blood cell count and hemoglobin concentration—and hence oxygen capacity—as well as changes in the relative numbers of various types of white blood cells and the relative amounts of blood proteins, and a possible reduction in the blood's ability to clot. 

Most of the discomforting studies of electropollution have been done by the Soviets, and they've been given short shrift by Western scientists. There are many reasons for this attitude. There's a simple prejudice against all things Russian and a feeling that their science, technologically less flashy than ours, is necessarily cruder. Western researchers have hamstrung themselves with the dogma that there simply can't be bioeffects from low levels of electromagnetic energy—so why bother looking? Then, too, Russian publication standards are different; procedural details are often omitted, making replication difficult. In addition, there are often troubling contradictions in the data themselves. Results are often inconsistent from animal to animal. If red blood cell count goes up in one, it will go down in another, so the experiment shows no statistical change even though every animal's blood composition is going haywire. In such a situation, the ultramechanistic Americans tend to believe the statistics, while the Soviet biologists concentrate on the animals. Russian scientists have been systematically studying electromagnetic bioeffects since 1933, and we can hardly afford to dismiss their entire body of work simply because it comes from a country we fear. 

My associates and I therefore proceeded from one of the most detailed Soviet reports and designed an experiment to measure effects on the blood of mice as our test fields were turned on and off. We concluded that these effects weren't a reaction to the fields themselves but rather a transient compensation that the animals were making in response to any change in their electromagnetic environment. By themselves, none of the blood fluctuations were especially hazardous. However, since we all live amid EMFs that are constantly shifting as we turn appliances on and off or travel from place to place, the continual blood instability could be significant. 

American attitudes began to alter in 1978-79 when Richard Lovely of the University of Washington took advantage of a detente-inspired exchange of microwave results to visit the Soviet Union for a month and study Eastern methods closely. His research group then painstakingly recreated a major Soviet experiment in which rats had been irradiated seven hours a day for three months with 500 microwatts. The Russian work was confirmed in every detail, including disruption of the blood's sodium potassium balance, other pathological changes in blood chemistry, damage to the adrenal glands from stress-induced hormonal changes, diminished sense of touch, a decline in exploitativeness, and slower learning of conditioned responses. Donald I. McRee, director of the EPA electromagnetic-radiation health research program, termed the results "very interesting" and called for an end to the American establishment's contempt for Soviet work. 

Electromagnetic energy has other adverse effects on blood composition and tissue function. Yuri D. Dumansky, one of many Soviet biophysicists who have done detailed work on microwave hazards, found changes in carbohydrate metabolism, including a rise in human blood sugar levels, resulting from 100 and 1,000 microwatts. Power-frequency (50-hertz) fields were also linked to altered sugar and protein metabolism in rats, as well as decreased muscular strength in rabbits. Like many other Russian results, these were questioned because of American failure to corroborate them. In this case a research team headed by N. S. Mathewson of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, reported no such metabolic changes in response to the Sanguine-Seafarer 45-hertz frequency. 

However, the Mathewson group made a fundamental mistake. They neglected to account for the 60-hertz background field near the test cages in their lab, even though they'd measured it when setting up the work station. When we reanalyzed their data in light of this omission, the experiment showed exactly the same changes in blood levels of glucose, globulins, lipids, and triglycerides as the Russians had found. 

The most frightening data so far on blood composition come from a preliminary study for Project Sanguine. Dietrich Beischer found that one day of exposure to a magnetic field such as would be produced by the ELF antenna caused a 50-percent rise in triglycerides in nine of ten human subjects. The NAS committee's conclusion that this early result didn't stand up was based on subsequent Navy work, mainly the faulty Mathewson study. Adequate follow-up by a disinterested group has never been funded, even though Beischer's finding agrees completely with Russian studies and the reinterpreted Mathewson data on animals. This doesn't exhaust the list of microwave metabolic effects reported behind the Iron Curtain. Dumansky found widespread changes in the liver function of rats exposed to low levels of microwaves that were scheduled to approximate the pattern of mealtime exposure from microwave ovens. Others detected vitamin B2 and B6 depletion from blood, brain, liver, kidneys, and heart, as well as major shifts in trace-metal metabolism in response to low levels of microwaves. The distribution of copper, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, and iron was affected throughout the bodies of rats. Similar trace-metal changes were recorded after exposure to ELF electric fields for four months, even at moderate field strengths for only half an hour per day. Since B6 is essential to the utilization of carbohydrates, fat, and protein, and since the trace metals act as catalysts in a wide variety of biochemical reactions, these observations may explain some of the other metabolic changes. 

There are indications that some types of electropollution directly decrease the efficiency of the heart. Several research groups in Poland, the Soviet Union, Italy, and the United States have studied pulse, electrocardiogram, blood pressure, and reserve capacity (the heart's ability to handle exertion) in animals. Microwaves and 50-hertz electric fields both produced similar changes that persisted throughout long-term exposure. These included bradycardia (decreased pulse), a huge reduction (40 to 50 percent) in the strength of the electrical impulses governing contraction of the heart muscle, a decline in reserve capacity, and a short-term rise followed by a long-term fall in blood pressure. In general, these decrements occurred in both "domestic" (0.5 volts per centimeter) and "industrial" (50 volts per centimeter or more) electric fields and at microwave power densities of 150 microwatts, well within the amount received by many people from radar beams and microwave ovens. 

In humans, confirmatory evidence for these effects comes from several Russian studies of workers in high-voltage power station switchyards. In the first such group examined, forty-one of forty-five had some sign of nervous or cardiovascular disease, including bradycardia, instability of pulse and blood pressure, and tremors. The same health problems were found in four additional studies of nearly seven hundred more workers. 

The only comparable American study is much quoted for its failure to find consistent health damage in a mere eleven power-line maintenance workers. 

Growth Systems and Immune Response 

Given the results presented so far and the dynamics of life's connection to the earth's field, we can now make several predictions about the effects of ELF pollution. The most important aspects of the natural electromagnetic field for the biological timing systems are the lunar circadian rhythm and the micropulsations of 0.1 to 35 hertz. It seems logical that cells will perceive frequencies close to normal more readily than those further removed from the norm. Therefore we can postulate that the ELF band from 35 to 100 hertz would be the most damaging, while higher frequencies might go more or less unnoticed until the energy injected into cells became intense or prolonged enough to be significant. The accumulating evidence supports this idea. 

Based on this notion, we can predict two major ELF effects that would encompass many others. We can expect the abnormal signals to disrupt biocycles. Such disruption would trigger the generalized stress response even if the EMR-induced changes in brain neurotransmitters were only an effect and not a cause of the stress reaction. In addition, the wrong timing signals would likely throw off the mitotic cycle time of every cell, interfering with growth processes throughout the body. 

Although any number of factors can trigger the adrenocortical stress reaction, the response itself is always the same. It involves the release from the adrenal glands of specific hormones, mainly the corticosteroids, which in turn mobilize the body against invading germs or foreign proteins. Thus the stress response always activates the immune system. 

Short exposures to stress aren't necessarily harmful and may even be healthy. In fact, the Soviet work on microwave stress has disclosed a brief period of increased immune-system competence at very low intensities (under 10 microwatts). However, when an organism must face a continual or repeated stress, the response system enters the chronic phase, during which resistance declines below normal and eventually becomes exhausted. Several well-known diseases, such as peptic ulcer and hypertension, result directly from this stage, but the most important result is a decrease in the body's ability to fight infection and cancer. 

The trouble is that the immune system is geared to fight tangible invaders—bacteria, viruses, toxins, and misbehaving cells of the body  itself—or such consciously detectable stresses as heat, cold, or injury. It includes a system of circulating antibodies by which specialized cells recognize the intruder. The cells controlling this phase, which is called humoral immunity, then select appropriate defenders from an array of other types, each programmed for a certain function, such as digesting bacteria, clearing away cellular debris, or neutralizing poisons. Electromagnetic energy isn't consciously perceived, however. It tricks the immune system into fighting a shadow. Thus we can predict that, just like a fire company answering a false alarm, the body will be less able to fight a real fire. 

Experiments bear out this supposition. Impaired immune response has been found at many frequencies. Several groups of Soviet researchers have found a decline in the efficiency of white blood cells in rats and guinea pigs after the animals had been exposed to radio waves and microwaves. Most of these experimenters checked for immune system disruption only up to power densities of about 500 microwatts, one twentieth of the nominal American safety standard. Multiple dangers from higher levels are already considered proven in the Soviet Union. 

As predicted, however, the most dramatic reported effect on immune response has been produced by ELF fields. During his systematic study of 200-gauss, 50-hertz magnetic fields, Yuri N. Udintsev found that the concentration of bacteria needed to kill mice in such an environment was only one fifth that needed without the field. 

When considering resistance to illness, we must also account for the effect of electromagnetic energy on the disease itself, a factor that has so far been all but ignored. Virtually the only evidence to date is a disturbing piece of work by Yu. N. Achkasova and her colleagues at the Crimean Medical Institute in Simferopol. In 1978 they reported the results of exposing thirteen standard strains of bacteria—including anthrax, typhus, pneumonia, and staphylococcus—to electric and magnetic fields. After accounting for magnetic storms, ionospheric flux, passage of the interplanetary magnetic-field boundaries, and other variables, they found clear evidence that an electric field only slightly stronger than earth's background stimulated growth of all bacteria and increased their resistance to antibiotics. The magnetic fields inhibited the growth of the germs but in many cases still enhanced their resistance to antibiotics. Achkasova concentrated on frequencies between 0.1 and 1 hertz, so the survey was far from complete, but perhaps the most important finding was that every field tested had an effect, even after one four-hour exposure. In many cases longer exposure produced permanent changes in bacterial metabolism.

The admittedly sketchy evidence to date suggests that our electropollution is presenting us, and perhaps all animals, with a double challenge: weaker immune systems and stronger diseases. We shouldn't be surprised, then, at an onslaught of "new" ailments, beginning about 1950 and accelerating toward the future. In several cases, new maladies have recently been described as coming from pathogens that previously weren't capable of inducing disease, and this, too, shouldn't surprise us. Among the newcomers are: 

Reye's syndrome. First described in 1963, this condition begins with severe vomiting as a child is recovering from the flu or chicken pox. It then progresses to lethargy, personality changes, convulsions, coma, and death. The mortality rate, initially very high, has now been reduced to about 10 percent, but the incidence has increased greatly. 

Lyme disease. A virus disease carried by certain insects, it produces severe arthritis in humans. It's one of several similar illnesses that have appeared only recently. 

Legionnaire's disease. This is a pneumonia caused by a common soil bacterium that has found a second home in air-conditioning systems. The organism caused us no recognized problems before the initial outbreak in Philadelphia in 1976. 

AIDS. Autoimmune deficiency syndrome is a condition in which the body's immune system fails completely and its owner often dies. The patient is unable to resist common, otherwise harmless bacteria and viruses, and can no longer suppress the seeds of cancer that reside in all of us. At present, some sort of virus is suspected as the precipitating cause. 

Herpes genitalis. This disease isn't new, but its prevalence and severity have increased tremendously in one decade. Sexual permissiveness generally takes the blame, but a decline in immunocompetence may be more important. 

Certainly there are additional factors that may be contributing to the rise of these and other new illnesses. Chemical pollution and the prevalence of junk food are two of the most obvious. However, these diseases, as well as cancer, birth defects, and the other growth problems described below, are on the increase throughout the industrialized world. So are some of the major psychological diseases, such as depression and compulsive use of all types of drugs, from caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol to prescription tranquilizers and the illegal euphoriants, Although heart attack death rates have declined in the last five years (for no known reason), they're still far higher than before World War II. 

These diseases exist at more or less the same rates in countries whose chemical toxicity, eating habits, and styles of life are widely divergent. However, the massive use of electromagnetic energy is a common denominator uniting all of the developed nations. In particular, the entire North American continent, Western Europe, and Japan generate such strong 50- and 60- hertz fields that they can be sensed by satellites in space. The populations of these areas are continuously bombarded by these ELF fields. 

Disruption of the biocycle timing cues must inevitably make it harder for the body to regulate the mitotic rate of its cells. The major exception to the "no effect" assurances in the NAS Sanguine-Seafarer report was unignorable evidence that 75-hertz fields lengthened the mitotic cycle and hindered cell respiration of the slime mold used in standard tests of cellular growth. The same effects were seen regardless of field strength. Hence we should expect that ELF pollution would foster diseases in which growth processes go awry. 

Indeed there has been an alarming increase in such problems. Cancer is hardly a novel illness, but its prevalence is new. In the mid-1960s roughly a quarter of the U.S. population could expect to develop it. By the mid-1970s, that figure had risen to one third, and it's now even higher. The incidence of birth defects has doubled in the past quarter century. There has been a similarly rapid rise in infertility and other reproductive problems. 

Rarer defects of cell division may be on the increase as well, especially among workers exposed by occupation to high levels of electromagnetic energy. Pathologist Hylar Friedman of the Army Medical Center in El Paso reported in 1981 that radar technicians were three to twelve times more likely than the rest of the population to get polycythemia, a rare blood disorder characterized by production of too many red blood cells. Such relationships are hard to confirm statistically, however, in diseases affecting small numbers of people. We need direct experimental evidence and large-scale studies on the widespread disorders. Both are now available. 

Back in 1971, two more Soviet researchers, S. G. Mamontov and L. N. Ivanova, reported that industrial-strength 50-hertz electric fields tripled the mitotic rate of liver and cornea cells in mice. Soon afterward, Bassett and Pilla published empirical evidence that pulsed EMFs accelerated the healing of bone fractures. For the most part, however, concrete evidence that time-varying fields could affect cell division was slow in coming. 

That situation has changed in the last few years. Several experimenters, notably Stephen Smith, have now proven that the Electrobiology bone-healing device, using 15 pulse-bursts per second, speeds up the division rate of cells that are already proliferating rapidly. Among normal cells, this includes skin, gut, and liver cells. In 1983, A. R. Liboff, a biophysicist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, reported on the effects of a more inclusive set of parameters. Magnetic fields of 0.2 to 4 gauss, vibrating at 10 to 4,000 hertz, all enhanced the replication of DNA during the S (synthesis) phase of mitosis. 

As predicted, the interaction appears to be greatest between 35 and 100 hertz. Jose M. R. Delgado—the flamboyant advocate of a "psychocivilized" society through mind control, who has publicized direct electrical stimulation of the brain by such displays as stopping a charging bull in its tracks with a radio impulse transmitted to an implanted electrode—recently reported results of a genetic study of magnetic fields at three frequencies. Delgado placed chick embryos in minuscule magnetic fields pulsed at 10, 100, and 1,000 hertz. He used fields of only 0.001 gauss, or roughly the strength of the earth field's micropulsations. Chicks exposed to the 10-hertz fields were normal, but those dosed at 100 hertz developed severe defects of the central nervous system. The highest frequency also yielded abnormalities, but they were much less severe. Higher intensities are common in homes, in offices, and near power lines. The Navy has found stronger fields near its 76-H3 ELF antenna and reradiated at that frequency from a power line a mile away.

It's important to bear in mind that, in stimulating DNA synthesis, an electromagnetic field doesn't distinguish between desirable and undesirable growth. It affects all cells in the same way, but cell systems that are already rapidly dividing are speeded up the most. As we've seen in earlier chapters, these susceptible processes include healing, embryonic growth, and cancer.* In fact, a researcher working on the New York State Department of Health's power line project, Wendell Winters of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, recently reported some of the first laboratory evidence that power frequencies can accelerate malignant growth. Winters exposed human cancer cells to 60-hertz electromagnetic fields for just twenty-four hours, and found a sixfold increase in their growth rate seven to ten days later. 

*Only the magnetic component appears to accelerate healing in any way. Power frequency electric fields severely retard fracture healing in rats, as Andy Marino, Jim Cullen, Maria Reichmanis, and I proved with a series of experiment in 1979. This work was confirmed the following year by R. D. Phillips in a study done for a Department of Energy review of transmission line bioeffects.

Moreover, the perturbation of normal cell-cycle time is enhanced if nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is induced in the atoms of the DNA molecules. In simplified terms, nuclear magnetic resonance is present when the magnetic fields around atomic nuclei are induced to vibrate in unison. The phenomenon requires two external magnetic fields, one steady and one pulsating. For every chemical element, the oscillating field at a specific frequency will induce resonance within the steady-state field at a certain strength. 

In 1983 a research team under A. H. Jafary-Asl showed that the earth's magnetic background could serve as the steady field, while the harmonics of power line frequencies could produce a time-varying field that would induce nuclear magnetic resonance in at least two common atoms of living tissue—potassium and chlorine. Other elements might also be susceptible to the effect. Bacteria and yeast cells exposed to these NMR conditions doubled their rate of DNA synthesis and proliferation, but daughter cells were half size. Liboff, analyzing contradictory studies, found that the contradictions disappeared when he calculated resonance conditions for the earth's field where each test was done. Previous work must now be reinterpreted as one vast experiment in adding new frequencies to the varying background.

Almost all experimenters to date have tested the response of organisms to a single specific frequency and intensity. This approach was needed in the beginning to provide a basic level of knowledge, but it's far removed from everyday life, in which we're all exposed to many frequencies simultaneously. A synergism between electromagnetic energy and radioactivity has already been suggested by the fact that cancer rates among nuclear power plant workers are higher than was predicted solely by the higher levels of ionizing radiation in their environment. Nuclear power plants abound in multifrequency radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation. In addition to inducing NMR in the building blocks of living cells, multiple frequencies may likewise interact synergistically to yield biohazards greater than the sum of their individual dangers.

Animal experiments on the risk of cancer and birth defects from electromagnetic energy arc scarce, even in the USSR. The little work that has been done was mostly on microwaves. The only well-known American laboratory study of birth defect dangers used pulsed radio waves and found numerous mutations in fruit fly offspring. In 1976 a Russian group dosed rats with 50 and 500 microwatts for one to ten days. When they then studied somatic (nongenital) cells from the animals, they  found chromosome defects in astounding numbers. At the higher power density there were five times as many as in the controls, and even at the lower intensity the number continued to increase (to 150 percent of the normal value) for two weeks after the beams were turned off.

A 1979 study directed by Przemyslaw Czerski of the National Research Institute of Mother and Child, in Warsaw, documented increased numbers of damaged chromosomes in the sperm of mice exposed one hour a day for two weeks to microwave intensities ranging from 100 microwatts up to the American safety standard of 10,000 microwatts. An even more discomfiting set of data came from a mid-1970s Russian experiment in which female mice were subjected to small power densities, 10 to 50 microwatts. Throughout this range there was a decrease in the number and size of litters and an increase in developmental problems among the newborn animals. The rate of stillbirths jumped from 1.1 percent at the lowest intensity to 7 percent at the highest.

Alas, human beings are the main experimental animals in this line of research. Those who contend microwaves pose no danger often quote a survey of twenty thousand Korean War veterans completed in 1980 by C. D. Robinette and others for the NAS-National Research Council's Medical Follow-up Agency. Comparing VA medical records of radar technicians and others heavily exposed to microwaves with the records of controls, this group found no increase in the death rate. This finding can't be relied on, however. Most of the controls were radar operators, who are exposed to some radiation from radar beams as well as from their consoles. Thus the presumption that they absorbed negligible amounts of EMR just doesn't hold water. In the last few years more reliable epidemiological studies have appeared, showing increased rates of cancer and birth defects among people exposed to higher-than-average levels of electromagnetic energy.

Since microwave broadcasts for television and telephone relays must be in a line of sight to the receivers, there are only a few suitable high locations for the transmitters near each city. Of necessity there's an above-normal concentration of ELF fields and microwave spill off in that area, possibly leading to a destructive synergism as outlined above. Moreover, since TV is aimed at an audience and phone relay beams at the next station, corridors are set up within which people get more than their share of microwaves.

Sentinel Heights, seven miles from downtown Syracuse, is one such transmitter hill. Slightly more than a thousand people live there. From 1974 to 1977 I learned of seven cases of cancel in that area. They were divided into two clusters, in two microwave corridors separated by a shadow zone. This is 55 percent more than the 4.5 cases statistically expected for this population, and there may have been more cases I didn't know about. Obviously, in such a small and unscientific sample the results could have been due to chance, but the ominous implications demanded some more extensive surveys.

The first one came in 1979, when Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper of the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver published a study of childhood cancer and power lines. The researchers studied 344 deaths from childhood cancer between 1950 and 1973. The address of each of the victims was paired with the address of the next baby born in the area, to provide a matched series of controls. If the family had moved before the death, both birth and death addresses were used in the experimental group. The wiring of each house and its distance from the nearest transformers were studied. It proved possible to divide the houses into two groups: those with high-current wiring configurations producing strong magnetic fields, and those wired in a low-current arrangement producing much weaker magnetic fields. After certain other variables—such as economic class, family risk patterns, traffic, and urbanization differences—were factored out, the childhood death rate from leukemia, lymph node cancer, and nervous system tumors in the high current homes was more than double the rate in low-current homes. 

Three years later S. Milham, director of occupational health and safety for the state of Washington, found that adults who worked in strong electromagnetic fields also had a leukemia incidence significantly higher than the norm. The link appeared in statistics for generating-station operators, high-voltage-line maintenance workers, aluminum smelters, and several other categories of laborers. 

Besides the investigation itself, another thing was noteworthy about Milham's paper: the reaction of the scientific establishment. Another paper quickly appeared in the same periodical, the New England Journal of Medicine, citing many other studies to prove Milham wrong. However, all of them involved controlled exposure to microwaves alone, while the jobs studied by Milham were in the real world, where microwaves and power frequency fields mix. The editors declined to publish my letter pointing out this obvious flaw in the critique, but still it was momentous that such a prestigious publication ran Milham's paper at all. 

Soon confirmatory reports appeared. Wertheimer's and Leeper's findings were duplicated in Stockholm by a group who correlated childhood leukemia with actual measurements of magnetic fields. The strongest statistical link was found with 200-kilovolt power lines running within 200 yards of the stricken child's home. Milham's work was vindicated    by surveys in Los Angeles and Great Britain. Wertheimer herself extended her observations to adults and found the same highly significant connection between high-current wiring and various cancers, especially leukemia.

Radar beams (composed of pulsed microwaves) have the highest power densities of any EMR source. In the laboratory, both radio frequency and microwave radiation have been shown to change the gateway-barrier function of cell membranes, upset hormone balances, and induce chromosome defects, all of which are factors in malignant growth. However, there have been few attempts to directly assess radar's potential role in human cancer.

John R. Lester and Dennis F. Moore of the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita have recently done so. Wichita was an ideal location for such an inquiry. It had two airports with radar towers, but few other major sources of electropollution. Its chemical environment was also quite clean as cities go. Lester and Moore plotted the cancer incidence for the whole city and found it was highest where the residents were exposed to both radar beams. It was lower where only one beam penetrated, but lowest where the population was fully shielded behind hills. The results held up when other factors, such as age, poverty, sex, and race, were statistically balanced as far as possible. The authors noted one apartment house whose cancer death rate was twice that of the area's nursing homes; its upper floors were in direct line with both radar beams.

Heart attack rates in North Karelia and Kuopio, Finland, became the highest (and most swiftly increasing) in the world within a few years after the Soviets installed a gigantic over-the-horizon radar complex that bounced microwaves off the surface of Lake Ladoga and through these parts of southeastern Finland. These are rural districts whose way of life is built on outdoor labor rather than the sedentary indoor stresses generally associated with heart disease. Noting that cancer rates had also risen precipitously in the region, Lester and Moore went on to investigate statistics for American counties having Air Force bases. These counties had a significantly higher percentage of cancer deaths than other counties, even though radar towers from commercial airports inevitably must have smoothed out the data and made the difference less striking. 

The study of human genetic defects from electromagnetic energy is still in a primitive stage. In the case of microwaves, this situation is largely due to obstruction by military and government agencies. Even in World War II, rumors of radar-induced sterility were so rampant that sailors often gave themselves "treatments" before shore leave. The first scientific evidence of reproductive effects didn't come until 1959, when John H. Heller and his co-workers at the New England Institute for Medical Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut, found major chromosome abnormalities in garlic shoots irradiated with low levels of microwaves. They soon found the same changes in mammalian cells, as well as the fruit fly mutations mentioned above. Their work in this direction ended about 1970 due to lack of funds.

In 1964 a group of researchers studying Down's syndrome at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, after linking the malady to excess X rays given to pregnant women, found an unexpected further correlation with fathers working near radar. It was a full decade before any money was allocated to follow up this finding, and, while the link between parental radar exposure and Down's syndrome wasn't substantiated, higher-than-normal numbers of chromosome defects were found in the blood cells of radarmen. 

By this time an Alabama professor of public health had found an apparent surge in birth defects among children of radar-exposed Army helicopter pilots. In 1971 Dr. Peter Peacock noted that there had been seventeen children born with clubfoot within a sixteen-month period at the Fort Rucker, Alabama, base hospital. Statistically, there should have been no more than four. 

Working through two federal agencies and two private research foundations, Peacock and others tried for five years to follow up this disturbing news, only to be thwarted by some clever tactical moves by the Army. Refusing to release work records, medical files, and radar inspection records on grounds of "privacy" and "national security," officials of the Army Medical Research and Development Command managed to prevent all but two reassessments of Peacock's original data for several years. They stalled separate research proposals sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration's Bureau of Radiological Health without ever letting on to one agency that they were dealing with the other. As the coup de grace, the Army agreed to supply the FDA group with a survey of radar transmitters in the Fort Rucker area. The officers fobbed off on the unwitting civilians a deceitfully sketchy map showing only one major radar installation at the base, whereas an official Army report made at the time of the observed birth defects showed nineteen such emitters. Throughout the Vietnam War thousands of helicopter trainees had each spent months flying through the resultant microwave haze. Much of their training consisted of homing right down the beams to within a few dozen yards of the  source in TH-13 Bell copters whose Plexiglas bubbles left them naked to microwaves. 

The Fort Rucker affair and many other instances of military-governmental sabotage of health effects research on microwaves have been impeccably documented in New Yorker reporter Paul Brodeur's 1977 book, The Zapping of America. In the early 1970s, for example, follow-up to a preliminary finding of excess Down's syndrome among children of Seattle airline pilots was first supported by the local chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association, then opposed due to pressure from the national level.

The stonewalling continues. Grants for serious consideration of electro-pollution's dangers have been cut to a trickle in the United States, but some findings continue to emerge, especially from other countries. 

A 1976 survey of Hydro-Quebec's generating-station electricians showed a drastic change in the gender ratio of children born after one of the parents began work in the high-EMF environment. Before, boys and girls had been born in equal numbers; afterward, there were six times as many males as females. A 1979 study of Swedish high-voltage substation workers showed lower birth rates and an 8-percent incidence of genetic defects in offspring, as compared with 3 percent among children of a control group. The finding was confirmed in 1983. Since most of the exposed electrical workers were men, the damage apparently was done during sperm formation. Most recently, in May 1984, Nancy Wertheimer presented evidence of a statistical correlation between use of electric blankets, which emit powerful EMFs, and the occurrence of birth defects.

Among the most serious recent data are those concerning video display terminals (VDTs). There have been alarming numbers of miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects among pregnant women working in newly computerized offices. In one year at the Dallas office of Sears, Roebuck and Company, for example, only four of twelve pregnancies ended normally. Among twelve pregnant VDT workers at the Defense Logistics Agency in Marietta, Georgia, there were seven miscarriages and three cases of congenital defects. Four VDT operators in the Toronto Star's classified-ad department gave birth to deformed children, while three co-workers who didn't work with VDTs had normal babies. These anomalies must be compared with the normal 15-percent incidence of spontaneous abortion and the 3-percent rate of serious birth defects among the population at large. Writing in Microwave News, an independent newsletter covering nonionizing radiation, in 1982 editors Louis Slesin and Martha Zybko reported on eight such clusters, and workers' groups have documented several others, but still there has been no attempt at a large-scale statistical study to check the oft repeated claim that these are just coincidences.

Two studies are widely quoted as disproving harmful effects from the machines. In 1977, when two New York Times copy editors developed radiation-induced cataracts after less than a year at their new screens, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) tested a few machines and, finding that X-ray emissions were within the half millirem-per-hour standard for work exposure, concluded there was no link to the health problems. Unfortunately, the agency didn't adequately measure non-ionizing radiation, gave contradictory data as to the sensitivity of its own instruments, and failed to test malfunctioning monitors, which are known to emit larger amounts of X rays. Nor is there any assurance that the X-ray exposure standard is adequate, since it was formulated for a much smaller group of workers (mainly nuclear technicians and uranium miners), whose health is continuously monitored in a way that that of VDT operators is not. Furthermore, the NIOSH investigators noted an enormous microwave reading of 1,000 microwatts in one of the Times offices, without even bothering to find out where it was coming from! 

Press releases claimed a mid-1983 National Academy of Sciences review would allay the fears once and for all, proving VDTs to be risk free. However, a reading of the text showed a different picture. While the authors played down reports linking birth defects and eye problems to VDT radiation, they admittedly failed to find any research adequate to answer the health questions one way or the other. 

According to the sketchy data available, all VDTs (which of course include video games and televisions as well as computer monitors) emit varying amounts of radiation over a broad spectrum. The transformers release VLF and ELF waves, while microwaves, X rays, and ultraviolet emanate from the screen. Poorly adjusted or malfunctioning terminals can emit enormous amounts; two machines tested in the offices of Long Island's Newsday, for example, were producing 15,000 microwatts of radio energy. There's no information whatever on the synergisms that may operate amid this varied radiation over long periods of time, but I suspect that the birth defects are primarily due to the ELF component.

Meanwhile, the only American "research" on the problem continues to be the daily lives of our 10 million or more console operators. Despite the reassurances, at least a third to a half of the workers continue to suffer headaches, nausea, neck and back pain, and vision impairment. In fact, a 1983 survey of eleven hundred UPI employees conducted by Arthur Frank, then at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, suggested that VDT users lose so much time due to eye problems and neck pain that the effects may become a major drain on the economy by the end of the decade.

Some of the complaints undoubtedly arise from postural strains and lighting defects in the notoriously ill-designed work areas where many VDT's are used. They could be prevented by more frequent breaks and some sympathetic attention to human engineering. The birth defects and cataracts probably won't disappear so easily, however. Certainly pregnant women should be allowed temporary reassignment without loss of pay, a right already accepted in much of Western Europe and recently put into law in Ontario. That won't protect sperm cells and unfertilized eggs, however. Regular maintenance and a lead-impregnated glass or acrylic screen (such as is used in nuclear power plant windows) can virtually eliminate ionizing radiation, but screen-generated microwaves require a transparent shield that still conducts electrical energy—a product that doesn't yet exist. Some frequencies of EMR are easy to block simply by using metal cabinets instead of the cheaper plastic ones, but VLF and ELF waves require grounded shielding. All these preventive measures are expenses that most manufacturers and managers have been loath to accept; until they do, workers will be paying the entire price. 

The dangers of electropollution are real and well documented. It changes, often pathologically, every biological system. What we don't know is exactly how serious these changes are, for how many people. The longer we, as a society, put off a search for that knowledge, the greater the damage is likely to be and the harder it will be to correct. Meanwhile, one of the few honest statements to emerge from the Nixon administration, a warning issued by the President's Office of Telecommunications Policy in 1971, continues to bleed through the whitewash: "The population at risk is not really known; it may be special groups; it may well be the entire population. . . . The consequences of undervaluing or misjudging the biological effects of long-term, low-level exposure could become a critical problem for the public health, especially if genetic effects are involved."

conclusion of the chapter next

286s- Conflicting Standards