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It's important to note that according to official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer. I've heard my own concerns about non-ionising radiation di

It's important to note that according to official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer. I've heard my own concerns about non-ionising radiation dismissed (even belittled) so many times that I've lost count. Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. But one should understand that if this dogma was correct, there should be no link found at all. I did a physics degree at uni, and then spent many years working in genomics. And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer. After working with biologists for many years I've come to the understanding that biology is extremely complex, we have an extremely limited understanding of it, and there could be any number of as yet undiscovered effects of non-ionising radiation on cellular biology. I would hope that as more of these studies are done (this is not the first and probably wont be the last) that we would hear less of this dogma spouted by supposedly smart people, but I doubt this will happen. It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility. And the dismissive "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" people never miss an opportunity to tell you that doubting this "proven fact" makes you stupid.

andybak 10y ago
Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the scientific method shouldn't be bandying around words like 'proof'. Science is always provisional and new evidence can always overturn a theory. Sadly many areas of debate attract cranks in larger than usual numbers and the health effects of electromagnetic radiation is one of them. So people get rather weary of fighting the same battles again and again and tend to become a little flippant in their replies.
legulere 10y ago
I guess a better way to say it is: Non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer the way UV, x-ray or gamma rays cause cancer. We haven't found any other way radiation can cause cancer yet.
- shirro 10y ago
  That may not be true. UVA is not ionising and possibly increases risk of skin cancer. Non-ionizing radiation can cause chemical reactions (photochemical, heating, burns) that damage cells and might lead to increased cancer risk. I really doubt if that is the case with mobile phones but I think it makes more sense to look at the epidemiological data rather than make a bunch of hand wavey arguments about the radiation. There are a hell of a lot of cell phone users and if there is a risk worth being concerned about I think it should have shown up before now.
  - marvin 10y ago
    Non-ionizing radiation can also cause other adverse health effects. A famous Norwegian case in the early 90s related to navy personnel on board an attack vessel, where 17 of the 85 children of soldiers who had served on the vessel, had birth defects. A disproportionate number of the employees on the electronics workshop of its home base also has children with similar birth defects The negative effects are widely believed to have been caused by a 750W radar jammer, which frequently radiated the ship deck. There hasn't been established a clear cause-and-effect link. https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikk-saken https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikk-saken
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      They could have shared exposure to an awful lot of things. Short of some indication that they were turning on the jammer all the time in the workshop I would sort of think chemical exposure would be a more likely explanation.
tzs 10y ago
> And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer. ...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it. It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be. If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with. Here is a submission from a little over a year ago about the fractal antenna aspect of DNA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447964 See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).
MicroBerto 10y ago
Be careful when dealing with absolutes. No matter how smart you think you may be, you simply don't know what you don't know, as you allude to later in your comment.
- whatisunseen 10y ago
  Very true, but the same can be said for scientists. While paying lip-service to what it doesn't know, the hubris of modern science is its vice. We live in an age of relative technological ignorance. Let's keep a proper perspective. In a few centuries, people will look back at what we know today and laugh. (Infinite examples could be given. Only 100 years ago people said man would never fly, etc. )
Houshalter 10y ago
Perhaps, but how, in 2016, is it not known? Surely scientists have tried raising rats near strong radio waves to see if they die or get cancer?
- DanBC 10y ago
  Rats get cancer. The rats used in this study get tumours. http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/33/11/2768 http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/33/11/2768 > A spontaneous tumor incidence of 45% was noted in 360 Sprague-Dawley rats (179 males and 181 females) and a 26% incidence was seen in 254 Swiss mice (101 males and 153 females) used as untreated control animals in an 18-month series of carcinogenesis experiments. A tiny increase in cancer over a large base rate is going to be tricky to find.
greatnorthz 10y ago
In a round-about-way you are hinting at the 'science is a religion' mentality. If something can't be explained by current scientific knowledge then, the people who think that way, must have the idea shot down and disregarded. It's a binary thought pattern that would probably be less common if history (and philosophy) had a greater value in society.
derptacious 10y ago
The establishment demands that non-ionizing UV can be carcinogenic, but laugh if someone thinks that microwave - at various doses - could be! Why does it take so much evidence to even propose that low doses of the frequency that cook food can have adverse health effects on living humans? The fact that they're not willing to recommend bluetooth or earbuds without a mountain of evidence is another demonstration of closed mindedness. If something in nature has an even infinitesimal chance of being harmful, then you put it closer to your hands and legs - and not your eyes, face, and brain.
- mcbits 10y ago
  Fire cooks food, but waving your hands above a candle for warmth doesn't "cook" your hands. However, if you do damage your skin (especially repeatedly), the tissue damage and repair cycle can increase the risk of cancer. So when it comes to cell phones, do those microwaves merely warm human tissue very slightly, or might it occasionally be concentrated in a way to cause micro-burns? Supposing the body is repeatedly having to heal tiny microwave burns, it wouldn't be surprising at all if cancer risk is increased.
mnsc 10y ago
"official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer." I doubt that you can find a scientist doing research on radiations effect on the body that dogmatically has said that "non-ionising radiation _can not_ cause cancer". I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically. So if you "doubt" the dogma by saying "non-ionising radiation _can_ cause cancer" every scientist, and me, can go "Fk yeah, thats a working hypothesis, go prove that and bring society forward". But if you would say that "non-ionising radiation _causes_ cancer" you are "stupid" in the way that you don't base that sentence on the current state of science and you are just making things up because you have been "working with biologists for many years" and you are a proud user of Common Sense™.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  > I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically. Feynman did in 1974: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm In light of these things, my working hypothesis is scientists can dogmatically claim things too.
mh-cx 10y ago
I think it would help a lot if they could somehow compile a list of the likelinessnes for getting cancer from a specific sort of radiation. It should also contain the radiation that we are naturally always exposed to. Even if the values were only rough estimates I feel like this would put the real risks more into perspective.
mathgeek 10y ago
> It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility. This is a bit overly general. Many of us who are highly educated and traditionally intelligent battle with imposter syndrome. We're just the ones who you won't find out there acting like we know everything. The idea that this is often the case it likely more a matter of "the squeaky wheel" than scientific fact.
kisstheblade 10y ago
No, the "dogma" is just that scary cellphone RADIATION! is no more harmful than the radiation from lightbulbs, flashlights, candles etc. And probably a couple of orders of magnitudes less so. But hey, radiation, you know, nucular, scary.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Snark aside, those lightbulbs, flashlights, and candles are not placed directly against the head and near the reproductive organs (in pockets) for upwards of a thousand hours per year.
snake_plissken 10y ago
Aren't the ultraviolet components of sunlight non-ionizing?
xenadu02 10y ago
I'm not saying you are a quack, but you are crying the rallying cry of quacks everywhere. You also setup a straw man. Any scientist or thoughtful person says "there isn't a known/proven" link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer and so far most evidence seems negative. Of course there is a lot we don't know. That doesn't mean we are incapable of making any statements about anything at all. If cell phones caused a significant risk in the rise of cancer (say 1-10%) we'd have easily seen that by now. We haven't. This study didn't see it either... In fact the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than the ones not exposed! So what we can confidently say is that if cell phone radiation causes cancer, it is an extremely minor contributor. In all likelihood it's contribution is zero, but that is also unproven and should be further studied.
pithic 10y ago
> Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. Such biologists may even believe they know how cells divide, because they've observed stages of cell division and given them fancy Latin names.

andybak 10y ago

Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the scientific method shouldn't be bandying around words like 'proof'. Science is always provisional and new evidence can always overturn a theory. Sadly many areas of debate attract cranks in larger than usual numbers and the health effects of electromagnetic radiation is one of them. So people get rather weary of fighting the same battles again and again and tend to become a little flippant in their replies.

legulere 10y ago

I guess a better way to say it is: Non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer the way UV, x-ray or gamma rays cause cancer. We haven't found any other way radiation can cause cancer yet.

shirro 10y ago
That may not be true. UVA is not ionising and possibly increases risk of skin cancer. Non-ionizing radiation can cause chemical reactions (photochemical, heating, burns) that damage cells and might lead to increased cancer risk. I really doubt if that is the case with mobile phones but I think it makes more sense to look at the epidemiological data rather than make a bunch of hand wavey arguments about the radiation. There are a hell of a lot of cell phone users and if there is a risk worth being concerned about I think it should have shown up before now.
- marvin 10y ago
  Non-ionizing radiation can also cause other adverse health effects. A famous Norwegian case in the early 90s related to navy personnel on board an attack vessel, where 17 of the 85 children of soldiers who had served on the vessel, had birth defects. A disproportionate number of the employees on the electronics workshop of its home base also has children with similar birth defects The negative effects are widely believed to have been caused by a 750W radar jammer, which frequently radiated the ship deck. There hasn't been established a clear cause-and-effect link. https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikk-saken https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikk-saken
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    They could have shared exposure to an awful lot of things. Short of some indication that they were turning on the jammer all the time in the workshop I would sort of think chemical exposure would be a more likely explanation.

tzs 10y ago

> And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer. ...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it. It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be. If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with. Here is a submission from a little over a year ago about the fractal antenna aspect of DNA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447964 See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).

MicroBerto 10y ago

Be careful when dealing with absolutes. No matter how smart you think you may be, you simply don't know what you don't know, as you allude to later in your comment.

whatisunseen 10y ago
Very true, but the same can be said for scientists. While paying lip-service to what it doesn't know, the hubris of modern science is its vice. We live in an age of relative technological ignorance. Let's keep a proper perspective. In a few centuries, people will look back at what we know today and laugh. (Infinite examples could be given. Only 100 years ago people said man would never fly, etc. )

Houshalter 10y ago

Perhaps, but how, in 2016, is it not known? Surely scientists have tried raising rats near strong radio waves to see if they die or get cancer?

DanBC 10y ago
Rats get cancer. The rats used in this study get tumours. http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/33/11/2768 http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/33/11/2768 > A spontaneous tumor incidence of 45% was noted in 360 Sprague-Dawley rats (179 males and 181 females) and a 26% incidence was seen in 254 Swiss mice (101 males and 153 females) used as untreated control animals in an 18-month series of carcinogenesis experiments. A tiny increase in cancer over a large base rate is going to be tricky to find.

greatnorthz 10y ago

In a round-about-way you are hinting at the 'science is a religion' mentality. If something can't be explained by current scientific knowledge then, the people who think that way, must have the idea shot down and disregarded. It's a binary thought pattern that would probably be less common if history (and philosophy) had a greater value in society.

derptacious 10y ago

The establishment demands that non-ionizing UV can be carcinogenic, but laugh if someone thinks that microwave - at various doses - could be! Why does it take so much evidence to even propose that low doses of the frequency that cook food can have adverse health effects on living humans? The fact that they're not willing to recommend bluetooth or earbuds without a mountain of evidence is another demonstration of closed mindedness. If something in nature has an even infinitesimal chance of being harmful, then you put it closer to your hands and legs - and not your eyes, face, and brain.

mcbits 10y ago
Fire cooks food, but waving your hands above a candle for warmth doesn't "cook" your hands. However, if you do damage your skin (especially repeatedly), the tissue damage and repair cycle can increase the risk of cancer. So when it comes to cell phones, do those microwaves merely warm human tissue very slightly, or might it occasionally be concentrated in a way to cause micro-burns? Supposing the body is repeatedly having to heal tiny microwave burns, it wouldn't be surprising at all if cancer risk is increased.

mnsc 10y ago

"official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer." I doubt that you can find a scientist doing research on radiations effect on the body that dogmatically has said that "non-ionising radiation _can not_ cause cancer". I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically. So if you "doubt" the dogma by saying "non-ionising radiation _can_ cause cancer" every scientist, and me, can go "Fk yeah, thats a working hypothesis, go prove that and bring society forward". But if you would say that "non-ionising radiation _causes_ cancer" you are "stupid" in the way that you don't base that sentence on the current state of science and you are just making things up because you have been "working with biologists for many years" and you are a proud user of Common Sense™.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
> I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically. Feynman did in 1974: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm In light of these things, my working hypothesis is scientists can dogmatically claim things too.

mh-cx 10y ago

I think it would help a lot if they could somehow compile a list of the likelinessnes for getting cancer from a specific sort of radiation. It should also contain the radiation that we are naturally always exposed to. Even if the values were only rough estimates I feel like this would put the real risks more into perspective.

mathgeek 10y ago

> It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility. This is a bit overly general. Many of us who are highly educated and traditionally intelligent battle with imposter syndrome. We're just the ones who you won't find out there acting like we know everything. The idea that this is often the case it likely more a matter of "the squeaky wheel" than scientific fact.

kisstheblade 10y ago

No, the "dogma" is just that scary cellphone RADIATION! is no more harmful than the radiation from lightbulbs, flashlights, candles etc. And probably a couple of orders of magnitudes less so. But hey, radiation, you know, nucular, scary.

Karunamon 10y ago
Snark aside, those lightbulbs, flashlights, and candles are not placed directly against the head and near the reproductive organs (in pockets) for upwards of a thousand hours per year.

snake_plissken 10y ago

Aren't the ultraviolet components of sunlight non-ionizing?

xenadu02 10y ago

I'm not saying you are a quack, but you are crying the rallying cry of quacks everywhere. You also setup a straw man. Any scientist or thoughtful person says "there isn't a known/proven" link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer and so far most evidence seems negative. Of course there is a lot we don't know. That doesn't mean we are incapable of making any statements about anything at all. If cell phones caused a significant risk in the rise of cancer (say 1-10%) we'd have easily seen that by now. We haven't. This study didn't see it either... In fact the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than the ones not exposed! So what we can confidently say is that if cell phone radiation causes cancer, it is an extremely minor contributor. In all likelihood it's contribution is zero, but that is also unproven and should be further studied.

pithic 10y ago

> Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. Such biologists may even believe they know how cells divide, because they've observed stages of cell division and given them fancy Latin names.