11 ms·

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves. Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story. I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article. At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.

userbinator 7y ago
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
  That's not true, cancer rates have risen also in children and young adults.
  - taneq 7y ago
    A significant chunk of the rise in life expectancy is driven by a fall in infant mortality, is it not?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
      Well, if you could point me to a good scientific study that makes a link between higher life expectancy and cancer, I'd be inclined to believe it. Until then, I think the cancer incidence rise is shocking, and can't be explained by rise in life expectancy alone.
      - pas 7y ago
        https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cancer-rising https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cance... "In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
      - dekhn 7y ago
        Before we go any further, are you a scientist or a doctor? You're arguing on a thread where there are a bunch of scientists who have fairly deep knowledge in this area (it's still an area that a lot of people who come from external areas, like physics, struggle with frequently). Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).
      - Guph 7y ago
        cancer incidence rising strongly correlates with our ability to detect as well as the push to look for it. I also believe many of the cancers we successfully treat would be non issues if left alone. (all the young women who found lumps and become breast cancer survivors)
      - ByzantineO6 7y ago
        you're gonna die, bucko! of A,B,..Z., sooner or later. Make it past Y,and Z's gonna get ya. Change my mind!
- andrepd 7y ago
  Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).
  - not_a_moth 7y ago
    I would add sleep deprivation to your list. We live in an increasingly sleepless society and lack of sleep is effectively a carcinogen.
    - nl 7y ago
      I checked this for you, and what appears to be the best meta study I could find shows that the only correlation found was that long sleep duration increases the risk of one type of cancer: The present meta-analysis suggested that neither short nor long sleep duration was significantly associated with risk of cancer, although long sleep duration increased risk of with colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3762769/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3762769/
      - not_a_moth 7y ago
        "After just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep," Walker tells The Guardian, "your natural killer cells—the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day—drop by 70%." Sleep deprivation has such serious outcomes that "the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen." ^Matthew Walker, presumably the 70% drop is from work at his Berkeley lab
  - pas 7y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cancer-rising https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cance... "In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
- kristjankalm 7y ago
  from where does this increase in cancer probability statistic come from? anyone have a link to a paper? tried googling but found nothing reliable sadly
  - pas 7y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cancer-rising https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cance... "In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Don’t double post. But also, cancer death can go down while cancer diagnosis can go up.
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        A big confounder in studies based on diagnosis numbers is that you can confuse better diagnosis with higher incidence, and earlier diagnosis with longer survival. No room for confusion with Death though, it's very cut and dried. Suppose that today the average person tells their doctor about a symptom of Example Cancer (which is incurable) six months before it kills them. 1 million people per year in Standard Country die of Example Cancer, with an average of six months between diagnosis and death. Now, let's imagine I invent a machine, it can scan seemingly healthy people and tell them if they've got Example Cancer on average 12 months earlier. Nothing changed in terms of whether people get Example Cancer, it's still incurable, but now we've improved time between Diagnosis and Death by 200% but even scarier the incidence of Example Cancer, the number of people who know they have it, has also increased by 200%. It's an epidemic! That machine is pretty unrealistic. A more realistic machine also gives false positives for Example Cancer. Now the number of people living with Example Cancer has increased by 500% but good news, most of those people don't die of it, because they had what medics would call "Sub-clinical incidence" meaning, sure, you had the disease but it didn't actually affect your life so who cares?
- glastra 7y ago
  Sugar and seed oils.
nabla9 7y ago
> more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" They are mostly experts in other fields.
refurb 7y ago
I think this take is a little unfair. Sure, calling scientists “wackos” with reviewing the publications is extreme, we also know there is a massive body of scientific evidence looking at the link between RF waves and cancer that has pretty much found zilch at this point.
- BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
  If you'd read some of the research linked in the article, you'd perhaps found this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25749340 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25749340 which clearly shows a link. Here's a longer list for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383574218300991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421... though a lot of those studies are about DNA damage and not cancer per se. Though DNA damage is known to increase cancer risk. So no, not zilch, not at all.
  - Junk_Collector 7y ago
    A finding from your link. "the biological activity of any specific type of EMF is inversely proportional to its frequency and proportional to its intensity"
  - gjulianm 7y ago
    > clearly shows a link Clearly? The actual article (here's a full text: http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf) doesn't seem to show that clear link. First, there's no dose-response effect, mice with higher doses didn't present higher rates of cancer (sometimes lower). Also, Table 1 with the actual findings is just crazy. For example, the group with no radiation has the second-highest incidence of lung carcinoma. The rate of lymphoma is the same at 0W/kg and 2W/kg, but doubles at 0.4W/kg. I'm not going to say that the article is trash because it doesn't seem to be, but it is definitely not a clear link, there is a lot unanswered there. There is no mechanism proposed, there are a lot of carcinomas studied (high probability of finding something with a correlation) and there is no dose-response effect.
notacoward 7y ago
I've coined the term "orchard picking" for this. If the subject is climate or vaccines, most people will yell "learn the facts" and "follow the science" and generally act as though dissenters deserve every ounce of contempt we can pour on them. On those topics I generally agree, except maybe for that last part. But somehow on other topics - e.g. most discussions of programmer productivity or effects of technology - it's all "meh, here's my anecdote instead" and other forms of pseudo-skepticism. There I tend to break from the crowd. I believe science is a mode of thought, not just another rhetorical club to pick up when it's convenient and set down again when it's not.
- rimliu 7y ago
  There is no "meh", just no link found between mobile phones and cancer.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Perhaps because everyone here knows there's very little actual, proper science on programmer productivity, and even less of that is applicable in workplace environment. There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.
Numberwang 7y ago
"chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women" You don't think living longer has anything to do with this?
xwdv 7y ago
People don’t click the link because they already know better. We are bathed in radiation everyday. So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation. Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway. So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.
- arpa 7y ago
  You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs). Just so you know. Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well! Better live underground, i guess. Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G! Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station! So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    Other points: while excessive radiation is bad, below a certain point it is not harmful, and in fact is beneficial. There's some good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation (or rather, you can't predict the effect in a stochastic way as a function of dose) and also that within certain regimes, radiation is beneficial (mutations leading to evolution).
javagram 7y ago
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really. Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years. Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment. I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Yeah I’m gonna need some data to believe that one. 90% obese / overweight? I’m calling bullshit.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    Yes, it's more like 35-40%.
    - effie 7y ago
      In 2014, 73% of men, 67% of women. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity#prevalence https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
      - 7y ago
abainbridge 7y ago
The article says, "more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." The link to the 500 articles is https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl3Eur3/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl.... I checked the "conclusions" of the first two: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736 Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated. Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users. They both read as, "we found no significant effect".
- klmr 7y ago
  Careful, you’re misinterpreting the document. The two studies you’ve picked are listed as “neither evidence of an effect or a null finding”, they are not included in the “more than 500 studies” finding harmful effects. Those studies are prefixed by “P” in the document and, although I haven’t counted, a rough estimate based on the number of pages makes it plausible that there are > 500. That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
  - abainbridge 7y ago
    Good point. Thanks for the patient explanation. To partly redeem myself, I followed the links to the first two articles prefixed by "P". They were https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 The first didn't have a conclusion and the results were just the measured RF power in an apartment. The conclusion of the second is, "A total of 900-MHz EMF applied in middle and late adolescence may cause changes in the morphology and biochemistry of the rat ovarium.", which makes no sense. "A total of 900-MHz EMF" is gibberish. The complete text is not freely available.
bart_spoon 7y ago
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.
gjulianm 7y ago
So I started checking the articles in the link, seeing the ones that reported positive effects: - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 The article only measures exposition, no conclusion on effects other than a literature review. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 One author, talks about wildlife orientation. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 Decreased nasal mucose in rats. No mention of whether thermal effects were at use here. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not". - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 This one is about nicotine sulfate + RF exposition in frog embryos, and doesn't find effects of RF alone. That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions. > And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really. Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.
aaron695 7y ago
I did click The list of peer reviewed articles is from Powerwatch - Who we know all about - https://www.badscience.net/2007/05/so-simple-a-child-could-spot-it/ https://www.badscience.net/2007/05/so-simple-a-child-could-s... The petition of 240 'scientists' on (emfscientist.org) ask for 6. medical professionals be educated about the biological effects of electromagnetic energy and be provided training on treatment of patients with electromagnetic sensitivity; This is coo coo science that NO reputable person would put their name behind. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is trivial to check, for low cost. Yet no one in the world has proven it exists. Yes, the 240 scientist's are "bullshit". I can't believe Scientific American allowed this blog article, or perhaps I can but are more saddened by it.
eytgsf5et 7y ago
I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians). 5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.
- dekhn 7y ago
  Then there are people like me, who are in love with technology, but work with it and science so closely we have a very good understanding of when and how technology can have risks, and when it can have benefits. And when it's impossible to predict.
- manifestsilence 7y ago
  As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism. You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were. It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
- tezzer 7y ago
  I work around RF sources professionally. I'm intensely interested in any biological effect of the radiation I work around. I have access to journals through work and my old university, and I read primary sources with great interest (and some knowledge, being an electrical engineer). I have yet to find any credible link between gigahertz RF and health problems (except the neck problems that come from staring at a phone). I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.
dekhn 7y ago
the best explanation for why more people get cancer is fewer people are dying of other diseases. Also, more people are surviving cancer. Note: I'm a scientist, and one of the reasons I'm not clicking on links in the article is that I've already done my own looking into IARC and I've concluded they are non-scientific. Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact. Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.
smohare 7y ago
To be fair, there’s also quite a few published studies showing a positive effect for various pseudoscientific medical practices. Those studies just tend to be very poorly designed, executed, controlled, and don’t represent the actual literature trend. You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.
christophilus 7y ago
Agreed. > The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals. That’s a pretty strong group.
turk73 7y ago
Quit drinking and quit smoking.
BryanBeshore 7y ago
The pioneers behind reverse transcriptase were ridiculed by their peers for years. As DNA could only travel in one direction. Francis Crick even called the scientist a wacko. But in the end, the 'wacko' was proven correct and won the Nobel Prize for being so. His name is Howard Temin. Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-club http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-...
ozymandias12 7y ago
The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this: >"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents." https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologist-joel-moskowitz-cell-phone-wi-fi-truther-10928 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis... To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all. Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
blue_devil 7y ago
>>Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".
- boringg 7y ago
  Is it "paucity of research" or "a paucity of research"? Agreed though.
ausjke 7y ago
I actually read the article as I'm unsure this is about safe-for-human-body or safe-for-network-security. What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while. 5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest. I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. I mean, what else is there left to kill us?
Guph 7y ago
Click links in the article? I feel accomplished with the fact I read the article.... I think the push to make these scientist seam like wackos, is all the money loss for the new tech(and even existing tech) Oh, and more important than the studies is who is doing them and who is funding them.
thrower123 7y ago
People live too long, and don't die of stuff like pneumonia or tuberculosis or syphilis or yellow fever much anymore. Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
We have already solved all the worlds problems, unified quantum mechanics with classical physics, cured cancer and figured out how to factor primes. None of these works will ever see the light of day or be taken seriously because of the sources. That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.
lnanek2 7y ago
Doesn't help that the article is written in a kind of exaggerated, fear mongering way. E.g.: " 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) " MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...
- Causality1 7y ago
  Yeah. If an average person thinks MIMO stands for Massive Inputs and Outputs that's not a bad mistake. If someone purporting to speak with authority on the subject of RF radiation thinks that, it's grounds to suspect them of being a blithering fool.
iskander 7y ago
The average lifetime risk of getting cancer in the US has actually fallen substantially due to a decrease in smoking. Diagnosis has simultaneously increased, especially in cancers where the rationale for treatment is low (e.g. prostate cancer in most men). (work in cancer research)
ccffpphh 7y ago
I promise I'm not being snarky but would higher cancer rates be linked to the fact that we rarely die from anything else nowadays, barring accidents?
Aperocky 7y ago
Don't fight a knee jerk reaction with one from your own. > Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why 'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.
codr7 7y ago
The dissonance runs high here on the subject of 5G, the only thing I can think of that comes close is vaccinations. Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to. Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term. Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.
shpongled 7y ago
As a biochemist, I just want to chime in that I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already - we have to die of something, and cancer is something that is not "curable" in the sense of other disorders. After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)
- dekhn 7y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have worked with world-class scientists where the author only had a gmail address (untill we gave them an appointment at Berkeley).
  - shpongled 7y ago
    Of course, a gmail address in and of itself is not an indicator of quality, however on a single author paper it certainly makes me wary. Just out of curiosity, what field was that in? I could certainly see some scientific disciplines having unaffiliated world-class scientists, but others it would be virtually impossible to do high quality research outside of a lab
    - dekhn 7y ago
      bioinformatics/computational biology. Specifically, multiple sequence alignment and HMMs for protein recognition. The author was previously a physicist (PhD) who left physics due to the low number of jobs in the 70s-80s, founded a database company, sold it to Intel, and then visited Berkeley and saw a cool talk and volunteered. There were already a few codes in the area and plenty of papers, and he was mathematically inclined, so it didn't take long for him to become an expert. Once he was an expert, he pointed out major problems in existing codes (both functional and performance). This is an area where you're working with fairly straightforward data and math (linear strings from a chosen alphabet, probabilistic model is well-established). You don't need to understand the underlying biology in detail to contribute.
sgt101 7y ago
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer. Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.
morpheuskafka 7y ago
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?
mikorym 7y ago
I think the title of the link is phrased badly. "We have no reason to believe 5G is safe" makes me want to comment that "we have no reason to believe 5G is unsafe" without even reading it. Maybe the title should be more specific. For example: pointing out that millimeter waves are not present in <=4G.
- wtetzner 7y ago
  To be fair, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start with the assumption that something is unsafe and work to prove that it is safe. Seems safer ;) If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    If we were to do this, it would cause large numbers of techologies to never ever reach the public because people couldn't do the work to "prove" that something is safe. I would only recommend this policy towards things that we could reasonably expect to have catastrophic outcomes.
    - wtetzner 7y ago
      Like I said, the reason it seems reasonable in this case is because 5G really just doesn't seem like it's super important. The telcos just need a new thing to market, and it seems totally reasonable for us to expect them to ensure it's safe, especially give the ubiquity of cell phones and the fact that most people will probably eventually be upgraded to 5G without even needing to opt in.
vharuck 7y ago
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html Also, the lifetime risk of incidence is about 40% for both men and women: https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?sectionSEL=2&pageSEL=sect_02_table.13 https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section... https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?sectionSEL=2&pageSEL=sect_02_table.14 https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
fortran77 7y ago
Frankly, that's SOP on Hacker News. Half the people are commenting on something they haven't read, and the other half are complaining that news from reputable sources isn't free and/or complain that they can't read it with NoScript in Lynx on Arch Linux.
LeftHandPath 7y ago
Funny things start to happy on online discussion boards when billions of dollars are at stake. Comments deserve as much skepticism as the headline.

userbinator 7y ago

At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
That's not true, cancer rates have risen also in children and young adults.
- taneq 7y ago
  A significant chunk of the rise in life expectancy is driven by a fall in infant mortality, is it not?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
    Well, if you could point me to a good scientific study that makes a link between higher life expectancy and cancer, I'd be inclined to believe it. Until then, I think the cancer incidence rise is shocking, and can't be explained by rise in life expectancy alone.
    - pas 7y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cancer-rising https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cance... "In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
    - dekhn 7y ago
      Before we go any further, are you a scientist or a doctor? You're arguing on a thread where there are a bunch of scientists who have fairly deep knowledge in this area (it's still an area that a lot of people who come from external areas, like physics, struggle with frequently). Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).
    - Guph 7y ago
      cancer incidence rising strongly correlates with our ability to detect as well as the push to look for it. I also believe many of the cancers we successfully treat would be non issues if left alone. (all the young women who found lumps and become breast cancer survivors)
    - ByzantineO6 7y ago
      you're gonna die, bucko! of A,B,..Z., sooner or later. Make it past Y,and Z's gonna get ya. Change my mind!
andrepd 7y ago
Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).
- not_a_moth 7y ago
  I would add sleep deprivation to your list. We live in an increasingly sleepless society and lack of sleep is effectively a carcinogen.
  - nl 7y ago
    I checked this for you, and what appears to be the best meta study I could find shows that the only correlation found was that long sleep duration increases the risk of one type of cancer: The present meta-analysis suggested that neither short nor long sleep duration was significantly associated with risk of cancer, although long sleep duration increased risk of with colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3762769/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3762769/
    - not_a_moth 7y ago
      "After just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep," Walker tells The Guardian, "your natural killer cells—the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day—drop by 70%." Sleep deprivation has such serious outcomes that "the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen." ^Matthew Walker, presumably the 70% drop is from work at his Berkeley lab
- pas 7y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cancer-rising https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cance... "In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
kristjankalm 7y ago
from where does this increase in cancer probability statistic come from? anyone have a link to a paper? tried googling but found nothing reliable sadly
- pas 7y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cancer-rising https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#are-death-rates-from-cance... "In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Don’t double post. But also, cancer death can go down while cancer diagnosis can go up.
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      A big confounder in studies based on diagnosis numbers is that you can confuse better diagnosis with higher incidence, and earlier diagnosis with longer survival. No room for confusion with Death though, it's very cut and dried. Suppose that today the average person tells their doctor about a symptom of Example Cancer (which is incurable) six months before it kills them. 1 million people per year in Standard Country die of Example Cancer, with an average of six months between diagnosis and death. Now, let's imagine I invent a machine, it can scan seemingly healthy people and tell them if they've got Example Cancer on average 12 months earlier. Nothing changed in terms of whether people get Example Cancer, it's still incurable, but now we've improved time between Diagnosis and Death by 200% but even scarier the incidence of Example Cancer, the number of people who know they have it, has also increased by 200%. It's an epidemic! That machine is pretty unrealistic. A more realistic machine also gives false positives for Example Cancer. Now the number of people living with Example Cancer has increased by 500% but good news, most of those people don't die of it, because they had what medics would call "Sub-clinical incidence" meaning, sure, you had the disease but it didn't actually affect your life so who cares?
glastra 7y ago
Sugar and seed oils.

nabla9 7y ago

> more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" They are mostly experts in other fields.

refurb 7y ago

I think this take is a little unfair. Sure, calling scientists “wackos” with reviewing the publications is extreme, we also know there is a massive body of scientific evidence looking at the link between RF waves and cancer that has pretty much found zilch at this point.

BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
If you'd read some of the research linked in the article, you'd perhaps found this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25749340 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25749340 which clearly shows a link. Here's a longer list for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383574218300991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421... though a lot of those studies are about DNA damage and not cancer per se. Though DNA damage is known to increase cancer risk. So no, not zilch, not at all.
- Junk_Collector 7y ago
  A finding from your link. "the biological activity of any specific type of EMF is inversely proportional to its frequency and proportional to its intensity"
- gjulianm 7y ago
  > clearly shows a link Clearly? The actual article (here's a full text: http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf) doesn't seem to show that clear link. First, there's no dose-response effect, mice with higher doses didn't present higher rates of cancer (sometimes lower). Also, Table 1 with the actual findings is just crazy. For example, the group with no radiation has the second-highest incidence of lung carcinoma. The rate of lymphoma is the same at 0W/kg and 2W/kg, but doubles at 0.4W/kg. I'm not going to say that the article is trash because it doesn't seem to be, but it is definitely not a clear link, there is a lot unanswered there. There is no mechanism proposed, there are a lot of carcinomas studied (high probability of finding something with a correlation) and there is no dose-response effect.

notacoward 7y ago

I've coined the term "orchard picking" for this. If the subject is climate or vaccines, most people will yell "learn the facts" and "follow the science" and generally act as though dissenters deserve every ounce of contempt we can pour on them. On those topics I generally agree, except maybe for that last part. But somehow on other topics - e.g. most discussions of programmer productivity or effects of technology - it's all "meh, here's my anecdote instead" and other forms of pseudo-skepticism. There I tend to break from the crowd. I believe science is a mode of thought, not just another rhetorical club to pick up when it's convenient and set down again when it's not.

rimliu 7y ago
There is no "meh", just no link found between mobile phones and cancer.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Perhaps because everyone here knows there's very little actual, proper science on programmer productivity, and even less of that is applicable in workplace environment. There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.

Numberwang 7y ago

"chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women" You don't think living longer has anything to do with this?

xwdv 7y ago

People don’t click the link because they already know better. We are bathed in radiation everyday. So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation. Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway. So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.

arpa 7y ago
You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs). Just so you know. Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well! Better live underground, i guess. Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G! Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station! So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
- dekhn 7y ago
  Other points: while excessive radiation is bad, below a certain point it is not harmful, and in fact is beneficial. There's some good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation (or rather, you can't predict the effect in a stochastic way as a function of dose) and also that within certain regimes, radiation is beneficial (mutations leading to evolution).

javagram 7y ago

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really. Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years. Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment. I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
> Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Yeah I’m gonna need some data to believe that one. 90% obese / overweight? I’m calling bullshit.
- dekhn 7y ago
  Yes, it's more like 35-40%.
  - effie 7y ago
    In 2014, 73% of men, 67% of women. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity#prevalence https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
    - 7y ago

abainbridge 7y ago

The article says, "more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." The link to the 500 articles is https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl3Eur3/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl.... I checked the "conclusions" of the first two: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736 Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated. Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users. They both read as, "we found no significant effect".

klmr 7y ago
Careful, you’re misinterpreting the document. The two studies you’ve picked are listed as “neither evidence of an effect or a null finding”, they are not included in the “more than 500 studies” finding harmful effects. Those studies are prefixed by “P” in the document and, although I haven’t counted, a rough estimate based on the number of pages makes it plausible that there are > 500. That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
- abainbridge 7y ago
  Good point. Thanks for the patient explanation. To partly redeem myself, I followed the links to the first two articles prefixed by "P". They were https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 The first didn't have a conclusion and the results were just the measured RF power in an apartment. The conclusion of the second is, "A total of 900-MHz EMF applied in middle and late adolescence may cause changes in the morphology and biochemistry of the rat ovarium.", which makes no sense. "A total of 900-MHz EMF" is gibberish. The complete text is not freely available.

bart_spoon 7y ago

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.

gjulianm 7y ago

So I started checking the articles in the link, seeing the ones that reported positive effects: - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 The article only measures exposition, no conclusion on effects other than a literature review. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 One author, talks about wildlife orientation. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 Decreased nasal mucose in rats. No mention of whether thermal effects were at use here. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not". - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 This one is about nicotine sulfate + RF exposition in frog embryos, and doesn't find effects of RF alone. That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions. > And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really. Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.

aaron695 7y ago

I did click The list of peer reviewed articles is from Powerwatch - Who we know all about - https://www.badscience.net/2007/05/so-simple-a-child-could-spot-it/ https://www.badscience.net/2007/05/so-simple-a-child-could-s... The petition of 240 'scientists' on (emfscientist.org) ask for 6. medical professionals be educated about the biological effects of electromagnetic energy and be provided training on treatment of patients with electromagnetic sensitivity; This is coo coo science that NO reputable person would put their name behind. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is trivial to check, for low cost. Yet no one in the world has proven it exists. Yes, the 240 scientist's are "bullshit". I can't believe Scientific American allowed this blog article, or perhaps I can but are more saddened by it.

eytgsf5et 7y ago

I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians). 5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.

dekhn 7y ago
Then there are people like me, who are in love with technology, but work with it and science so closely we have a very good understanding of when and how technology can have risks, and when it can have benefits. And when it's impossible to predict.
manifestsilence 7y ago
As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism. You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were. It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
tezzer 7y ago
I work around RF sources professionally. I'm intensely interested in any biological effect of the radiation I work around. I have access to journals through work and my old university, and I read primary sources with great interest (and some knowledge, being an electrical engineer). I have yet to find any credible link between gigahertz RF and health problems (except the neck problems that come from staring at a phone). I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.

dekhn 7y ago

the best explanation for why more people get cancer is fewer people are dying of other diseases. Also, more people are surviving cancer. Note: I'm a scientist, and one of the reasons I'm not clicking on links in the article is that I've already done my own looking into IARC and I've concluded they are non-scientific. Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact. Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.

smohare 7y ago

To be fair, there’s also quite a few published studies showing a positive effect for various pseudoscientific medical practices. Those studies just tend to be very poorly designed, executed, controlled, and don’t represent the actual literature trend. You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.

christophilus 7y ago

Agreed. > The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals. That’s a pretty strong group.

turk73 7y ago

Quit drinking and quit smoking.

BryanBeshore 7y ago

The pioneers behind reverse transcriptase were ridiculed by their peers for years. As DNA could only travel in one direction. Francis Crick even called the scientist a wacko. But in the end, the 'wacko' was proven correct and won the Nobel Prize for being so. His name is Howard Temin. Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-club http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-...

ozymandias12 7y ago

The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this: >"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents." https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologist-joel-moskowitz-cell-phone-wi-fi-truther-10928 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis... To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all. Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.

blue_devil 7y ago

>>Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".

boringg 7y ago
Is it "paucity of research" or "a paucity of research"? Agreed though.

ausjke 7y ago

I actually read the article as I'm unsure this is about safe-for-human-body or safe-for-network-security. What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while. 5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest. I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

Guph 7y ago

Click links in the article? I feel accomplished with the fact I read the article.... I think the push to make these scientist seam like wackos, is all the money loss for the new tech(and even existing tech) Oh, and more important than the studies is who is doing them and who is funding them.

thrower123 7y ago

People live too long, and don't die of stuff like pneumonia or tuberculosis or syphilis or yellow fever much anymore. Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

We have already solved all the worlds problems, unified quantum mechanics with classical physics, cured cancer and figured out how to factor primes. None of these works will ever see the light of day or be taken seriously because of the sources. That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.

lnanek2 7y ago

Doesn't help that the article is written in a kind of exaggerated, fear mongering way. E.g.: " 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) " MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...

Causality1 7y ago
Yeah. If an average person thinks MIMO stands for Massive Inputs and Outputs that's not a bad mistake. If someone purporting to speak with authority on the subject of RF radiation thinks that, it's grounds to suspect them of being a blithering fool.

iskander 7y ago

The average lifetime risk of getting cancer in the US has actually fallen substantially due to a decrease in smoking. Diagnosis has simultaneously increased, especially in cancers where the rationale for treatment is low (e.g. prostate cancer in most men). (work in cancer research)

ccffpphh 7y ago

I promise I'm not being snarky but would higher cancer rates be linked to the fact that we rarely die from anything else nowadays, barring accidents?

Aperocky 7y ago

Don't fight a knee jerk reaction with one from your own. > Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why 'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.

codr7 7y ago

The dissonance runs high here on the subject of 5G, the only thing I can think of that comes close is vaccinations. Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to. Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term. Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.

shpongled 7y ago

As a biochemist, I just want to chime in that I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already - we have to die of something, and cancer is something that is not "curable" in the sense of other disorders. After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)

dekhn 7y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have worked with world-class scientists where the author only had a gmail address (untill we gave them an appointment at Berkeley).
- shpongled 7y ago
  Of course, a gmail address in and of itself is not an indicator of quality, however on a single author paper it certainly makes me wary. Just out of curiosity, what field was that in? I could certainly see some scientific disciplines having unaffiliated world-class scientists, but others it would be virtually impossible to do high quality research outside of a lab
  - dekhn 7y ago
    bioinformatics/computational biology. Specifically, multiple sequence alignment and HMMs for protein recognition. The author was previously a physicist (PhD) who left physics due to the low number of jobs in the 70s-80s, founded a database company, sold it to Intel, and then visited Berkeley and saw a cool talk and volunteered. There were already a few codes in the area and plenty of papers, and he was mathematically inclined, so it didn't take long for him to become an expert. Once he was an expert, he pointed out major problems in existing codes (both functional and performance). This is an area where you're working with fairly straightforward data and math (linear strings from a chosen alphabet, probabilistic model is well-established). You don't need to understand the underlying biology in detail to contribute.

sgt101 7y ago

>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer. Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.

morpheuskafka 7y ago

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?

mikorym 7y ago

I think the title of the link is phrased badly. "We have no reason to believe 5G is safe" makes me want to comment that "we have no reason to believe 5G is unsafe" without even reading it. Maybe the title should be more specific. For example: pointing out that millimeter waves are not present in <=4G.

wtetzner 7y ago
To be fair, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start with the assumption that something is unsafe and work to prove that it is safe. Seems safer ;) If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
- dekhn 7y ago
  If we were to do this, it would cause large numbers of techologies to never ever reach the public because people couldn't do the work to "prove" that something is safe. I would only recommend this policy towards things that we could reasonably expect to have catastrophic outcomes.
  - wtetzner 7y ago
    Like I said, the reason it seems reasonable in this case is because 5G really just doesn't seem like it's super important. The telcos just need a new thing to market, and it seems totally reasonable for us to expect them to ensure it's safe, especially give the ubiquity of cell phones and the fact that most people will probably eventually be upgraded to 5G without even needing to opt in.

vharuck 7y ago

>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html Also, the lifetime risk of incidence is about 40% for both men and women: https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?sectionSEL=2&pageSEL=sect_02_table.13 https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section... https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?sectionSEL=2&pageSEL=sect_02_table.14 https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...

fortran77 7y ago

Frankly, that's SOP on Hacker News. Half the people are commenting on something they haven't read, and the other half are complaining that news from reputable sources isn't free and/or complain that they can't read it with NoScript in Lynx on Arch Linux.

LeftHandPath 7y ago

Funny things start to happy on online discussion boards when billions of dollars are at stake. Comments deserve as much skepticism as the headline.