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Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

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Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#141

Post by CorvusCrypto »

joshvm wrote: post #17
djmdjm wrote: post #6

Does anyone have a link to the actual paper? As usual, it's impossible to get any useful information from a sensational mainstream science article. The article states that they studied rats and mice at 9 hrs/day exposure (at what RF power?) but aren't reporting results for mice at this stage. Of the rats (how many?), they found the "cancer association appeared in male rats" but no effect size or confidence interval i…

Mother Jones posted this link: http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f... Key points: - The rats were exposed in utero and throughout their lifetimes - They did pilot studies to find what radiation level did not cause a body temperature rise to remove that as a confusing factor - 900MHz CDMA and GSM signals - SAR of 0, 1.5, 3, 6 W/kg. For comparison the FCC limit is 1.2 W/kg in 1 gram of tissue.…

>At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR...

ex-biologist here. Re: the last statement, if radiation is actually affecting tissues (I don't personally really believe the data shows a de-facto effect) then there is a hypothesis among some scientists that study radiation exposure that small chronic doses actually prime your body for dealing with minor changes in genetic structure (if you're into it, the mechanism is hypothesized to be via epigenetic up-regulation of DNA-repair protein coding genes[1]). Since Sprague-Dawley rats are known to develop spontaneous tumors after one year regardless of treatment, this is my hypothesis for explaining the apparent effect of shortened life in the control group.

[1] - just google scholar the keywords "radiation upregulation dna repair". there are tons of papers on this effect.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#142

Post by pithic »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #40

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 und…

> 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.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#143

Post by CorvusCrypto »

mikekij wrote: post #103

Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…

My first thought was "damn, those exposure powers are extremely high".

Think about it... even the 0.5 W/kg treatment is still about 40W for average human adolescent male. That's a LOT of power from just a cell phone

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#144

Post by epistasis »

colordrops wrote: post #131
epistasis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because there already have been many many studies, and regulations require that each new food GMO be studied as well. If you don't mention all those, I'm guess the "tearing limb from limb" is actually annoyance at your ignorance.

You and others proved my point. I wasn't even criticizing GMOs myself, only talking about the dialogue about them, and still downvoted immediately and responded to negatively. There is no other tech on this planet with the same rabidly fervent support as GMOs that disallows even discussion about discussion.

Well I didn't downvote you, but if you refuse to even acknowledge that "torn limb from limb" is just annoyance with your inability to acknowledge the existing information, then perhaps the fault is with you and not others.

One might also say that there is no tech with as rabidly fervent detractors as GMO. I don't really care about the technology much, and for some reason you think I'm a fervent supporter! Ridiculous.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#145

Post by colordrops »

epistasis wrote: post #144
colordrops wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and others proved my point. I wasn't even criticizing GMOs myself, only talking about the dialogue about them, and still downvoted immediately and responded to negatively. There is no other tech on this planet with the same rabidly fervent support as GMOs that disallows even discussion about discussion.

Well I didn't downvote you, but if you refuse to even acknowledge that "torn limb from limb" is just annoyance with your inability to acknowledge the existing information, then perhaps the fault is with you and not others. One might also say that there is no tech with as rabidly fervent detractors as GMO. I don't really care about the technology much, and for some reason you think I'm a fervent supporter! Ridiculous.

I'm not really just speaking about you. It is near impossible to speak about GMOs in anything but glowing terms pretty much anywhere on the internet.

I have no idea what you are speaking about regarding ignoring existing information by the way. I didn't even mention any specifics.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#146

Post by alevskaya »

dragonwriter wrote: post #114
mikekij wrote: post #103

Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…

> But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We certainly seem to understand many of the processes by which cell mutations are produced, but that's not the same as all of them, and, perhaps more importantly, what we do understand about how cancer is produced is that there are lots of factors besides cell mutation involved, and those of them that we do under…

Cancer is complicated, but it emphatically is a _genetic_ disease, with inherited _genetic_ risk factors. Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation via cell stress (e.g. by promoting local inflammation) and cell proliferation, which in turn increases mutation load. There are subtler influences that could weaken the natural immunosurveillance of neopeptides by T-cells, but the importance of such surveillance in prevention is debated and perhaps more relevant in later-stage cancers. We may not fully understand such a complicated disease, but with modern sequencing we have a pretty good lens on the phenomenology of emergence of cancer, and that "subjective plausibility" is a working gut-bayesian framework that doesn't put a strong prior on ambient microwaves as a likely causative factor. Also, the field of RF- and microwave- induced cancer has been a long-running cottage industry producing bad science for many years now: i.e. studies with poor statistical power and poor replicability… so there’s a reason skepticism prevails on this point among biologists. It’s not just dogmatism: if anyone can get a replicable animal model we could dive into it to find new mechanisms… but these results always seem to sit at the edge of detection.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#147

Post by epistasis »

colordrops wrote: post #145
epistasis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I didn't downvote you, but if you refuse to even acknowledge that "torn limb from limb" is just annoyance with your inability to acknowledge the existing information, then perhaps the fault is with you and not others. One might also say that there is no tech with as rabidly fervent detractors as GMO. I don't really care about the technology much, and for some reason you think I'm a fervent supporter! Ridiculous.

I'm not really just speaking about you. It is near impossible to speak about GMOs in anything but glowing terms pretty much anywhere on the internet. I have no idea what you are speaking about regarding ignoring existing information by the way. I didn't even mention any specifics.

Another area besides GMOs where you're going to experience a visceral reaction for offhanded skepticism is evolution. Saying, "I think we need more studies on evolution" has implicit in it the assumption that we don't know much about it. While of course we have a lot left to discover on evolution, making that statement without acknowledging that we do know a lot about evolution and its status is not in doubt, will put you in the nutter category that denies that evolution is a fact.

Similarly, if somebody tells me "I think we need to study climate change more before we can tell if humans are causing it," then I'm going to challenge them to actually tell me what they know, and why they ignore the science.

If you've never encountered somebody that's spreading similar FUD around the science around GMOs, then great. But anybody who's informed about the actual science of GMOs is going to be somewhat put off by uninformed skepticism of the science that is endemic in the general population.

There's a huge body of evidence that GMOs are safe, over decades, that rigorously assessed safety of many types of GMOs (each one of course is unique and presents its own unique potential risks). Despite this huge amount of study, no safety concerns for food have been found. Yet I still get regular emails about, say, the impacts on monarch butterflies, when in fact that early-stage study was followed up upon in a conclusive manner, and the early-stage concerns were not found to be significant.

Any reasonable discussion of GMOs must acknowledge what we already know about GMOs. I don't know who you're talking to where you get shut down form talking about it, but in my experience that feeling comes from those who refuse to lok at the data that's out there that may not support their presuppositions.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#148

Post by the_af »

colordrops wrote: post #145
epistasis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I didn't downvote you, but if you refuse to even acknowledge that "torn limb from limb" is just annoyance with your inability to acknowledge the existing information, then perhaps the fault is with you and not others. One might also say that there is no tech with as rabidly fervent detractors as GMO. I don't really care about the technology much, and for some reason you think I'm a fervent supporter! Ridiculous.

I'm not really just speaking about you. It is near impossible to speak about GMOs in anything but glowing terms pretty much anywhere on the internet. I have no idea what you are speaking about regarding ignoring existing information by the way. I didn't even mention any specifics.

I have the opposite experience: most of the people I speak to are sure GMOS and "transgenics" are obviously bad for you and "unnatural" or "unproven", and that "more studies are needed" (until when? nobody says). The internet is chock full of sites repeating conspiracy theories about GMOs.

If someone is more careful about repeating scary "common sense" knowledge such as this, usually it's because they have a scientific background.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#149

Post by dragonwriter »

alevskaya wrote: post #146
dragonwriter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We certainly seem to understand many of the processes by which cell mutations are produced, but that's not the same as all of them, and, perhaps more importantly, what we do understand about how cancer is produced is that there are lots of factors besides cell mutation involved, and those of them that we do under…

Cancer is complicated, but it emphatically is a _genetic_ disease, with inherited _genetic_ risk factors. Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation via cell stress (e.g. by promoting local inflammation) and cell proliferation, which in turn increases mutation load. There are subtler influences that could weaken the natural immunosurveillance of neopeptides by T-cell…

> Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation

That may be typical, in that there are definitely lots of environmental influences that work that way, but its been established for at least on the order of a couple of decades that there are also influences that impact the emergence and development of cancer when potentially cancer-causing mutations exist, and that genetics while important to cancer, aren't the whole story and mechanism. Attributes of the extracellular matrix, which can definitely be affected by physical and chemical effects that are not mutagenic, are one of the established influences.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#150

Post by psychometry »

mikekij wrote: post #103

Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…

Biostats grad student here.

"But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than..."

It was a randomized block experiment. You don't need to assume that there were no unmeasured confounders in order to make causal inferences. That assumption is only needed in cross-sectional and cohort studies.

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