west@sdcsla.UUCP (07/27/83)
The following article is copied without permission from the August
1983 issue of "The Institute", a newspaper for members published monthly
by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., more commonly
known as the IEEE. Nothing in that issue says anything about any policy
regarding copying their articles (which are copyrighted by the IEEE), so I
am assuming they have no restrictions regarding transmission for non-commercial
use. [If anyone out there knows differently, let me know -- by the way, I
am a {student} member.]
In some places, I have followed numbers given in the article with
their English equivalent in braces (e.g., "... 20 {twenty} ...") to reduce
chances of errors.
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>From "The Institute", Volume 7, Number 8, August 1983 -- copyright IEEE, Inc.
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EXPERIMENTS SHOW MICROWAVES
CAN DAMAGE CHROMOSOMES
Boulder, Colo. -- Microwave radiation at power levels well below those
permitted by current American safety standards can produce chromosomal
damage in the sperm cells of mice, according to recent experiments performed
at the U.S. Public Health Service's National Center for Devices and
Radiological Health in Rockville, Md. A different but related set of
experiments showed that radiation at power levels only 2.5 times higher
than current standards could more than quadruple spontaneous abortion
rates in exposed mice.
These results were presented by Przemyslaw Czerski, a visiting
scientist from Poland, at the annual Bioelectromagnetics Society
Conference held here June 13-17. The Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS)
is a multidisciplinary international organization devoted to the study
of the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. Dr. Czerski's
results, as well as other similar results reported at the conference,
if confirmed by future research, may demonstrate the existence of a new
area of potential hazard from nonionizing radiation. While in the
past there has been growing evidence of various neurological and
hormonal effects of electromagnetic fields, there has until recently
been relatively little solid proof of genetic damage.
New findings on the possible hazards of strong 60-hertz
power-line fields were also reported at the BEMS meeting. Experiments
showed that fields at strengths comparable to those found near
high-voltage power-lines have induced brain abnormalities in rabbits
exposed prior to and immediately after birth and have caused a doubling
of abnormal fetuses in miniature swine after many months of continuous
exposure.
In the experiments performed by Dr. Czerski and his colleagues,
male mice were exposed for a half hour a day, six days a week, to 0.915-
and 9.4-gigahertz radiation. At power levels as low as 0.05 milliwatts
per gram of absorbed radiation -- eight times less than the limits
recommended by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) --
7 {seven} percent of the mouse sperm cells were found to have chromosomal
defects, which is nearly 100 {one hundred} times the rate in normal mice.
In experiments run at a higher power level of 1mW/g {one milliwatt per
gram}, above the ANSI standard of 0.4mW/g, spontaneous abortions of mice
impregnated by exposed males rose to 20 {twenty} percent from a normal
level of 5 {five} percent.
Since the microwave photons have far too little energy to directly
affect chromosomes by single-photon processes the way ionizing radiation
can, many scientists have theorized that some sort of resonant absorption
is taking place. Mays Swicord, also of the National Center for Devices
and Radiological Health, presented findings that purified bacterial DNA
did indeed absorb microwave radiations between 8 {eight} and 12 {twelve}
GHz {GigaHertz} highly effectively and that the absorption coefficients
depended on the length of the DNA molecules. For some molecular lengths,
absorption was as much as 400 times that of water.
Among the results indicating possible hazards of power-line fields,
perhaps the most dramatic were those presented by Richard Phillips of
Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, Wash. Dr. Phillips
reported on a recently completed four-year-long experiment in which
Hanford miniature swine were bred in 60-Hz fields of 30 {thirty} kilovolts
per meter. The field strength was selected to produce currents in the
pigs like those produced in humans by 10-kv/m {ten kilovolts per meter}
fields, comparable to those directly beneath high-voltage (for example,
765-kv {seven hundred and sixty-five kv} transmission lines. After
18 {eighteen} months of exposure, swine were found to have twice as high
a rate of abnormalities in their offspring as did the controls.
In another experiment, Hans-Arne Hansson of the Institute of
Neurobiology, Goteborg, Sweden, exposed rabbits to 14-kv/m, 50-Hz
{fourteen kv/m, fifty Hz} fields before birth and for a month after
birth. Microscopic examination of the exposed rabbits' brains revealed
many changes in the structure of their brain cells and in their organization
within the brain tissue, as compared with nonexposed control rabbits.
While these new findings on interaction of electromagnetic fields
with life processes will have to be more fully explored in future experiments,
many participants at the BEMS conference thought that the steady accumulation
of evidence will force tougher safety standards for both radio-frequency
and power-line frequency fields. At the same time, the ability of weak
electric fields to affect the reproduction and development of organisms
may be giving scientists a clue to the role played by such fields in
fundamental biological processes and providing a powerful tool to study
these processes. -- Eric Lerner
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>From "The Institute", Volume 7, Number 8, August 1983 -- copyright IEEE, Inc.
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(... kinda makes you shy away from that ol' microwave, doesn't it?)
-- Larry West, UC San Diego
-- sdcsvax!sdcsla!west