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Cell Phone Safety and Industry-Part 2 (Jerry Phillips)
Theme:
Air Date: 8/13/06
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Description: Jerry Phillips says that Motorola tried to block him from publishing accurate information on cell phone radiation.
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| Cell Phone Safety and Industry Part 1 | A look at why British safety agencies discourage cell phone use among young children and the FDA doesn't. |
| Cell Phone Safety and Industry-Part 3 (Phillips) | Part 2--Jerry Phillips concludes his account of how he says that Motorola worked to block accurate information about cell phone radiation. |
| Cell Phone Safety and Industry-Part 4 Blake Levitt | Interview with Blake Levitt--journalist and cellphone industry watchdog. |
During the last century, telephones have changed from a novelty to a basic part of modern life.
From telephones that stay in one location, we?ve evolved to cell phones that connect people wherever they may be. Cell phones were a baby industry in 1998, with only few million U-S customers. Sometime this summer, the world?s two billionth customer signed up for a cell phone. Plus, there?s a move in the U-S to market cell phones aggressively to young kids.
Cell phones are great in many ways, but are they really safe enough for long-term, extended use, including by young children? In the U-S, most of the health research in this area is funded by the cell phone industry, and their bottom lines may benefit when research shows ?No adverse health effects.? This issue goes beyond cell phones. Most drug research now is funded by drug manufacturers. These days, even our watchdog agency, the FDA is more industry funded. A recent survey of FDA scientists indicates many have been pressured by industry to say that some drugs, or products, are safer than they truly may be.
In the U-S, allocating public funds for health research used to be a greater priority. What?s the consequence of ?saving money? by reducing public funding? For an inside look, today we?ll talk with Jerry Phillips. Jerry?s a scientist who says that as a funding source, the cell-phone manufacturer, Motorola, tried to block his lab from publishing accurate information about cell phone radiation. We?ll begin the interview with Jerry in a minute and a half. First, here?s a statement about the interview, provided by Motorola?s director of Global Issues Management, Norm Sandler. The Motorola statement is read by KGNU?s Bob Freeman.
?For more than 30 years, Motorola has been a global leader in supporting research on the possible health effects of radio waves. Motorola has commissioned research on its own and in conjunction with industry and government organizations. We have emphasized the need for this research to be peer-reviewed and published in publicly available scientific journals.
?Throughout, this process has respected the principle of independent research. When Dr. Phillips presented the findings of his DNA study to Motorola, the data were inconsistent. Motorola asked Dr. Phillips to conduct additional work to clarify the findings. Dr. Phillips declined Motorola's invitation to continue his research with additional funding. He informed Motorola that he would proceed to seek publication of his results. Dr. Phillips was free to do so under Motorola's policy of respecting the independence of Motorola-sponsored researchers and laboratories. Motorola commissioned a separate laboratory to follow up on the results published by Dr. Phillips. That and other studies have failed to confirm his conclusions.
?Once published, Dr. Phillips' study became part of the substantial scientific database bearing on this issue. Like others, it was subjected to critical evaluation by international experts, who have continued to conclude that mobile phones pose no known health risks. Links to the World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and other sources are accessible at www.motorola.com/rfhealth.?
Thanks to KGNU?s Bob Freeman for reading that statement from Motorola. Bob has asked me to remind our listeners that his reading of the statement doesn?t mean he endorses it.
Now, let?s meet Jerry Phillips, as he talks about events leading up to the loss of his research lab in 1998.
You sound like a man who has a clear conscience.
Oh, of course! I can?t imagine NOT having a clear conscience at this point. I mean, all I was doing, and all my colleagues were doing, was research. There was nothing to prove. There was only good science to do, and good science to publish, and that?s what I did for 30 some years.
Can you share what research you published and how well-known you were in your field?
I did a variety of research. What you?re most interested in is radio frequency fields, the work that relates to cellular telephones, but I also spent a lot of time working with 60 hertz fields associated with electric power lines, the electromagnetic fields associated with high voltage power lines, and that?s work I began in about 1982, and did that until my wife and I left research in 1998, right at the beginning of 1999.
When you were doing this, were you just doing this for fun, or were a lot of people coming to you and saying, you really know what you?re doing. Will you do a study for us?
That?s not the way research is done, generally. You find an area that?s of some interest to you. When I began working with the power line frequency fields, I was working with trace metals, zinc, iron, looking at the development of a new anticancer drug based on platinum. Associated with a blood protein. A fellow I knew at the Medical School in San Antonio had just received funding from the New York power lines project. I knew nothing about it. I had no idea what an electric field was. I had no idea what a magnetic field was. I didn?t know there was any concern.
What was your expertise?
My background at the time was in protein chemistry. My PhD is in biochemistry, and all my work was done in biochemistry and cell biology, and later on also a little molecular biology, but it?s my wife who?s the official molecular biologist.
You guys are interested in cellular function and cellular health, but you got drawn into a project involving electro-magnetic frequencies.
As it related to health issues. That was the concern of the NY power lines project that was funding the fellow I knew at the medical school. The issue there involved whether or not the electric and magnetic fields associated with high voltage power lines were in any way a potential cause of adverse health effects in humans. There was a 5 million dollar project established by the state of New York. They funded a number of investigators around the country, and he was one. At the time I was working on zinc and iron and blood proteins and so on, and I saw ways that I could begin to work with the fellow, and the more I did the work, the more interested I became. The first studies we did produced some absolutely outstanding, very unexpected results, which we published in a number of journals, and I slowly moved all my research from what I had been doing with trace metals and blood proteins, I moved my work into the study of biological effects and electro-magnetic fields.
How do metals such as zinc and iron affect what happens in our bodies, the shape of our proteins and so forth?
Iron and zinc are two essential minerals. The body requires a certain amount of them on a regular basis. And they participate in key processes in the body. They?re very much involved in metabolic reactions that allow the body to make energy or make compounds the body needs or break compounds down to produce energy.
What did you find out that was unexpected about how EMFs affect the metal ions in the body and the body function?
Initially, we looked at whether or not the exposure of the cells we were working with, to EMFs, had any effect on their growth properties. We were, at the time, looking at the effect of cancer drugs on a type of cell that people hear more about nowadays. It?s a stem cell. It?s a grandfather type cell that?s capable of giving rise to all the other cell types in the body.
Meaning an eye, a nose, a fingernail.
The cells that make up those tissues. What we asked initially is whether or not we could affect stem cell production in the population by exposure to electromagnetic fields. We found we most certainly could. If you took cancer cells and exposed them to EMFs, similar to what you would find associated with a power line, we got increased numbers of stem cells in the population. More than that, we found the properties of those stem cells had changed. We found increased growth, and the property of those stem cells had changed. They couldn?t be destroyed the way the regular cancer cells could be, they responded differently to various stimuli, and the effect that we produced, based on a single 24 hour exposure was permanent. We took one population of cells and created a brand new population of super cancer cells. They had increased survival potential, increased growth potential, and that was very unexpected.
Exposing them to EMFs made more of those and made more of them likely to survive?
That?s correct. We did this in the mid-80s.
Did you say, Oh, Dear!
At the time, that was pretty close to what we did. Initially, I had no expectation that there would be any effect. It?s different working with EMFs or the radio frequency fields associated with cell telephones, you can?t taste them, feel them, touch them. You can?t do any of the things that you can do with chemicals that we normally work with in labs, and that people understand.
And yet, Jerry Phillips, as I think about it, electromagnetic waves can affect which way the needle in a compass goes. And a needle in a compass has metals in it so it has different polarities. Is that something to do with why, perhaps, EMFs might affect metal ions in our bodies?
That?s a pretty sharp observation, and there is at least one group in California, headed at the time, I think he?s still at Cal-Tech, a fellow named Joe Kirshvink, who hypothesized that electric and magnetic fields could affect cells, such as in the brain, where some of these iron deposits are known to effect, or other deposits in similar ways, by affecting metal ions such as iron. There?s been a lot of work done on it, the work is still not conclusive. It?s a great hypothesis.
[Joseph L. Kirschvink
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena CA 91125, USA
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/users/jkirschvink/]
So who knows. But something happened.
Something happened. But we still have no idea what.
But it wasn?t good.
Potentially, it wasn?t good. We always keep in mind that we?re working with cells in a laboratory. We?re not working with cells in a living body. The fact that what we did could be seen certainly gives pause, especially since, over the last 15 to 20 years, there have been a number of epidemiological studies that do indicate an association between longer exposure to EMFs and an increase in some disorders, including certain cancers.
Was there enough there to make you not want to live below a high tension power line?
Oh, absolutely. In fact, My wife and I, we would bring home the meter we used in the laboratory to measure the strength of the magnetic fields in the house, and we would position beds accordingly. In some cases, I?ve known people to call in plumbers, electricians to check grounding. It affects the sort of heating systems people select. Whether they go with base heaters and so on. It made us very conscious of the environments we live in.
You were publishing in peer-reviewed, scientific journals.
Yes.
One or two?
Initially, the first series was four or five papers.
What kind of journals? What are some of their names?
One paper was published in Cancer Research, another in Journal of Immunology, and the international journal of radiation biology also published one of our initial papers, and these are all top-notch journals.
You got a reputation of doing good research. Then you went on to study cell phone radiation.
The initial work I did was at the University of Texas health sciences center in San Antonio. Then we joined a research group at the VA hospital in Loma Linda. This is a group whose interest was the same as ours, of low-frequency and cell phone radiation. That?s when we began our study of cell phones specifically, in 1991.
Who funded your research?
The initial work we did in Texas, on the high voltage fields was funded by various people. My colleague had funding from New York Power Lines project, and I had funding from different group of foundations in Texas. When we moved to California, the high voltage work was funded by the department of energy. It was a long-standing contract between the group and DOE to do that work. Shortly after we arrived in 1990, we began talks with Motorola, and Motorola had come to us because of the reputation of the group as a whole, the individuals within the group, to look at the effect of cell phone telephone radiation. To determine whether there were biological effects, especially when it related to human health.
So Motorola came to you because you had a good reputation for doing good research.
That?s what THEY said. (Laughter from Jerry) That was the understanding at the time. In fact, our initial relations with Motorola were very cordial. Our primary contact was with Q. Balzano, who was the director of research for Motorola, and one of their top people in the corporation, and he kept telling us that all he cared about, and all the corporation he cared about, was us doing the best research possible. He told us on several occasions, I don?t care what kind of results you get. He says, Of course we?d like it if it doesn?t show anything, and there was always a laugh among everybody, but he?d say, but that?s not the point. All we care about is the best research being done, and the relationship remained cordial with them, but only until we started getting data that they didn?t like. [Balzano retired from Motorola a few years ago; I found these email addresses for him: qbalzano@eng.umd.edu, qbfree01@ao1.com ]
So, until then, you had been funded in California, primarily by the government.
The government never interceded at all in the research. They never bothered us. They held their reviews. We submitted reports. Never did the government tell us what to do. Never did the government criticize the work that we did. Their concern was only that the work be of the highest quality. When they brought reviewers to the laboratories, it was simply to ensure that the work being done was of the highest quality. Working for the DOE was great.
When Motorola came, how did they get into the funding picture?
Initially, the department of energy was supplying plenty of money to keep the group going, to keep the research going. All the money Motorola brought was in addition to.
Icing on the cake.
Oh, it was wonderful. It?s a researcher?s dream to have that kind of money come in and really be able to do the research you love doing. Especially being able to buy the supplies, pay the technicians, by the equipment, and it was great. And it?s wonderful.
So you had all the money you needed, and more, because you had the government funds, plus Motorola.
Oh, we were doing pretty well.
And then . . . first of all, what happened with the data?
I?ll tell you a couple of stories. There are several in here. Our relationship with Motorola was very cordial, but only until we started getting data. At one time, while we were in California, we had a visit from a half a dozen or so very high ranking officials of Motorola. John Majors, who went on to head QualCom, the head attorney for Motorola, the head of marketing, the PR guy, Balzano, who was head of research at Motorola. We were meeting with the top people in the corporation, and they came out to hear what we always referred to as our dog and pony show. The presentation of our data. Our work was being done in two areas. We had a whole animal study, with laboratory rats who were exposed to the cell phone frequency from before they were born, when they were still in the womb, until they were adults. This exposure went on for two years. The experiment was designed specifically to look at an increase in brain tumors and nervous system tumors. We used a well accepted model in the study. We had the whole animal study, which takes a couple of years to do, then you have to analyze all the data. We were also doing cell studies. We began our dog and pony presentation with the cell studies, and for the most part, they weren?t demonstrating any results of any consequence. That made Motorola real happy. They?re in their element at this point. Right on guys, you?re doing great. Then we presented the whole animal study, which at the time, actually demonstrated not an increase, but a decrease in central nervous system damage in laboratory rats.
It almost seemed that cell phone energy was good for them?
In this model. We use a chemical to induce brain tumors in the rats, and You look for an agent that?s capable of increasing tumors above the incidence caused by the chemical, and what we saw was a decrease. It appeared to have a protective effect. At first blush, it may seem like a great thing. Wow! Not only will cell phones not give you cancer, but it will protect you from it. But that?s not the case. That?s not the case at all. And here?s why. The fact that we got a decrease in brain tumors showed that the cell phone field was interacting with the brain tissue. There was some coupling going on between the tissue and the radio frequency field. Now keep that in mind, and also know that we used only one exposure regimen. We had one intensity of the radio frequency field, and the rats were exposed so many minutes, so many days of the week, for the weeks of the study. Now, think of how many ways you can expose yourself to a cellular phone field. You can do more than a couple of minutes. You can do it several days a week. There?s a infinite number of cell phone exposure regimens you can employ.
You can use a cell phone, you can be next to a cell phone tower.
Absolutely, and that brings up the next point that you can be exposed to fields at different intensities. So here, we have our study with one intensity, one exposure regimen, and we can still demonstrate that the radio fields can couple with the biological tissue. When we presented these data, these folks who were so happy before were no longer very happy. I remember John Major picked up, and he started pacing back and forth across the floor. And as soon as the boss does that, everyone else does that, and pretty soon, everyone?s pacing back and forth across the floor. And we were asked questions at the time to the effect of, look, if you start getting questions about these data, how are you going to handle it. What are you going to tell people when they call? What if the press gets hold of this and calls. What are you going to tell them? What if somebody else calls and says, well I?m concerned about my cell telephone use. And I want to know if anything bad is going to happen to me. You folks are doing research. What?s your research telling you and what advice would you give to me? If someone calls you questions like that, what are you going to tell them?
What did you usually tell people before you got this question?
At the time, I would simply summarize the state of science up to that point. That?s all I?ve really ever tried to do with people is to say, Hey, look, Here?s what the epidemiology studies tell us. Here?s what the cell related studies tell us. Here?s my interpretation. That?s all I can tell you. You use your best judgment now. We?ll try to make you an informed consumer. You decide whether you want to use the telephone under these circumstances.
Then what did you tell the Motorola funders when they started pacing back and forth and said, what are you going to tell people if they call, worried about this study?
We sort of avoided that question all together. At that point, it was, look, it?s premature to discuss that at this point. So, that particular meeting concluded with the Motorola folks not particularly happy about the results being generated. And this leads into the next little story, because I know you?re interested in the influence that industry has over what results get out there and how they get out there.
Well, I am interested. For instance, the Barcelona conference, three years ago, where medical journal editors stated they were concerned that there?s a bias that favors industry and stifles non-industry data. It seems to be something that?s been a concern for some time, and there?s some fear that it?s continuing and growing.
I know the situation with medical journals, and what they appear to favor or not, and this isn?t quite the same situation. This has little to do with the journals and whether they favor industry, and more to do with industry itself, telling the researchers who are funded by industry what they can do and what they can?t.
This isn?t just a matter of what research journals accept in, it?s more to do with whether or not research can be done to even submit to a journal.
Let me give you two examples. One relates to a cell study I did and the other relates to the animal study I just related to you. The cell study I did, we were looking at how cell telephone fields affected some important proteins in the cells. These are proteins that are associated with cancer development. It?s a type of protein known as a proto oncogene. Basically, over the small panel of proteins we looked at, we saw no real effect after the cells were exposed to radio frequency fields.
What?s a proto oncogene?
The proto oncogenes are involved in the regulation of cell proliferation. When they change in various ways, and proto oncogene becomes an oncogene, that can lead to cancer development.
So we had an effect with one particular proto oncogene, and it was an effect we had also seen similar directions, similar magnitude, in our studies with high voltage power line related EMFs, so we wrote it up saying, basically we don?t see much of anything, but this effect on this particular protein, it?s kind of consistent with what we?ve seen with 60 hertz fields.
As soon as I wrote that paper up, we were required to at least give Motorola a copy of the paper to look at, but it was our understanding that they were going to look at it, and they could make comments, but we controlled the publication of the data. We controlled the paper, it was our work. All they did was to sponsor it.
I got a call from a fellow at Motorola who took over Balzano?s job as the head of research eventually. His name is Mays Swicord. Interestingly enough, he used to work for the FDA. He was hired away from FDA by Motorola, and Mays was in charge of the center for radiologic devices and health. It?s part of this open door policy between government and industry. So Mays read the paper and he said, look, this last paragraph, you have a sentence in here about this effect that you?re seeing on this proto oncogene, and you provide some indication that maybe this is related to a health effect.
I said, look, all I did was to summarize the results. Sometimes in these papers, you offer some speculation and say, look, there?s some questions raised, now we have to do more studies to find out what?s going on.
Mays said, look. I want that changed.
This was the same kind of language you had used in the power line studies to talk about effect. There was nothing special about it?
Oh, no. No. Nothing special at all. It?s a scientific paper. Every paper I wrote dealt with the science.
This person who was a decision maker, a funder, who used to be with the FDA and now is with Motorola, was telling you that he was concerned that you were saying something that most researchers would say in their scientific papers.
Exactly. I didn?t think what I had indicated in the paper was out of line. He told me he wanted that changed, and I said, no. I?m not going to change it. And we had a protocol for submitting the papers. The bottom line is, when I looked at the paper after it actually got published, that sentence had been changed.
The sentence had been changed?
The sentence had been changed. The sentence then read the way he told me he wanted it read.
Did he check that over with you?
No. I still don?t know how that sentence got changed. But I did not change that sentence. In the final paper, it was not what I had written, and the way it had been changed was to see, yes, we had seen an increase in the expression of this one protooncogene, but it?s doubtful it?s of any physiological interest. And that?s not a statement I?m going to make. I have no idea if it?s of any physiological significance or not. That?s the reason for further research. Why qualify it that way, saying it?s of doubtful physiological significance, when nobody knows? But that?s the way he wanted it to read, and that?s the way it reads in the final paper.
Where did it get published?
In the top journal in the field, called Bioelectromagnetics.
Did you have some words with him about this?
No. Not at the time. Not at the time.
I?ll tell you two more things. One about the animal study we were doing. The animal study, we wanted to report at one of the annual meetings of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, and this was going to be held in Victoria, in British Columbia. What a lovely location for a meeting. We had a great time. Anyhow, you write up the abstract for the paper, and it was required that the abstract be submitted to Motorola. Now the first author on the paper was Ross Adey. [Shelley, Ross died at the age of 82] Ross submitted the abstract to Motorola. It came back with, not recommendations to change, but statements that look, this needs to be changed. They didn?t want, for instance, any mention of damage to DNA and radio frequency fields in the same radio abstract.
Why were we going to mention damage to DNA? Because a paper had just come out from University of Washington showing an increase in damage to brain cells of rats that were exposed to radio frequency fields. That was Lai and Singh. Their study kind of hit the field by storm. It turns out that if you look also at the literature, there are reasons why we could believe that the radio frequency fields in our whole animal study were actually causing a decrease in the number of central nervous system tumors by increasing DNA damage in the brains. The increase in damage to the brain would increase repair mechanisms in the young brains. That would result in a lower incidence of central nervous system tumors. That was our speculation, and this is all based in the literature.
So your decrease in damage was indicating a lucky fluke?
I don?t think I?d call it a lucky fluke. It is indicative of the totality of what was going on in those brains that were exposed to the both the brain tumor causing chemical and the cell phone fields. This is what scientists do. You try to connect the dots. If there?s some literature that says, look, here?s a plausible mechanism to describe what you?re seeing. Here?s how we interpret our data. Here?s one mechanism that may be responsible. Now let?s investigate it. This is what science is all about. I still believe that, even though Motorola doesn?t.
The bottom line is, with this abstract that we needed to submit for this meeting in Victoria, it kept going back and forth between our group and Motorola, and it kept being changed, and changed and changed. Now Ross Adey in 1998 was interviewed by Paul Kenyon with the BBC, for a British show called Panorama, and what Ross told him at the time, as part of that interview, with every iteration of the abstract, it became more and more apparent that exposure of our rats to radio frequency fields did absolutely nothing. That certainly wasn?t the result of our study. But That?s what Motorola wanted. Every time we submitted it, they?d say, look, this has to be changed. So Ross would make some changes. No, now this has to be changed. Make some more changes.
Is this like the story of the frog? If you put it in cold water and turn up the heat slowly, it doesn?t know it?s in boiling water?
It may be. To Ross?s credit at that time, anyway, When he made the presentation in Victoria, during his oral presentation, he did mention the connection that we know existed in the literature between DNA damage, the DNA repair systems, the effect of the chemical we were using, the Lai and Singh study, and he tried to connect the dots, saying the decrease in tumors we had seen was actually the result of an increase in DNA damage consistent with Lai and Singh?s study.
You?re still getting funding from Motorola at this point.
At that point we were. In fact, at that point, it?s kind of interesting, because When Lai and Singh?s paper came out, I got an email from Ross Adey, and he told me he had gotten an email from Balzano at Motorola, and they wanted me to critique the Lai and Singh study so they could have something for the press, as a counter to what Lai and Singh had said in that paper.
Basically, I told Ross at the time, and Henry Lai has a copy of what I wrote to these people, a lot of people have a copy, and basically I reviewed the paper like I would any paper, and raised some questions about the study, but the bottom line is, it was a good study, and I wasn?t going to provide the stuff for Motorola that they told Adey that they needed, to begin to counter the impact that the Lai and Singh study was having both in the lay population and the scientific community..
I?m Shelley Schlender. Jerry Phillips continues to work in Colorado Springs, now leading science discovery programs for kids. In their statement to KGNU, Motorola has said that the worldwide research shows that mobile phones pose no known health risks. They add that links to the World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and other sources are accessible at www.motorola.com/rfhealth.?. Next week, we?ll get an update about industry funding and radio frequency radiation, from the perspective of industry watchdogs. If you missed a part of this interview, you can listen to it, and others in this month-long series, by going to the KGNU website and checking ?For Your Health? on the listings page. That?s ?For Your Health? on the listings page of the kgnu website, kgnu.org. .Questions or comments about this program? Call the comment line. 303-447-9911