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ISIS miniseries "Fields of Influence" - RE: 13 countries to
study cellphones and cancer (Ms. Mary McBride & Her Connections) -
Hermann Paul Schwan (Harlan Girard) - 'Sci-Fi' Weapons Going to War (15/12/02)
Tramès per Klaus Rudolph (Citizens'
Initiative Omega)
The Institute of Science in Society Science Society Sustainability
http://www.i-sis.org.uk
General Enquiries sam@i-sis.org.uk
Website/Mailing List press-release@i-sis.org.uk
ISIS Director m.w.ho@i-sis.org.uk
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ISIS miniseries "Fields of Influence"
Electromagnetic radiations are increasingly flooding our environment,
as evidence of health risks is mounting, suggesting that organisms are
sensitive to very weak electromagnetic fields.
This requires a new biology that understands organisms that has been systematically
ignored and excluded from mainstream discourse, to our peril. This miniseries
is in four parts:
Electromagnetic Fields Double Leukemia Risks http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FOI1.php
Mobile Phones & Cancer http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FOI2.php
Non-Thermal Effects http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FOI3.php
The Excluded Biology http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FOI4.php
The Excluded Biology
Successive reports have confirmed that electromagnetic fields too weak
to cause burns and heating are linked to cancers and other illnesses.
But these are still dismissed because of the presumed absence of "possible
biological mechanisms" that could account for the effects. Dr. Mae-Wan
Ho reveals a biology that can explain the effects, but has been ignored
and excluded from mainstream discourse.
The complete document http://www.i-sis.org.uk/full/FOI4Full.php
with references, is available in the ISIS members site
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php
. Full details here
There has been very little funding on research into the biological effects
of weak electromagnetic fields. Investigations that are carried out encounter
both methodological and conceptual hurdles. The laboratory findings have
been conflicting. It is difficult to reproduce the same conditions, as
ambient fields can vary from place to place and even in the same location
at different times. It is difficult to control for the physiological conditions
of the organisms, even if the same cell lines, the same strain of mice
are used. But above all, the effects are difficult to explain in terms
of known biological mechanisms.
It is true that there is nothing in mainstream mechanistic biology that
would enable us to understand how electromagnetic fields below the "thermal
threshold" could have any effects. That, despite the fact that consistent
changes in gene expression and DNA breakages - considered to the 'most
solid' evidence - have now been obtained (see "Mobile phones &
cancer", this series http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FOI2.php).
The "thermal threshold" is usually taken to mean the level at
which burning or heating occurs. But there is a more important meaning
that comes from classical thermodynamics, a subject area that deals with
energy transformation. Here, the "thermal threshold" refers
to the small fluctuation in energy that occurs at random in a population
of molecules at thermodynamic equilibrium.
Some biological effects are indeed associated with electromagnetic fields
so weak that the energies in those fields are below the energy of random
thermal fluctuations, and thus, according to classical physics, cannot
possibly have any effect.
The big fallacy is to assume that living systems are at thermodynamic
equilibrium, which they are not. Systems at thermodynamic equilibrium
are devoid of organised activities or structures, such as the mixture
of gases in a closed airtight container that one finds only in textbooks.
Organisms, in contrast, are open systems maintained far away from thermodynamic
equilibrium by virtue of their ability to capture and store energy.
Systems full of non-equilibrium energy are excitable, ie, they need only
the slightest provocation to give, at times, disproportionately large
effects. Unlike typical mechanical processes where effects are proportional
to, and determined by the magnitude of the force, living processes are
highly non-linear and unpredictable.
The weather is an example of non-equilibrium, non-linear process. It is
predictable locally in the very short-term, but not in the medium and
long-term, as typical of systems exhibiting deterministic chaos. Edward
Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered deterministic
chaos in the 1960s while trying to write down mathematical equations that
could predict the weather; only to discover that his equations said predictions
are impossible.
The weather is 'deterministic' because one can write down equations that
describe the process; but the equations give unpredictable, chaotic behaviour.
The equations cannot be solved mathematically, but they can be simulated
on a computer. Computer simulations clearly show that a slight perturbation,
or the tiniest difference in starting conditions, and there is no telling
where the system will go. This is the 'butterfly' effect: a proverbial
butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest could affect the
weather in London.
Living processes are the same. The healthy heartbeat, the electrical activities
of the brain, the behaviour of ant colonies, ecosystems, and a host of
other living functions, all exhibit chaotic dynamical behaviour. They
tend to be quasi (almost but not quite)-periodic, the periodicities are
a complex of many periods, and they can swing between different quasi-periodic
states. But they are not at all random.
One can plot a 'phase-space' diagram of the dynamical behaviour and get
weird and wonderful shapes called appropriately, 'strange attractors'
which show there is method in the madness. The Lorenz attractor is like
a pair of goggles.
We already have examples of living organisms being sensitive to very weak
signals in the environment. Pesticides and other industrial poisons are
associated with cancers at concentrations of parts per billion (see "Atrazine
poisoning worse than suspected", ISIS Report, October 2002 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/atrazine.php).
The upshot is that many of the standard statistical tools are inadequate
to cope with biological behaviour. And special statistical techniques
have already been borrowed from non-linear physics in order to describe
and analyse biological activities. An emerging discipline of 'dynamic
diseases' is based on detecting deviations from the chaotic dynamics of
healthy biological rhythms. Heartbeat and other biological rhythms can
be read in rather the way that traditional Chinese practitioners read
an individual's status of health from the person's pulse.
Andrew Marino, a pioneer investigator of the non-thermal effects of electromagnetic
fields (see "Non-thermal effects of electromagnetic field",
this series), also initiated the use of statistical methods to analyse
his experiments on the basis that the biological phenomena under investigation
are non-linear.
The reliability of the procedure was tested using pairs of untreated controls,
and by sampling a known non-linear system, such as data obtained by computer
simulation of the Lorenz equations for a weather system at two different
temperatures.
Marino's team found that the untreated pairs of controls gave little or
no statistical differences when analysed according to either the linear
or the non-linear model. The data from the Lorenz equations, on the other
hand, gave no statistically significant difference when analysed with
conventional linear statistics, but gave a highly significant difference
on the non-linear model.
In replicate experiments, male and female mice were exposed continuously
to very weak, 60 Hz electromagnetic field for certain periods of time,
and the effect on 20 immune parameters measured. They found that in all
the experiment, exposure to the electromagnetic field resulted in statistically
significant changes - in four to ten of the parameters - when and only
when the response of the animals to the fields was analysed as if it were
governed by non-linear dynamics.
Non-linear chaotic dynamics is not the only reason why weak electromagnetic
fields should affect living systems.
Robert Becker, Marino's supervisor, had done a series of experiments beginning
in the 1950s showing that the body of all organisms has a Direct Current
(DC) field, and that electric currents produced all over the body are
involved in controlling growth and regeneration. By the 1960s, Becker
had already proposed that an electrical communication system exists within
all living things, and demonstrated that externally applied fields could
influence the processes of growth and regeneration.
The fields and currents identified by Becker were actually found much
earlier by another US biologist Harold Saxton Burr. He had proposed in
the 1930s that all living things, from men to mice, from trees to seeds,
are moulded and controlled by electro-dynamical fields, which he had measured
and mapped extensively.
These fields are in addition to the now well-known and accepted electrical
activities of the brain that can be measured as electroencephalograms
(EEG) and in the pace-maker of the heart as electrocardiograms (ECG).
Electrical activities and ionic currents have also been measured in cultured
cells and tissues. And the weak magnetic fields generated by current flows
all over the body can now be measured non-invasively with the extremely
sensitive Super Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) magnetometer. The
evidence is overwhelming that electro-dynamical fields and currents are
involved in intercommunication within the body. These fields and currents
are connected to and correlated with the EEG and ECG that are a routine
part of conventional biomedicine.
The body uses electromagnetic signals of different frequencies and extents
to intercommunicate. Hence it would be surprising if external electromagnetic
fields did not have an effect. As Gerard Hyland points out, electromagnetic
radiation from mobile phones and computers are well known to interfere
with electronic medical devices such as pace-makers and telecommunication
systems of airplanes. To deny that these radiation could influence the
body's own electro-dynamical intercommunication system is irrational to
say the least. He is particularly worried about the similarity of mobile
phone frequencies to the major EEG frequencies such as alpha and delta
waves, and frequencies that could trigger epileptic fits in people suffering
from epilepsy.
Ten years ago in my laboratory, we found we could dramatically transform
the global body pattern of the fruitfly larva simply by exposing the embryos
within the first three hours of development for 30 min to very weak static
magnetic fields. The transformation is unique and striking: the normal
segmental pattern became twisted towards a helical pattern. In one instance,
a completely helical larva was obtained.
These experiments were significant for the following reasons. First, they
involved static magnetic fields, so only moving charges or liquid crystals
in a high degree of dynamic order could have been affected. Second, the
energy in the fields were well below the threshold of random thermal fluctuations,
and the only way they could have an effect is if the embryos were in an
excitable, non-equilibrium state. Third, the global transformations indicate
that the embryos must be coherent to a high degree. It means that all
the molecules in the body of the embryo must be moving together in a correlated
way, which incidentally also increased its sensitivity to weak fields.
We have repeated and extended these experiments, which suggested that
the effects of weak electromagnetic fields on body pattern formation is
non-classical. In other words, it suggested that the embryo is quantum
coherent.
We have since obtained further evidence of the global coherence that exists
in living organisms. The molecules are moving together so perfectly that
the entire body appears liquid crystalline (see "What Barrier?"
ISIS Report November 2002
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/whatbarrier.php).
This new biology that I have sketched out, that enables us to understand,
not only the sensitivity of organisms to weak electromagnetic fields,
but also the holistic health practices of many cultural traditions, is
being systematically ignored and excluded from mainstream discourse, while
we continue to be poisoned with a range of environmental pollutants and
by the 'side-effects' of drugs from conventional reductionist mechanistic
medicine.
The complete document http://www.i-sis.org.uk/full/FOI4Full.php
with references, is available in the ISIS members site
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php
. Full details here
This article can be found on the I-SIS
website at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FOI4.php
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RE: 13 countries to
study cellphones and cancer
Ms. Mary McBride & Her Connections
Have a look at: The Wireless Information Resource Centre http://www.wirc.org/about/board.shtml
and there is Vice Chair:
Mary Louise McBride
Epidemiologist, Cancer Control Research, British Columbia Cancer Agency.
Scientific Director, Cancer Registry
Excerpt from a message from Ronald Macfarlane to Roy Beavers, message
forwarded by Robert Riedlinger from a Panel Presentation of February 7,
2000, personal notes of Ronald Macfarlane):
Ms. Mary McBride read out the conclusions of the Royal Society stating
that SC 6 was adequate and that more research was needed in selected areas.
One of these areas was epidemiology (her area of specialization), another
was thermal effects on eyes. She agreed that non-thermal biological effects
have been documented but pointed out that "biological effects are
not the same as health effects." Dr. Bradley repeated this as well
during questioning. She also stated that what we needed were studies
showing a strong "causal" information rather than just an "association".
She didn't bother to point out that epidemiological studies (which she
advocated) may demonstrate "association" but don't demonstrate
"causation". Other types of research are needed for this.
She questioned the none-linearity of responses (i.e. no obvious dose/response
relationship for some tests) and stated that a large number of studies
were negative. This concept of dose/response was challenged by both
Drs. Lai and Havas and by a member of the audience. Dr. Allan Frey thinks
the classical toxicology model may not be appropriate for EMFs and that
the analogy of a radio (that elicits a response only when it is tuned
to a specific frequencies and intensity) may be a more appropriate model
for electromagnetic bioeffects. Dr. Lai commented that many biological
activities don't follow a linear dose/response model and that was not
a good reason to reject the experiments.
Dear Dr. Ho: I am sitting in the
Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania and typing this note.
H.P.S. is emeritus professor of Biomedical Electronic Engineering at Penn.
I have been very interested in Schwan since 1984, when I enrolled in the
University to work toward a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture.
One month later my life was irretievably altered when I was coopted into
some Nazi-style research of Schwan's in which it was expected that I would
die, and thus be unable to sully his reputation. I simply would like to
advise you that in 1953, Schwan's first doctoral candidate was graduated
and went to work at Fort Deitrich, Maryland, the Army's chemical and biological
warfare center. By virtue of this happy circumstance, Schwan had his own
Top Secret clearance from Ft. Deitrich by 1957. In other words, every
statement he has ever made on any subject since then has been tainted
by his close association with the military-industrial complex. It is hard
for me to understand why anyone who is NOT an American would accept anything
Schwan has ever said as having any scientific validity. His livelihood
and scientific standing have depended from the very first on his willingness
to lie along the lines dictated to him.
According to his Paperclip file, Schwan himself was not a Nazi but his
immediate superior was a member of the Party and wrote a recommendation
for him. However, given the industry with which Schwan applied himself
once installed at the University of Pennsylvania and the enthusiasm with
which he allowed himself to be corrupted by the American military, I would
NOT be surprised if I found out that Schwan was a member of the Nazi Party
himself or, even, performed human experiments in the Nazi death camps.
He certainly would have if he had been asked.
Harlan Girard
Omega: Interesting Link: http://www.heart7.net/mcf/archv-hm.htm
'Sci-Fi' Weapons Going
to War
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin8dec08,0,664010.story
Informant: Member of the Bavarian Parliament Volker Hartenstein
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