This year the annual joint meeting of the Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) and the European Bioelectromagnetics Association (EBEA) – BioEM2015 – will take place on June 14-19 in Asilomar, CA, USA.
The program of plenary lectures and workshops was recently published on the BioEM2015 website. It is necessary to congratulate the organizers, especially Tom Vernier and Niels Kuster, for assembling a very interesting set of plenaries, not shy of controversy, as seen from the list of speakers. It is just necessary to hope that the speakers with opposing views will present these views fully and not, as it happened on several occasions in the past, be overly “polite” and “please” each other instead of debating issues… Here they are:
- 2B or not 2B: Should IARC’s classification of RF EMF as a possible carcinogen invoke the precautionary principle?
Kurt Straif, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), France
Christopher Portier, Former Director, US National Center for Environmental Health, USA
Ken Foster, Department of Bioengineering,University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Electric fields and nonresectable tumors — clinical practice and physical models
Julie Gehl, Department of Oncology, Copenhagen University Hospital, Herlev, Denmark
Jim Weaver, Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT, USA
- Electrohypersensitivity (Idiopathic environmental intolerance to EMF)
Kjell Hansson Mild, Department of Radiation Sciences, Umeå University, Sweden
Gunnhild Oftedal, Sør‐Trøndelag University College, Trondheim, Norway
- Dosimetry — gaps and challenges
Luc Martens, Information Technology Department, Ghent University, Belgium
Micaela Liberti, Dept. of Information Engineering, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
- Electric fields and calcium signaling
Ken-Ichi Yano, Division of Medical Bioelectrics, Kumamoto University, Japan
Rod O’Connor, LABEX Sigma-Lim – XLIM, Limoges, France
Besides plenaries, the list of workshops at BioEM2015 looks as follows (lists of speakers are not yet available):
- Key Topics in EMF/RF Guideline/Standard Development, organized by the Electric Power Research Institute, USA
- Current Status of LF Dosimetry Modeling, organized by the IEEE International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety
- Safety of wireless transmitting devices,organized by the Environmental Health Trust, USA
- Submitting papers for publication in Bioelectromagnetics, organized by James Lin, Editor, Bioelectromagnetics, USA
For all those unable to come to BioEM2015, I have a good news, though some may consider it as a “bad news”. I will participate in the BioEM2015.
As in 2013 in Thessaloniki (BioEM2013) and in 2014 in Cape Town (BioEM2014), I will be blogging daily and directly from the meeting. After the meeting I will also write a summary report, as I did in 2014. For those interested, my travel and participation in BioEM2015 was made possible thanks to the travel grant from the Pandora Foundation. The mentioned summary report will be after the meeting published here, on BRHP, and on Pandora Foundation website (in English and in German).
BRHP - Between a Rock and a Hard Place 