Non-thermal “heresy” that might be the reason why we see non-thermal effects

Biological and health effects of cell phone radiation are being denied by ICNIRP and by IEEE/ICES and number of governmental agencies.

The problem is that if it happens that cell phone radiation causes biological and health effects then the “Big Telecom” industry is in “Big Trouble”. This might be the reason why ICNIRP and IEEE/ICES perpetuate the dogma of cell phone radiation as able to induce only thermal effects. The large body of peer-reviewed published science, showing that non-thermal effects exist, is simply trashed by ICNIRP and IEEE/ICES because according to their dogma, these effects don’t exist and scientific evidence of them is just bunch of experimental artifacts caused by thermal exposures, mistaken for non-thermal exposures by naïve scientists.

Another dogma disseminated by ICNIRP and IEEE/ICES is that the energy of the cell phone radiation is insufficient to break chemical bonds. This claim shows absolute incompetence of both “expert” groups. There is much more to biochemistry of cells than only breaking of chemical bonds. Any cell biologist knows that!

Last night I got message from Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News and the never-ending source of detailed information on the history of EMF science.

Louis pointed out that the recent article in Scientific Reports, published as part of Nature group, suggests that RF-EMF might alter conformation of proteins and affect their enzymatic activity.

Years back, Microwave News published a story where David de Pomerai discussed the possibility that RF-EMF alters the conformation of proteins that might lead to activation of stress response that acts as mitigator of this unwanted effect.

This reminded me my own research showing activation of p38MAPK/Hsp27 pathway in endothelial cell line. I have suggested that RF-EMF affects conformation of proteins leading to appearance in cells of misfolded proteins. In order to remove these misfolded proteins cells activate/produce Hsp70 and Hsp27 proteins that in concert attempt to repair misfolded proteins. This is a very important event because, if not repaired and not destroyed by proteasome/ubiquitin, the misfolded proteins may accumulate in cells and lead to diseases like, e.g. Alzheimer’s.

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I have presented this hypothesis in my plenary lecture at the BEMS meeting in Maui in 2003. The possible appearance of misfolded, or otherwise incorrect, proteins was hinted in experiment that we published in one of our articles. In this experiment we observed appearance of vimentin that had lower molecular weight than the native vimentin [Nylund & Leszczynski, Proteomics 2004, 4, 1359–1365].

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Further experiments concerning changes of protein conformation in cell exposed to RF-EMF were “abandoned” due to lack of funding. For this lack of funding we may “thank” ICNIRP and IEEE/ICES that disseminated the false dogma of thermal effects only and of not enough energy to alter chemistry of cells. Both claims are false but they helped to stagnate research in this direction for the next 20 years.

Let us hope that now, something will happen and the research, prevented efficiently by false “dogma” disseminated by ICNIRP and IEEE/ICES, will continue and ultimately prove that RF-EMF of cell phone has ability to alter biochemistry of cellular processes that, if unchecked, may lead to health effects.

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