From Guy Inchbald
The debate over the safety of GSM phones rumbles on (13 September, p 12 and p 46, and 4 October, p 34), and I recently came across a news report of a study suggesting that the new higher-frequency 3G phones may cause nausea and other effects.
As a sometime electromagnetics engineer, I have like many others struggled to come up with any non-thermal mechanism by which the low-energy microwave quanta emitted by a mobile phone could possibly affect human tissue. Then, not long ago, my biologist daughter and I were discussing photosynthesis. Since then, it has occurred to me that we have here a similar phenomenon.
For many years biologists struggled to discover the mechanism by which low-energy light quanta could possibly prime the high-energy chemical reactions they were seeing. It turns out to be a kind of cascading pump, with each photon bumping up the energy of the system bit by bit, until enough has been collected.
Perhaps there may be some similar mechanism by which electrons or other charged structures within the brain can be pumped up step by step to damaging energy levels, using microwave quanta. Nobody to my knowledge has ever looked for such a mechanism. Indeed, do we even know how to?
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Upton-upon-Severn, Worcestershire, UK
