Dr. George Carlo has missed his true calling. Carlo, who led the six-year, $28 million effort to study any potential links between wireless phone use and cancer, should write self-help books, become a motivational speaker and tour the talk show circuit. He is worth at least a couple of segments on Oprah on resilience.
How many people-as defendants in class-action lawsuits-can strike agreements with plaintiffs that call for the plaintiffs to be able to buy the defendant’s book (at a discount) as part of a class-action settlement? How many defendants can get the plaintiffs’ lawyers to agree that, as part of the proposed out-of-court settlement, the defendants get funding to continue to conduct the very research that got them named in the lawsuit in the first place?
With Carlo, truth is certainly stranger than fiction.
As I write this, the judge is deciding whether to accept the proposed settlement between defendant Wireless Technology Research L.L.C. (which Carlo headed) and a class of up to 40 million wireless phone users. If the settlement is approved, Carlo would be given $250,000 in seed money to establish a registry for cell-phone users who would report suspected diseases and illnesses that they believe are caused from cell-phone use. Among other things, the class-action case alleges that people’s billing records were used without prior consent as part of an epidemiology study performed for WTR.
In another ironic twist, the wireless industry-via the insurance it bought for WTR-in effect is paying for Carlo to continue his research. And the wireless industry likely would just as soon shake its Carlo connection.
You can’t underestimate Carlo’s ability to pick himself up, dust himself off and start all over again. Here’s a guy who, at the beginning of his relationship with the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, walked side by side with industry. Then, after WTR research showed genetic damage from mobile-phone radiation, Carlo became industry’s worst nightmare, authoring a book detailing the troubled relationship he had with CTIA and appearing on numerous TV shows, shouting warnings that wireless phones may not be safe.
Now Carlo might get to pursue some of the post-market surveillance research he wanted to do from the beginning-with actress Linda Evans as a spokeswoman for the registry. Oprah can’t be far behind.
