Dear Editor:
In a recent article (RCR Wireless News, Dec.18, “Carlo book points finger at CTIA, Wheeler”), Jeffrey Silva reports on my activities from the perspective of former WTR head George Carlo. Carlo’s comments implicitly cast me as a scientist who “testified” about mobile base stations until, upon Carlo’s advice in late 1993 to a Motorola “lobbyist,” I was muzzled by being hired as a consultant to Motorola. In the 25 years that I have been an independent consultant (full time since 1993), I never addressed mobile base stations in any legal or quasi-legal setting where I might have “testified,” although in July 1993, I was invited to speak at a San Francisco meeting held by the California Public Utilities Commission and eleven months later, in June 1994, I was invited to speak on mobile base stations at a public meeting of Beverly Hills, Calif., planning agencies-months after I was supposedly neutralized by being hired as a consultant.
I was asked to join the Peer Review Board (PRB) for WTR (then called the Scientific Advisory Group on Cellular Telephone Research) early in 1994 through the recommendation of a former colleague and not, to my knowledge, because I was “nominated by Motorola,” as Carlo wrote in his recent book. I have no doubt that my work on the PRB was, without exception, conducted independently and for only one purpose: to get the best possible research results from the $25 million that was entrusted to WTR. I remain vexed that the WTR program so disastrously underachieved on its large and important goals. In his book Carlo charges I was, “Motorola’s guy on the board.” In the six years I was associated with Carlo through the PRB, he never once indicated that this was his view either in public or in any of our amiable private chats. Had he done so, I could have saved him years of mistaken belief and mistrust. I am confident that a review of my activities on the PRB, and interviews with the PRB staff and my colleagues on the PRB would show that I remained very much my own man.
Asher R. Sheppard, Ph.D.
