To the Editor:
“Good God almighty,” RCR Washington Bureau Chief
Jeffrey Silva said in a recent column (about health effects of wireless technology), “do the damn research and get
the controversy over with!”
Nobody disputes that more radio-frequency research is needed. But the larger
need is to be responsive to the public interest, while avoiding a national environmental train wreck such as occurred
with powerline fields. There can be no purely technocratic solution to what is in large part a social
problem.
Establishing the safety of something is a bit like establishing the health of a patient. It is an open-ended
process that is constrained by social expectation, legal and regulatory factors and economic realities, rather than by the
achievement of scientific certainty.
Scientists have been investigating the biological effects of RF energy since
before World War II, and thousands of studies on the subject already have been reported. Expert committees repeatedly
have surveyed this literature, and found no clear evidence that RF energy at exposure levels produced by low-power
wireless communications systems causes health problems.
The same can be said for power frequency fields in the
home-yet a health scare arose that cost the American economy $1 billion a year in litigation, attempts at remediation
and lost property values. Paul Slovic, a well-known expert in risk perception, once claimed that scientific research
helped to keep this public controversy alive. I believe that research finally brought it to closure, but the process was
slow, uncertain and very costly.
Scientific data are seldom unambiguous, and risk research is a particularly murky
and difficult subject. There are enough skeletons in the scientific closet that somebody with an axe to grind can pick
and choose data and put together a scary story. Paul Brodeur, a writer who did so much to make the powerline issue a
national health scare, did that for RF energy in his 1977 book “The Zapping of America” (Norton). The
time is ripe for a repeat performance along similar lines.
So calls to “do the damn research” are not
enough. More research alone will not end the controversy. A larger need is to satisfy the public that its interests are
being considered. Industry, which has a long track record of shooting itself in the foot by poorly considered statements
about these issues, also needs to pay close attention to the social aspects of the issue.
Kenneth R.
Foster
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
