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ing, fuel injection, emission control, and many other attributesof the performance and comfort of the car. Presumably, no onewould pay much for a modern car stripped of its software.

Similar restrictions are possible for the many other devicescontrolled by embedded software. Proponents of the legisla-tion protest that the law couldn’t stretch that far, but it isn’t justmy crazy idea that it could. For example, the states’ AttorneysGeneral specifically cited this embedded software issue ashaving “potentially devastating effects on consumers.”

Several changes of the law are being considered, andNCCUSL will vote on them at its annual meeting, scheduled tobegin as this article goes to press. They were written to addressobjections by the Attorneys General, a task force of the Ameri-can Bar Association, and a few other groups. At first glance, thechanges look impressive. On closer examination, most turnout to be cosmetic, or very narrow.

In the struggle against the act, some professional techni-cal organizations and industry professionals have teamed upto play a small but key role in clarifying issues relevant to thelegislation. For example, IEEE-USA and the IndependentComputer Consultants’ Association sent representatives to

some UCITA meetings, and people like Phil Koopman ofCarnegie Mellon University and Sharon Marsh Roberts ofthe consultants’ association spent a lot of time finding waysto make engineering issues understandable to legislators andother analysts.

Like many other legislative meetings, those discussingUCITA were frustrating for engineers who attended. The law’sdrafting committee seemed unenthusiastic about hearing non-legal viewpoints. However, engineers raised and explainedmany of the issues that later gained importance in the largerdebates that resounded in the press, the professional soci-eties, and the independent legal analyses. We were able toprovide many of the facts that lawyers and reporters needed toground their arguments and analyses. Without our participa-tion, UCITA would have passed through the drafting processmuch faster, with many more problems, and would have hadmuch more success in the states.

Unfortunately, even if UCITA is vanquished, its spirit will liveon in other proposed legislation, such as the new ConsumerBroadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. If we are tokeep these bad ideas from widespread adoption, engineeringvoices will have to continue being heard. •

Cellphones, Radars, and HealthExposure standards for electromagnetic radiation do not adequately address current realities

BY R AYMOND S. KASEVICHCS Medical Technologies LLC

[Continued from page 14]

en years ago, the only source of electromagneticwaves most of us encountered with any regularitywas the microwave oven. Today, we hold cell-phones against our heads, walk past cellphonebase stations in cities, cradle wireless personal dig-

ital assistants in our hands, and clip text-messaging devices andpagers to our belts. We are even starting to connect our comput-ers, cellphones, and peripherals with various wireless schemes.

Yet amid this increasingly dense “electro-smog,” we arestill using the same outdated and inadequate standards to cal-culate our exposure to radio and microwaves.

These standards are based on conclusions drawn from manyexperiments in the decades after World War II. Few of thosestudies, however, were designed to study low-level, localizedbiological effects not linked to heat. But electromagnetic theoryand decades of experiments clearly indicate that the electro-magnetic fields of radio and microwaves can also affect cellsmechanically, without producing significant amounts of heat.

These standards, formulated in the late 1980s by the Amer-ican National Standards Institute, the IEEE, and others, arebased on the assumption that if nonionizing radiation affectsliving cells and tissue, it must do so by heating the tissue. Thestandards, known as IEEE/ANSI C95.1-1991, also calculate

exposure over a person’s entire body, rather than specificorgans or the head and cheek (in the case of, say, exposure toa cellphone). These heat-based, whole-body standards are usedto calculate maximum exposures permissible for people whowork around radiation, such as soldiers or sailors who workaround radars, or technicians who work on cellphone base sta-tions. The standards are also used in the design of antennatowers, to limit what passers-by are exposed to.

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The possible link between radio and microwaves, whichare forms of nonionizing radiation, and human healthremains one of the most complex and controversial subjectsin all of biophysics. I couldn’t possibly review the vast litera-ture on this topic in a short magazine article. Nevertheless,there is growing scientific evidence that prolonged exposureto some kinds of radio waves does cause at least low-levelchanges in the movements, workings, and possi-bly structure of molecules and cells in living tis-sue. This evidence raises the possibility of healtheffects—ones against which our current exposurestandards are not adequately protecting us.

The relevant physics starts with the fact that allliving things absorb and scatter electromagneticwaves. As they do so, they convert, on a molecular level, theelectromagnetic fields of the waves into mechanical forces.Our bodies are full of ions—in nerve endings, in cell nuclei,in muscles. In addition, the body’s most common mole-cules, including water, have an irregular distribution ofcharge, so that they are influenced by an electric field (or amagnetic field if the ions or molecules aremoving).

Thus electromagnetic fields can physi-cally move, reorient, or even alter mole-cules or ions—or their distributions—inthe body. They can affect the rate of chem-ical reactions and the ability of molecules topass through a membrane. In addition, ifcharge acceleration occurs, perhaps as aresult of radar pulses with extremely fast rise times, the tis-sue itself may reradiate or scatter this energy inside thehuman body, complicating and intensifying the radiation’seffects.

Possible links between molecular or cellular effects andhuman health are controversial, but a number of experts arefocusing their attention on the blood-brain barrier. This phys-iological complex, which includes as its primary line of defensethe cellular lining of capillaries in the brain, shields the brainand central nervous system from foreign and harmful sub-stances. The barrier also seems to control the concentrationsof ions in cerebral tissue.

Radiation-caused movements or alterations of ions andmolecules can be particularly vigorous when they are causedby electromagnetic pulses that are sharp and intense. A casein point is the Air Force’s early-warning radar, the Pave Pawssystem in Falmouth, Mass. In a 1994 paper, Richard Albanese,a researcher at Brooks Air Force Base (San Antonio, Texas),reported that ultrashort electromagnetic pulses, of the sortemitted by Pave Paws and similar phased-array radars, maycause mechanical damage to tissue through what is calledprecursor radiation. The term describes the secondary burstsof radiation that occur inside living tissue when the tissue ishit by the radar pulses. This precursor radiation is a potentialsecondary source of tissue damage—and it is ignored in cur-rent exposure standards.

“Until the issue of tissue damage mechanisms associ-ated [with] pulses that cause precursors is fully studied,”

Albanese wrote in his 1994 publication, “the author recom-mends zero human exposure to such unique precursor andgendering pulses.”

Another study made worldwide headlines little over amonth ago, on 20 June. A team at Finland’s Radiation andNuclear Safety Authority reported its discovery that mobile-phone–type radiation has an effect on hundreds of proteins

found in lab-grown cells taken from human bloodvessels. The leader of the study, Dariusz Leszczyn-ski, refused to cite the results as proof of a connec-tion to human health. But he did hypothesize thatone of the molecules affected, the so-called stressprotein, hsp27, might be the key that opened gaps inthe blood-brain barrier, letting harmful or at least

foreign entities into the brain.More supporting results come from Henry Lai, in the

department of bioengineering at the University of Washingtonin Seattle. Lai has documented biological effects caused byrates of radiation absorption at levels down to 0.001 W/kg ofirradiated tissue and at power densities in the microwatt-per-

centimeter range. These levels are significantly smaller thanthose permitted under current standards. The effects includedamage to DNA in cells, increases in calcium efflux in cells,and decreases in cell division after exposure.

We have more than enough solid experimental evidenceto question the validity of formulating standards that takeonly thermal effects into account. It would be irresponsibleto continue using standards based on average, whole-bodyradiation exposures to laboratory animals, more especiallybecause a great deal of tissue damage has been done longbefore a laboratory animal shows behavior changes or diesfrom thermal effects.

What next? We must revise our safety standards and setconservative new ones using all of the available results andinformation—not just the data that fits previously heldassumptions. The telecommunications industry, which is in deep denial, needs to face reality. Professional groups,such as the IEEE’s Standards Association, must work withthe U.S. government and international agencies to ensurethat studies of long-term, low-level, nonthermal bioeffects areput in place. The U.S. Congress needs to recognize theurgency of these studies and not just defer to the telecom-munications industry when creating or modifying legislation.

For many of us, cell telephones are an indispensable partof our lives and lifestyles. Cellphone towers now line our high-ways and dot our communities. There is no turning back now.But we have a right to expect standards that will truly protectour health and well-being. •

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“We have more than enough experimentalevidence to question the validity of formulating standards that take only thermal effects into account.”