[LINK] electromagnetic fields effect brain activity

[Stewart Fist]

Rachael wrote on Confirmation Bias

> Is Johnny's reaction to Ziggy's paper an example of this?

More to the point, is Ziggy's report the ultimate example of this.

And getting back to the original question under discussion:

Where did all the nuclear scientists go when the bottom dropped out of their
industry?   

When I was a kid, a job in nuclear energy engineering/physics was seen as
being the career-path with the most prospects of wealth and fame in the
scientific area.  Thousands of bright kids must have gone into this industry
full of hope, then found themselves without prospects of employment.

Ziggy became a research laboratory administrator for Eastman Kodak in the
USA.   And I keep stumbling across other nuclear physics graduates in
various radiation-related fields -- specifically in radio telecommunications
(which has very little carry over).  They seem to be seen here as the
engineering types who have an understanding of potential interaction with
biological systems.  So they ended up running the various EMF-equipment
testing labs and health/radiation standards groups.

You find them in these jobs all around the world, and the various IEEE and
ANSI committees are full of them.

I suspect that many ex-nuclear physicists have a very dim view of the health
and environmental activists who killed their industry and their careers.
And I suspect that this explains their rather cavalier dismissal of all
claims of potential harm from R/F power sources; cellphones and the like.

They are quite confident that only ionising (above UV) forms of radiation
can effect biological tissue, unless the non-ionising forms are powerful
enough to raise the core temperature of their test rats by one degree
Centigrade (thermal effects).   And this is how the 'safety standards' are
set around the world.

They know this with absolute confidence because that's what they were taught
in their nuclear radiation classes thirty years ago.

 That's still conventional wisdom in this area of science, despite hundreds
of biomedical researchers saying that they can measure or detect biological
changes in humans, animals and tissue cultures at radiation levels far below
the thermal threshold, with (non-ionising) sources like radio and microwave
transmitters.



-- 
Stewart Fist, writer, journalist, film-maker
70 Middle Harbour Road, LINDFIELD, 2070, NSW, Australia
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