Some months ago over dinner, the topic of whether or not mobile phones cause cancer came up. My friend Sigrid turned to me and said, "You are in charge of researching this."
Yes ma'am.
Well Sigrid, I don't have an answer for you just yet, but there is some preliminary research that is worth considering.
First we have to remember that cancer is fundamentally a genetic disease; something alters the DNA in the cell nucleus which impacts the cell's protein expression in a highly adverse way. This is not to say that all protein expression alterations lead to cancer, but it is a place to start looking.
So, some Finnish researchers exposed the arm skin of ten volunteers to mobile phone radiation for one hour, took a biopsy from each exposed patch of skin (and one from the other arm for control) and compared protein expression between all of the samples. There was in fact a change in the expression of eight proteins, two of which were present in all ten volunteers. In an earlier test they found similar results using cultured cells.
What these proteins do is still unknown, so there is nothing to link them to cancer or any other disease, but the results do suggest that extended exposure to mobile phone radiation does in fact alter the expression of skin cell proteins.
So don't throw away your cool new I-Phone, but consider whether you want to hold it against your face for an hour. You can read the paper for yourself at the link.
-R
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