ELECTROIICS ? '_, 't; I.] a 1 - I !

WAVES . There is strong evidence that life (human and otherwise) may be able to detect (or be affected by) radio waves.

By TOM JASKI

IN a recent editoriAl (August, 1959), Hugo Gemsbu:k called for a :serious ruppraisal of the elfec~ of radio 7&Vea oD human and animal physi-olonr. ID iew of the almo~t casual use of high-power radar and industrial rf be.atiDil' equipment, this is certainly a timely word of warning.

It ia DOt surprising then that the Air Force ia already keenly aware of theM problems, and hu a number of projecta onder way to di.;.cover the eXact dfec:tl of bigh-int.:n~ i ty radar pul-. and microwaves on human and anill'.al tisaue. These projects are being carried out at ou r major univeniti~, eac:b spec:i.aliz:ing in one particular fre-quency. For example. the p roject at t he un ivenity of California, under the direc:tioD ot Pro!. Charles Susskind, is primarily investi~ating thl! ~rfeoc:ts of :s-cm radar enel10'. Test subjects a1e mice, ants, and yeast cells.

Thetm.l effec:ts Of gnat importance, and therefore

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under intensive investigation, .are the thermal effects of such waves, and the~ have been measured rather precisely under a variety of conditions.

Using mice as subjects, it was found that near-lethal doses of radiation do not seem to cause any pathologic.al changu in them, and that the lethal effect is primarily an overtaxing of the mice's temperature-balancing system. I t was found that the major huting effect took place immediately under the skin, b\lt of cour:~e heat generated there is rapidly distributed through the body. The temp~:rature of the mice was moni-tored continuously. The photograph shows zoologis t Susan Prausnitz moni-toring the temperature of a mouse sus-pended in the wire cage right in front of the waveguide just visible on the left. The mouse is slowly rotated to in sure even radiat ion over the entire body. Death occurred in 60'/ of. the mice when a critical tempertre of 44.t c was rea~t:,d.

Other interesting finding3 include the

Zooloclot c:heek the temperature oi a moa..te ( ci.-. cled objed u .. J)eDded iD froDt of w ... ep.ide).

fact that radar waves appear to h:ne no silrJlilicant el!eet on Ule fertility o1 the male mice.. Tbe el!ec:ta of radar waves on the longevity o! the mic:e are currently beinc innetipted.

An intensive aeries of. experiments was carried out on cellular organiamll. such a.s yea.st cells, but. other than showing thermal effects, the experi-ment. were inc:onclua.ive. Similar ex-periments with insects such as ants delivered relatively miZU~r data. But one interesting item which emu~ was that the an~, normally moving every which way, in a Petri dish, tiJ'iU CJll li"e ''P i11 4 .r~ ~/.d, c:Uig11mg tJ&..;~ 47t-telii!CI4 pura.llel to th fi4/.d, apparently to minimiz.e the etrec:~.

The project is continuing, and more research on mice, ant.s .nd other ani-mals is contemplate-d. Psychological etrec:~ will be looked into. One promis-ing item in the ant experimenu was that the an~ which were exposed to 3-cm waves apparently loet the ability, at least temporarily, to communicate the source ot food to their f.d.lo .... s, aa anu usually do. It may be signiHcant that tlle large ants used have antennas which me.asure very nearty one-fourth the wavelength of the 3-cm radiation.

Incidentally, mice are so frequently used !or this kind of experimo:nt be-cause they are e&.'Jily handled, easily obtained and relatively inexpeDsive, while their physiology and metabolism bear a useiol resemblance to human c:otmterparu in some waya. The lile span of a mouse is limited, permit-ting experimenten to evaluate i'enetic effects over several generations.

.Meanwhile other service bre1:1chet are carrying out research program con-cerned with the el!ec:ta of radio waves on animal li!e, not nec:esaarily limited to radar f.requenciea. A public an-nouncement by scientiata at the Na-t ional Institute for Neurological Die-eases concerning the lethal etfecta of 388-mc radio waves on monkeys a lso shows there is gr1!Bt inter-eat in other f requencies and etrec:ta. beside.a thermal~

Some early reports As long ago as 1930, Nrunori claims

ELECTRONICS

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f ~9.:CT - " f:. Fis. 1-Cou.amaiU u....t this timple IM:Iup , _J;':J'' 1 yY 10 detN:t " radiation., !rom hunaan aubjecla. ~ I 4

to ha,e ~n evidence that the human indicate any poinu at which he mi~ht organism "radiates" and "reacts to" notice anything unusual. The subjects radio waves of 2.33 meters and its har- were not allowed to see the dial. At a monies--in other words: 129. 258, 387 particular frequency, varyin~ between and ~96 "!c. . 380 and 500 me for different subjects,

Th1s brmgs to mtnd the work of a they repeatedly indicated a point with man who started publishing articles on aln1o:st unbelievable accuracy (as many this kind of subject more than 35 years as 14 out of 15 times). ago. An Italian university professor Subsequent experiments with the named Cazz.a:malli placed human sub- same subjects showed that at the ''in-jects in a shielded room, aubjected them dividual.. frequency, s trange things to . higbfrequency radio waves, and were felt. Asked to describe the experi-

daamed to be able to record a "beat" ence, all subjects agreed there was a which. he received on a sitnple untuned definite "pulsinc'' in the brain, ringing

. receinr eonsisUDT of a ~alena crystal, in the ears and a desire to put their a small capacitor, antenna and aensitive teeth into the nearest experimeDter. 1alvanometer. Cauamalli's equipment, The oscillator in this case was putting u well as it can be determined !ron\ out only milliwatts of power, and waa his early nrticles, is shown in Fir. 1. placed several feet from the "ubject. The one item whi~h he never mention~, perhaps because he could not accurately determine it, is the power of hill tran:t-mitter. He published oscillograms pur-

por~ly showing variations of the -t>t>au when his subject. were emG-tionally aroused or engaged in creative efforts. Later experiments delivered much more startlinll' results: he found that .st>mt of his s ubjP.ds would halluci-n;.&te under the inftuence of high-fre-quency radio waves, which by then ranged all the way up to 300 me.

Tbe Cazzamalli experiments were carefully duplicated with mode,rn equip-moent. of much greater sensitivity than his. His "osciUatori telerrafiea" (pre. sumably a transmitter as used for wire-less telegraphy) was replaced with a w:ry modest Jow-power oscillator. The reason for this was twofold. Ia the first place, university authorities take a very dim view of experiments on human

~inp. even if these subjects are the scientists themselves, volunteering for the part. Second, a previous experiment had indicated in a rather startling way that power wu not required to evoke elfec:ts in the human nwvous system. In fact, there :seemed to be some ~ort of resonant fr~uency applicable to each individual huma.o..

ffiec+s on humans That uperil:nent was suggested by the

behavior of the monkeys we cited. Tht3e animals went through a sequence of

~havior which would indicate that lW>mething besides thermal elfects was operating. To discover if this "some-thing" was subjectively noticeable by an individualr a weak oacillator wa3 swept through the band from 300 to 600 me with the :requeat that the subject

Optic:.sl and growth efreck It wu not the first time that such

phenomena had been observed. Van EverdinR"en, a Dutch scientist, had dis-COI(..t'red many years a~o thllt radiation would affect the heartbeat of chicken

embryo~. when he was exp~rimenting with the effects of hiJ::h frequency radiation on growth (specifically work-in" toward any etfcct it might have on malignant growths). Van Everdingen used 1.8i5 me and 3,000 me and dis-covered that this kind of radiatiOn would change the optical properties of a glycogen S{)lution. Glycogen is a sub-stance which occurs very abundantly in chicken embryos, particularly at an early stage of development. It is also the subJtance which provides our mua-des with ener~y I Van Everdingen found that thill change of optical pola tiution had some conne-ction with tumor growth. He proceeded to re-rotate the polarization in extracts ob-tained from tumor-producing mice. When this optically "pure" aubstance wa$ injected into mice with malignant tumors, and thut mice wert kept 071 a diet free of animal {ott, tilts tumor tJ.oOKld cto. to grow. Only radiation at uhf or shf would produce these effects in the sub~tances he uJed.

But Van Everdingen was not the only one who discovered important 1acts about radiation on living tissues. Years before, a F1enchman named Lakhovsky claimed to have removed tumors !rom patients with high-frequency radiation treatments, and his book, The Secret of Life,. has a number of attestations in it from grateful patients who were cured. Lakhovsky stated that healthy plant growth is materially aided by

placing a copper ri!lg about 8 inc:hu in diameter and supported on an inaulat-ing woode.n stic:k (Fig. 2) a round the planL S~Jed tumerous growths on plants disappeared within such a ring. Lakhovsky's experiment with planb has been duplicated succeufully. But then wt should also Dote that the same kind of thing has been done by a group of devout citizens using group prayer!

But the people who have publi~hed the most data on the subject of uhf radiation effecta on animals and human subjects are the Rus3ians. In Bio{L.ico, the Russian biophysics journal, a aden tist named Livshib published two sur-vey articles on the work that had been done in this field by 1958 ano..l 1959. They are too extensive tG repeat in great de-tail here, but some of the more impre.t sive highligh\:1 wiU be reported.

.Many experiment. were carried out on animals with conditioned reftexes and one by Glezer showed that a weax uhf field would inhibit the conditioned reftex, indicating that some inhibition of the cortex wu laking place.

As in Van Everdingen's experiment with chicken eggs, Pardzhanid.ze showed that the EEG's of rabbits were d ru-tically changed when the animals were subjected to a uhl field. Bludova, Kurilova and Tikhonova showed that the field produced an in~ of sen!i-tivity in the retina. and s imultaneously reduced the area of color sensitivity. It is interesting to speculate how this wuuld correlate with the Land effects. (Land, of Polaroid camera fame, has shown recenUy th.at our concepts of three-color vision may well be false, and that color vision seems to depend primarily on the presence of two images stimulated by two different frequencies of light!)

Turlygin similarly showed that the sensitivity of the eyes of dark-adapted subjects at. marginal levels was in creased as much as 1009'o by the pres-ence of a uhf field.

Nerve effeds Of importance in the light of Lak-

hovsky's claims ia the experiment by

Fls. 2--.4. copper rins, elsht inehe. LD diameter, ..-em to in~prove plant lfi'OwUa (after photosraph in Srea o/ l.i/e br

Lakhonky).

Grigcn!va, whQ showed that short eX posures to uhf would expedite th~ re-growth of severed nerve tissue, while prolonged exposure would suppress the n:growth.

A fact discovered many years a&o is that a uni field will have an analgesic (pain.reduc inl!{) effect on nerves, and radiation therapy of patien ~s Wtth painful diseases such as arthritis is iairlv common ora.ctice here and aoroad. ! i th.e fieid get~ very intense, the sitt:a tion reverses, and the erfects on the nervu can be extremely p::linft:l, as Le!ledinskii repor ts.

~umerous experiments are cited which des! with the simultaneot:s erfect.3 oi variou:l kinds of drugs, stim ulants and toxins, and uhf fields. :\boy o! t he$e deal with very specific reactions and conditions, and any gen~ra!i:ta.tion would be rather meaningless. One par-ticularly wa.s of interest because oi its relation to the experiments of the late Pavlov, the !ather of the condi tioned aftex. This expniment shows that the field increues the secretion oi hista

min~ in the. stomach, and in related experiments that the secretion of diges-t ive juice which wa:~ llrtilicially stimu-lattd by such ,]rugs as atropine is mater ially rtdu..:ed by the field. C!o~er to home, we find that Hugh

Fleming at Oregon State Coll~ge car-ritd 01H experiment$ on ;he erfecu o! hign.frequency field~ on rn:croor;:-an-isms. Flendng u::~ed racliat !on at ire qu~nde~ varying from 10 meters to 90 em ( 30 to 270 me). One rest; It wa~ that the rau of growth of cells w ill inc~ease to a ~ertain power level, and then will 5n:lrply decrease. Time of txposure l!nd conductivity of the medium are impor-tan: variables (a3 was also discov~red

~y \'an ,Everdingen, w~o al,;o found the ~i.Jco4itil ol the medium to be most im-portant).

Summing it up ~ow what does all this mean in terms

of )l r. Gernsback's warn:ng statement'? If you consider the few items we have

been able to GUote (more detail can be found in the art ides cited in che bibli-OlCriolphy), it is ob1ious ~hat we are in some way susceptible to radio waves, and that our susceptibility is net neces. sarily limited to a particular frequency. :S or a re large amounts oi puwer re--..uired to produce some oi the effe