Going Somewhere: Truth About a Life in Science

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Overview

What this book is about

This is Marino's memoir of about forty years (1956–2010) spent on one question: can man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs) make people sick? The fields he means come from power lines, radar, antennas, microwaves and cell phones. He was Robert Becker's lab partner, the co-author of their 1980 book Electromagnetism & Life, and one of the two scientists the power industry blamed for starting the power-line health controversy. The book follows him from a working-class childhood in Philadelphia, through physics and law school, into Becker's lab. It then covers his first animal experiments, a long run of hearings, lawsuits and committee fights, and his later work on how the human brain detects EMFs. He describes his aim as telling "how science really works". It is written as literature more than as a textbook. There is no maths or technical detail, and almost no legal jargon.

Marino makes three main claims: - EMFs affect living things. Fields far too weak to heat tissue still change growth, stress hormones, immune cells, the eyes and brain activity in animals and people. He thinks the body detects an EMF through specialised cells, as it does light or sound, and treats it as a stressor. Chronic stressors tax the body's adaptive capacity and raise the odds of disease, not of one disease but of whatever disease a person is prone to. - Inconsistent results are the real finding. Identical experiments keep producing opposite results: more growth in one run, less in the next. Marino argues this is not error. Each living organism follows its own "internal law", so averaging across animals or people, the method borrowed from physics, cancels out real effects. He calls this "consistent inconsistency". - "Truth" about EMF risk is decided by power, money, values and law, not by physics. He documents, often from his own Freedom of Information Act requests, how parts of the system shaped what counted as "the science". His list includes the power utilities and their research institute (EPRI), the Department of Energy, the Navy, the CIA and Defense Department on microwaves, the National Academy of Sciences, the NIH grant system, the FDA, the WHO and Motorola. In his account, EMF safety standards are "a political choice, not an objective scientific determination". The question "Is it safe?" gets quietly turned into "Does it meet the applicable standards?", and regulators then write the standards.

The second half of the book deals with how courts handle science. It covers the "general acceptance" (Frye) rule, the Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert decision, paid expert witnesses, and what "cause" means in law. Marino ends by proposing an "environmental science" of EMFs made of two parts: imperfect knowledge (about as certain as medicine) and justice. Experts, he argues, should investigate every possibility, interpret the evidence honestly and disclose all reasonable inferences. People can then choose for themselves how much health risk to accept, as they do with smoking.

The book uses a lot of literary devices. There are Platonic-style dialogues with a risk assessor and with industry figures, dream sequences in an underworld modelled on the Odyssey, a chapter of letters to an old physicist friend, a mock Broadway number about a defence lawyer, and satirical hypotheticals. The Preface says some characters are composites with changed names, including the industry expert "Anthony Erdgas", the defence lawyer "Patty Ryan" and the figures in the risk-assessment chapter. The book's Index, which flags the invented names, is not in this EPUB. Several other names, such as the "Zapper" radar-gun company, also appear to be pseudonyms. So read personal accusations as Marino's account, not as verified record.

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Key Ideas

The core frameworks and findings

EMF standards are political, not scientific (Preface)

Power companies "love" state utility commissions, and cell-phone companies "love" the FCC, because political influence lets them get standards set low enough to meet cheaply. "Our equipment meets all applicable standards" then stands in for "it is safe". Marino says he does not know whether limits should be tighter. His point is that what counts as the truth depends on who chooses.

Early animal findings (1972–1980s), in his own lab

Rats kept for a month in an EMF developed "secondary glaucoma" (17%, right eye only, against 0% of controls), but the effect did not recur when he repeated the experiment. In mice, 20% of cancer cells had defective chromosomes after EMF exposure, against 5% without it. Rats had lower gamma globulin (an immune protein) after 3 days. Corticosterone, a stress hormone, changed after a month. Over three generations of mice kept in a 60 Hz field from a wall outlet, fewer pups were born and survived, and the survivors were stunted, the first generation reaching half normal adult size. When he repeated this multigenerational study, the exposed mice grew larger. He takes the reversal as a sign that living systems produce novelty, not as proof of error.

The Phillips/Battelle case: "averaging away" an effect

Richard Phillips ran the industry/Department of Energy replication at Battelle in Richland, Washington. Marino got the internal documents through FOIA only after appealing to Vice-President Mondale, and says they show:

EMFs as a nonspecific stressor

Building on Becker, Howard Friedman's rabbit brain studies and Hans Selye (who told Saturday Review that EMFs can cause stress), Marino compares disease to a balloon popping as more stressors are added. In his view the disease an EMF produces depends on the person and their other exposures, so no single "signature" disease should be expected. In the literature review he wrote for Electromagnetism & Life, the same kinds of effects (heart rate, neurotransmitters, brain electrical activity) appeared at both power-line and radar frequencies. He concluded there were "no uniquely important frequencies, signature biological changes, or tissues that were especially vulnerable."

Industry and military conflicts of interest are the book's backbone

Among the episodes Marino describes:

Microwaves, cataracts and secrecy (the Zaret chapter)

Ophthalmologist Milton Zaret found cataracts, starting as a roughening at the back of the lens, in microwave engineers, always in the eye they used to look through a waveguide peephole. He also found them in radar, antenna, microwave-oven, walkie-talkie and cathode-ray-tube (CRT) workers who never felt heat, which challenged the military's "thermal-only" safety standard.

Pioneers of bone-healing electricity took different paths

Andrew Bassett and Arthur Pilla built the commercial pulsed-EMF bone stimulator. Marino infers from later litigation documents that they selectively dropped unfavourable dog data from a paper they published in Science. Carl Brighton's wired systems lost in the market. In Marino's own experiments, bone cells responded just as well to a plain sine wave as to Pilla's "special" signal, and old literature showed bone grows in response to almost any irritant. Becker used silver electrodes to cure infected nonunions (fractures that failed to heal, with bacteria in the bone), and warned against routine EMF treatment, especially in children, because "How do they know they're not going to start a cancer?"

How the NIH funding system shapes what gets studied

Marino describes these insider practices:

What "cause" means differs between physics, epidemiology and law

From the famous Palsgraf case in tort law, Marino takes the idea that in law "cause" is one but-for cause picked out for policy reasons. In the lab, a cause is a factor whose removal removes the effect, with all else held constant, which can never be shown outside the lab. So, he argues, cancer can only have "predisposing factors". He treats questionnaire (epidemiological) studies as weak evidence ("association" is not cause; for cell phones he calls epidemiology "the palest possible shade of green"). He also calls relying on them unethical, because it means waiting for exposed people to fall ill: "involuntary human experimentation". He prefers animal studies and human laboratory studies done with consent.

Burden of proof and the two kinds of error

In his moot-court argument (Winship) and later at the NIH's 1998 working-group meeting in Dallas, Marino argues that how certain one must be is a value choice. Wrongly calling EMFs safe harms residents' health; wrongly calling them unsafe costs utilities money. Whoever sets the burden of proof decides the "facts". At that meeting, physicist "Charles Pick" said it would be better "for the overall stability of society" to call power lines safe until certain otherwise.

Courts, experts and the Frye → Daubert shift

Marino recounts the Frye "general acceptance" rule, which came from a 1920s lie-detector murder case (in his telling, by a judge whose daughter was treated for cancer with the fraudulent Oscilloclast). The rule let judges exclude new EMF evidence. It ended with Daubert (June 28, 1993): scientific knowledge is the product of a method, not of authority. His rule of thumb is that a judge should ask how the expert knows, and the jury should decide what he knows. He names four kinds of "mistaken experts":

Police radar guns and cancer

He describes 15 officers' cases: The test case was lost after the judge excluded all animal evidence as "not generally accepted". The jury deferred to the defence oncologist, but a juror said they "would like to see these guns tested for safety". The St. Petersburg, Florida police department stopped using traffic radar because of its officers' cancers.

Cell phones and the head

In Marino's reasoning, part of a phone's EMF "does not travel to the base station but goes in the opposite direction and enters the user's head and is absorbed by the user's brain". Since the brain is an electrical organ, he calls it prudent to find out whether that interferes with how it works. If phones alter brain function, a claim that they are "completely safe" is false and continuing to make it is unjust, even without direct proof of disease. He dismisses the WHO's large case-control study of phone users and brain cancer, led by Elisabeth Cardis, as involuntary human experimentation. In a Motorola brain-cancer case, the plaintiffs' lawyers argued that full disclosure would have led prudent users to stop using phones "at least with the antenna held directly against their head". Marino accuses:

His later brain research: the brain detects EMFs within seconds

Using recurrence quantification analysis (RQA), a nonlinear method from Zbilut and Webber, Marino reports a patented way to show that each subject's EEG (brain-wave recording) changes when a weak EMF is switched on. The protocol was 2 seconds on and 2 seconds off, 100 times, about 200 seconds in total, or "less than four minutes" of phone use. He calls the effect "as reproducible as gravity". His findings: Earlier, averaging-based spectral analysis had shown detection in only 11 of 19 subjects, which review panels dismissed as "inconsistent". He names industry-aligned EEG studies (Krause, Fritzer, Inomato-Terada, Roschke, Wagner, Kleinlogel, Hamblin) that he says "averaged away" opposite individual responses.

The NIEHS RAPID program ended in a pre-set verdict (Marino's account)

Congress gave $40 million to the NIH's environmental-health institute (NIEHS) under director Kenneth Olden, to settle the power-line cancer question. At the 1998 Dallas meeting, the experts voted 16–8 (3 abstaining) that the immune studies did not convincingly show an effect. Marino writes, citing an NIH insider: Marino's own RAPID-funded study found that exposed mice's immune systems differed from controls at >95% confidence across 10–175-day exposures at 1 and 5 gauss, but only with a statistical method that avoids averaging.

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Chapter by chapter — click to expand

§ Preface ▾

Why he wrote it. Scientists are no more noble than anyone else. Standards are political. The law "doesn't know what to do with science". Industry experts always "improve" and fail to replicate his experiments, which leaves the public hearing "more research is needed".
His sources: taped interviews (including Mike Wallace), minutes and letters, and FOIA material, including 4,000 pages from the Department of Energy released after an appeal to Vice-President Mondale.
Composite characters and changed names (Erdgas, Patty Ryan, the risk assessors).

§ Part I — Growing Up: 1956–1974 ▾

§ 1. Starting Out ▾

West Philadelphia childhood among the power poles. Sputnik turns him to physics. A classmate's death from cancer ("It's a mystery, nobody knows").
Nearly failing calculus under Sam Ensor at St. Joseph's College. Jesuit logic from Father Wallner ("Always do the right thing… You must figure it out for yourself"). Early doubts: physics books never mention life.

§ 2. Incubation ▾

At RCA he measured microwave beams without thinking about his own exposure. A lecture by Herman Schwan on "nonthermal" effects on blood cells.
A light-bulb test where his boss asked him to change the result to suit a contract: "how many things that I had read… had been written by people who needed their jobs."
Graduate school at Syracuse. He meets his wife Linda. Biophysics under Charles Bachman. Hired by Robert Becker at the Syracuse VA hospital.

§ 3. Warrior ▾

Becker's program: salamander limb voltages, nerves as the regeneration signal, bone's "transistors", the psychiatric admissions and geomagnetic field study, bone growth from implanted currents.
Marino's first work: water compartments in bone, electron spin resonance, copper from tap water, proof that bone is piezoelectric (even 800-year-old bone). He shows Bassett's collagen-banding result was a pH artefact.
Becker's stories: Bassett's unacknowledged Scientific American article; the Semmelweis parable about pioneers being ignored; Becker's debts to Soviet researchers and to Szent-Györgyi.
A Dirac lecture and Schrödinger's What Is Life?; Rachel Carson attacked by industry. PhD 1968.

§ 4. A Legal Turn ▾

A stone quarry near his rural home: the town attorney is also the company's lawyer. At the hearing, a paid acoustics professor testifies the noise is "rustling leaves" (65 dB) and a seismograph expert reports "zero" vibration. Marino is carried out by police.
His lesson: experts are advocates for whoever pays. He enrols in law school. The Palsgraf tort-law class: legal "cause" is chosen by policy among countless but-for causes.

§ 5. Beginner ▾

Becker's electrical "dedifferentiation" of frog red blood cells, and why cells in a dish cannot prove it. Brighton's reduction of electrotherapy to an oxygen "drug".
History of electromedicine: Franklin, Mesmer, Galvani vs Volta, Perkins's sham metal "tractors", the 1910 Flexner Report and the rise of drug companies, Abrams's Oscilloclast exposed by Millikan.
Marino's idea that EMFs, not bioelectricity, might be the key. His first rat-leg EMF experiment.

§ 6. Knowing ▾

Becker grows partial limbs in rats. Lionel Jaffe calls it "plain ordinary fraud", then apologises.
Acupuncture demonstration and NIH-funded measurements of acupuncture points (six papers, then funding cut).
Becker's cancer cluster: eight cancer cases among neighbours in line of sight of hilltop radio towers. Becker's 1972 Technology Review warning about the whole North American population's exposure.
BHT, a Cheerios preservative, "deemed safe" by the FDA. The safety study came from the chemical's own manufacturer. Marino's mouse experiment on BHT. An imagined cross-examination of the quarry expert.

§ 7. EMFs ▾

Feynman on the "mystery" of forces. Frank Brown's worm-and-magnet experiments. Presman's Electromagnetic Fields and Life (effects from environmental EMFs, natural EMFs inside the body, and EMFs as a means of communication between organisms).
Friedman's rabbits: EMF stress activates a latent brain virus.
Marino's results: glaucoma in rats, chromosome damage in mouse cancer cells, lowered gamma globulin.

§ 8. A Long Day ▾

The New York Academy of Sciences meeting on electricity in biology (Sept 1973). Becker's keynote on the "control system", with a warning about "possible induction of malignant cellular changes". Bassett uses EMFs on dogs.
Romero-Sierra: microwaves raised hens' egg laying but killed some birds. Allan Frey reports that some people can hear military radar pulses.
Marino's talk meets silence. Navy Captain Paul Tyler recruits Becker. A Jack Anderson staffer tells him about Moscow Embassy irradiation, Cecil Jacobson's chromosome findings in embassy staff, and the classified "Pandora" brain research. Hints that Becker was visited by the CIA.

§ 9. Wagging Tails ▾

The glaucoma result does not replicate. His insight: "the primary meaning of the experiments was the pattern, not the data."
The three-generation mouse study with 60 Hz from a wall outlet: fewer pups, higher deaths, half-size adults.
Moot court on Winship: why criminal and civil cases use different standards of proof (the cost of error). Law degree.
A county fight over roadside spraying of the herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T ("safe" because the EPA said so).
The Navy's ELF antenna: most of about 25 Navy-funded studies found effects, and power lines were stronger still. The New York power-line hearing begins after a utility engineer testifies that cows under lines "wag their tails".

§ Part II — Wandering: 1974–1980 ▾

§ 10. The Commission ▾

The two proposed 765 kV lines. Fluorescent bulbs lit under power lines. Headaches at a million-volt test line, and engineers there reporting joint pains. A Johns Hopkins team found no worker effects while a Russian report called long exposure hazardous.
"BHT logic": industry calls things safe when animals show nothing, so it must accept harm when animals do show effects.
13 days of cross-examination. Schwan's cross-examination ("Whenever an experiment was negative, I was not further interested"). Morton Miller praises a Wisconsin study, then disowns it.
Commission chair Kahn is replaced by Berlin. Governor Carey: "We need the jobs, we need the power." A perjury smear is timed with a press release.
The hearing officer's "Marino lacks credibility" decision turns out to be ghost-written by Asher Sheppard (found via FOIA). Marino wins a defamation suit.
60 Minutes with Mike Wallace ("electric smog"; "They're doing it. It happens every day").
The final order approves the already-built north–south line but widens its right-of-way, rejects the east–west line, and taxes utilities to fund research.

§ 11. Monsters ▾

Multigenerational stunting confirmed. Corticosterone shows EMF stress. The VA receives anonymous complaints and grants are cut.
EPRI under Chauncey Starr funds friendly investigators. Dwight Spieler's booklet ("risk no more than a sunburn from a flashlight"). Robert Flugum at the Department of Energy.
The second multigenerational run gives bigger mice. Phillips's twin experiments, the prostate and corticosterone manipulations, the tiny cages (see Key Idea 3). FOIA via Schlesinger and Mondale.
The Frye rule first used to exclude him (in a farmer's power-line case). His "philippic" at the Bioelectromagnetics Society.

§ 12. Risk ▾

A Socratic dialogue with risk assessor Spieler: risk assessment is persuasion, "a counterfeit version" of courtroom advocacy with no standard, adversary or cross-examination. Marino calls the professional risk assessor "more like a drug dealer… than a scientist".
Tauschen's Nietzschean defence of the strong over "justice", applied to Starr.

§ 13. Dangers ▾

The Navy antenna moves to Michigan. Schwan's NAS committee finds "no clear evidence of harmful effects". Becker's committee report suppressed; Senator Nelson releases it.
The second NAS committee (Hastings) includes Schwan and Miller: "Powerline EMFs are almost a million times stronger than those from the antenna."
Hays tries to close the lab. Jimmy Carter's broken antenna pledge. Dan Rather's 60 Minutes with Becker ("a stacked deck").
Blood-sampling experiments show the animals respond symmetrically to the field being switched on or off. "Science… like a whore" editorial pitch.
Handler versus Saturday Review (Selye supports EMF stress). Handler's death.

§ 14. Zaret ▾

Microwave cataracts in engineers (peephole eye) and in servicemen and civilians using radar, antennas, microwave ovens, walkie-talkies and CRTs.
The CIA and Koslov, and the Moscow Embassy beam. The ambassador's cancer and secret blood tests. Data destroyed.
Harold Brown keeps the standard; the monkey colony is destroyed. Col. Budd Appleton's counter-studies. Justesen mocks Zaret with a tape recorder. A microwave-oven lawsuit reversed by a false affidavit.

§ 15. Bone EMFs ▾

The "3 B's" (Bassett, Becker, Brighton): 1P and 10P signals, Johnson & Johnson, Pilla's patents, dog data selectively reported in Science (Marino's inference), secret company at Columbia, FDA licence, IPO, patent suit.
Becker's silver-electrode "box" cures infected nonunions. His warning about cancer risk and treating children.
Marino shows signal shape doesn't matter and bone grows from any irritant (dog experiments from 1858). He splits from Becker's regeneration goal to study side-effects of EMFs.

§ 16. Turning Point ▾

High-voltage "aura" photography debunked (the "phantom leaf" images come from water droplets the leaf leaves on the film). Science rejects his paper but publishes a Pentagon-funded version with the same conclusion ("We know somebody there").
Stephen Perry's English Midlands study: suicides more likely at addresses with higher power-line fields. Marino then sours on questionnaire studies. Power companies and the New York commission refuse data for a statewide cancer study ("not politically possible").
The NIH radiology study section rejects him; the EPA passes money through the NIH. Mouse growth and stress confirmed.
Technology Review pulls his article after an ex-EPRI staffer joins. NIH: no federal money ever for EMF-disease work.
Writing Electromagnetism & Life with Becker: effects by body system, frequency independence, the "pointillist white rose" treatment of industry studies, chaos theory (Lorenz), the balloon/stress model, "There is no way to get to the bottom… because there is no bottom."

§ 17. Southbound ▾

Hays becomes VA research chief and closes the lab. Becker, 56, walks out. Equipment is scrapped. Offer from LSU Shreveport (Jim Albright).
An Odyssey-style underworld dream: his father, Handler, Cardozo with the corrupt hearing officer, Dirac and Schrödinger as jesters, Einstein regretting "that the highest form of knowledge was mathematical", and Bobo, the angel who gave mankind electricity and made people "electrical beings".

§ Part III — Detour: 1980–1994 ▾

§ 18. Floating ▾

Starting over at 41. Dialogues on how NIH grants really work: triage, lobbying reviewers, "propose one thing, perform another", the "Holy Trinity" (reductionism, mechanism, dose-response), and a "noble lie" that science is good in itself.

§ 19. Carbon Fibers ▾

Carbon-fibre knee-ligament implants from South Africa. Marino discovers they work by growing thousands of "tubes" of new tissue. Racehorse bowed-tendon trials (100+ horses).
A 145-patient controlled FDA trial ("the first controlled study in the history of orthopaedic implants", by his account). The FDA reviewer moves the goalposts ("I make the rules… and I can change the rules").
Devices "substantially equivalent" to pre-1976 products are deemed safe, like BHT. His application is denied. Lesson: "Everything begins with desire"; the FDA's culture is fear.

§ 20. Power ▾

Goadby v. Philadelphia Electric: Judge Clarence Newcomer halts a line over a poor man's land, the first injunction in the US against a power line on potential health grounds ($500 bond). The Third Circuit (company losses of $350,000/week) and Justice Brennan let it proceed. "Freedom could be reduced to arithmetic."

§ 21. Experts ▾

BC Hydro on Vancouver Island: residents fund Marino with bottle drives. The composite industry expert "Erdgas" (from a firm owned by ex-EPRI staff) testifies: melatonin reductions reported "sporadically" but return to normal, no dose-response. Marino testifies that exposure without consent amounts to "involuntary human experimentation", and explains laboratory vs real-world "cause".
Sandpiper Elementary, Florida: a school built beside a switchyard with its playground under the line. A mother's EMF meter pins under the wires. Epidemiologist "Keine" argues household fields cancel line fields ("vectorization") and dismisses the childhood-cancer studies. The judge bans the playground under the line but allows the buildings.
A microwave beam through a California home: Justesen argues people acclimatise (Russian workers showed a chronic-fatigue "neurasthenic syndrome"; Navy ships carry a thousand antennas). The case settles when Marino is admitted to cross-examine.
The "woman who gave birth to a sheep" parable about why nobody asks experts "How do you know?"

§ 22. Masters of Energy ▾

A Toronto utility summit. Executives speak on "Live Better Electrically", pacemaker warnings near lines, managing risk perception through "blue-ribbon committees" and the NAS, and a Texas school-district verdict of $25.1 million.
Phillips, now at the EPA, says the probability of hazard is "high" (effects on the nervous system, cells, circadian rhythm, probably reproduction, possibly cancer).
Marino's speech proposes a national body of generalists instead. The EPRI heir gives a "will to power" speech.
Marino says he would live beside a line only if he shielded the house ("which I know how to do, but most people do not"). The alpha-baboon analogy. "It wasn't the companies that corrupted science, it was science that corrupted the companies."

§ 23. Razzle-Dazzle ▾

Six power-line trials (New York, New South Wales, New Jersey, Texas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut) against defence lawyer "Patty Ryan". Nobel laureates (Glashow, Gilbert, Bloembergen, Yalow, Seaborg, Cormack) and Harvard/Yale physicists endorse "no hazard" in the media. Yale's Robert Adair says EMF research should be stopped. The WHO's Repacholi testifies.
The National Cancer Institute's "Stuart" testifies that if EMFs can't damage DNA they can't cause cancer. The judge: "The defendants' experts don't see any smoke. Neither do I." A musical parody of the defence strategy.

§ 24. Ipse Dixit ▾

Police radar and cancer: 15 officers' histories (see Key Idea 12). All animal evidence excluded under Frye; verdict for the manufacturer. The company's lawyer compares the guns to a "child's walkie-talkie or a nursery-room monitor". A draft EPA report calling EMFs "probable carcinogens" was withdrawn; the plaintiffs' lawyer suggested political pressure.
The origin of the Frye rule. Conversations about Daubert v. Merrell Dow (Bendectin) and the interests behind each friend-of-court brief: AAAS, NAS, the insurance industry, drug makers, the AMA, NEJM.
An imagined dialogue with Justice Blackmun: "It's harder to razzle-dazzle twelve men than it is only one." Frye ends 28 June 1993.

§ Part IV — Understanding: 1994–1998 ▾

§ 25. Szent-Gyorgyi ▾

Dinner with Albert Szent-Györgyi: life as electronic mobility, NIH "robots", "the cucumber is just like the man who eats it."

§ 26. Looking at EMFs I to I ▾

Life is an emergent property that physics cannot reach. "Where are the cells that allow EMFs to enter the body? Nobody knows!"
Arthritis cell work.
Human EEG studies at electric-blanket strength (11 of 19 subjects). Biology has "internal law" (Goethe). "Mother-worship" of physics and the averaging fallacy.
An oncologist friend explains a brain cancer as gene changes (p53, ras) and will not ask what caused them. He had once asked Marino about the Air Force's PAVE PAWS radar near his Cape Cod home.
EPA's six-lab chick-embryo replication splits. His lab-by-lab listing gives two positive and four negative, though he calls it a 4–2 "vote" to convict.
Congress's $40 million RAPID program. Gaming an NIH grant on natural-killer cells. Immune results at >95% confidence. "Snapshots" versus brain waves as "a book in which is written… every actual influence on the subject."

§ Part V — Return: 1998–2010 ▾

§ 27. Christopher ▾

Background: a leaked EPA draft calling EMFs carcinogens, and congressmen deterred by the cost of burying lines.
The Dallas RAPID meeting. Christopher's three criteria: plausibility/mechanism, dose-proportionality, coherence. Marino's objections: mechanisms regress without end, and only real effects can have mechanisms. The immune vote was 16–8. Juko: "Whatever your favorite result is, I can point to someone who found it and someone else who didn't"; EMFs "may act as a co-carcinogen".
The Grün parable (physicists persuaded that humans are machines). EMFs may raise the risk of all diseases, not only brain cancer.
Burden of proof. EPRI's sisters argue that "powerlines cure cancer" and that no precaution is justified. Olden forces a "safe" report; the 6–600 deaths-per-million estimate is omitted.

§ 28. Young Richman ▾

A billionaire tobacco/asbestos lawyer's circle. Dialogue defining "environmental science" as imperfect knowledge (as certain as medicine) plus justice.
The cell-phone argument (Key Idea 13): the head absorbs part of the signal; brain-function effects falsify "safe"; epidemiology is unethical here; animal and consented human lab studies are better. The EPA, OSHA and FDA all rely on animal data.
"Safe levels… are rules made by experts for the purpose of gaining freedom of action for their principals." Experts should investigate everything, interpret honestly, disclose, and let each person choose.

§ 29. Measure for Measure ▾

The "Keogh v. Motorola" strategy session: a brain surgeon using about 1,000 minutes a month, with headaches and blurred vision, then brain cancer. The allegations: misleading ads, an abandoned Motorola research program, and warnings that would have led users to stop "at least with the antenna held directly against their head".
Palsgraf causation, Motorola's duty to investigate and disclose, and Daubert's three requirements.
The lies that broke trust in experts: atomic tests, shoe-fitting X-rays for children, Tuskegee, DDT, thalidomide, Agent Orange.
The meaning of "can cause" differs for the biologist (t-test), the physicist ("force") and the epidemiologist (15 studies). The old lawyer: "Experts are never mistaken; they just disagree."

§ 30. Mind War ▾

The Motorola plaintiffs' experts are excluded at a Daubert hearing. An aspirin/Reye's-syndrome labelling analogy.
Why he turned to consented human lab work. The RQA method and patent. The findings in Key Idea 14. The "averaging" industry EEG studies.
Repacholi and Swicord. Cardis's questionnaire study. Spieler's "unknown unknowns" and Sheppard's attacks. The four kinds of mistaken experts. "The body is destroyed by its own obliquity… not by the detection of EMFs."

§ Epilogue ▾

His summary: inconsistency is the expected, real result for living things. Life has no deep equation. The NIH is like a church (study sections, mechanisms, "a curse from God, who cannot be sued").
Industry built a "socio-cognitive reality" that blocks general acceptance. Environmental science was "born" with Daubert but needs a lawyer who understands science to grow up. "Only uncertainty seems real."

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Practical Takeaways

What to actually do with this

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Read "complies with all standards" as a statement about regulation, not about healthMarino's central practical claim is that utilities and cell-phone makers influence the bodies that set the limits. When a company or agency says an antenna, line or device is compliant, the honest follow-up questions are "Is it safe, and how do you know?"

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Check who designed and funded a study before trusting a reassuring conclusionMarino's own rule, stated in the BC Hydro hearing: if a power company designed, paid for or analysed a study, he treats it as tainted. That is his opinion, but the Phillips documents are his evidence for why.

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Don't be reassured by "no effect on average"When some people or animals go up and others go down, averaging can show zero. Small studies, cramped or stressed controls, or excluding "odd" subjects can hide real effects. A failed replication is not, by itself, disproof.

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For children and schools:in the Sandpiper case even a sceptical judge kept children off the playground directly under the line. Becker urged no routine EMF bone therapy for children, because fast-growing cells could raise cancer risk. The book gives no safe distances. If buying a home or choosing a school, the book supports treating proximity to high-voltage lines, switchyards and big transmitters as a real unknown rather than a settled "safe".

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Cell phones and the head:Marino treats the radiation absorbed by the head as worth avoiding pending better evidence, and his EEG work says the brain registers phone-type fields within seconds. The book does not test or discuss headsets, earbuds or speakerphone. Keeping the transmitting phone away from the head follows from his reasoning, but it is our inference, not his advice.

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Microwaves and the eyes:Zaret's cases involved repeated close exposure: looking into waveguides, working with radar, standing at leaking microwave ovens (in one lawsuit, restaurant workers opened oven doors hundreds of times a day). Sensible lesson: don't make a habit of face-close, repeated exposure to microwave sources. The book supports that only through Zaret's clinical cases.

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Don't keep a continuously transmitting device against the bodyPolice officers rested always-on radar guns in their laps or had antennas at head height. Those cases were not won in court and the book does not prove causation, but Marino presents them as a warning pattern.

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People with pacemakers:even an industry speaker in the book said they should be warned to avoid going near power lines.

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If you ever face a utility, landowner or product dispute:get your own expert early. Make opposing experts explain how they know, not just what they believe; that is the practical meaning of Daubert. Put claims in writing. Use freedom-of-information requests, which is how Marino uncovered the ghost-written decision and the Phillips data.

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Shielding exists but isn't explainedMarino says he would shield a house next to a power line "which I know how to do, but most people do not". The book gives no method, so anyone acting on this needs a separate source.

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Going Somewhere: Truth About a Life in Science

Overview

Key Ideas

Contents

Practical Takeaways

See Also