Preface
This is a story about what happened in the world I experienced and in me during my life-long journey through a part of science-land, the part that relates to the ability of electromagnetic fields to make people sick. What initially appeared to be a simple problem turned into something immensely complicated, and then turned again to reveal something I never expected, that the truth of the matter depended on values and assumptions. Not completely, but enough to guarantee that there will never be final answers, only differences in perspective. I don’t mean something real that can be looked at in different ways, I mean different perspectives regarding what is real. Does my discovery apply to other areas? I think so, because power, fear, self-interest, and solipsism, which were at least as important as scientific laws and observations in determining what was generally accepted as the truth, aren’t unique to questions involving health hazards of electromagnetic fields.
I wrote about a search for an explanation of why the issue of health risks has been contentious, not about a search for truth within or about myself. Nevertheless, I could not omit me. What went on inside me is a central issue because I was the protagonist in a conflict involving the culture of science and the interests it serves. So I included the tensions that I experienced and my attitude about things, but I stayed on the periphery as much as possible, consistent with my purpose.
Herodotus wrote his history of the Persian wars “to show why two peoples fought with each other.” John Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify God’s ways to man.” I tried to express my motivation succinctly, but all I could come up with was “to give information” or “to tell a story about how science really works,” which I decided were inadequate explanations of my motivation. So I reached into my heart and asked myself why I actually did it, and I found that I had many motivations. The most frivolous was that I was sick and tired of books in which the scientist’s accomplishments were portrayed as heroically unemotional, and science itself was depicted as the highest form of knowledge, like Plato’s forms. It had been my experience that scientists were no more noble or unbiased than anybody else. Sometimes they didn’t really know what they thought they knew, and when they did know something and could prove it, the knowledge was always a mixture of blessing and curse because it helped some people but hurt others. Occasionally there was a book that captured something that looked familiar, for example, James Watson’s The Double Helix. But his story involved a relatively simple problem, the mechanics of a molecule, so his book could provide only a small window into how science actually worked. I wanted to write a story that told a larger version of the truth. By the time I recognized this motivation I had already decided that there are versions of the truth—in fact I had decided that, in science, there were only versions of the truth, some better than others.
The second motivation is more complicated. As a professional scientist, I write for a living. Sometimes I describe experiments that I performed, but I also write grant requests and modify manuscripts to accommodate reviewers. I love to write about what I understand to be the truth. I dislike writing what I think grant reviewers think is the truth, so they will fund my work, or what the reviewer says is the truth, so that the editor will publish the manuscript. I have written several hundred grant applications and publications about electromagnetic fields, also called EMFs. Each dealt with only a tiny piece of the overall picture, and most were compromised to a certain extent by the forced inclusion of the truth of others. So I said to myself, “I’m going to write a book about EMFs that includes the whole truth as I understand it, and only the truth that I understand,” and I set out to see if I could do it.
Other motivations came more directly from my life. My concern with EMFs had always been from multiple perspectives. As a physicist, my gaze was objective because the conventions of physics required it, and I saw EMFs as something to be harnessed. When I learned biology it became possible for me to see the mystical side of EMFs, that they make life possible. After I became a lawyer, I saw how EMFs could be a means of injustice, like pliers in the hands of a torturer. I didn’t set out to write a book that extolled or condemned EMFs, or maintain that one frame of reference was more fundamental than another. Rather, I wanted to write a story that integrated my different perspectives to see if they added up to something coherent. My hypothesis was that they did, and I did the experiment to test the hypothesis.
Another motivation was to tell a story about having a career in science while still remaining free. A recurring theme in my conversations with students involves how they would go about making a living doing research. In graduate school, the direction of the work is chosen by the student, based on his choice of mentor, and it proceeds under their joint control. After graduation, however, the student becomes an employee and must do the bidding of management. When the research is controlled by others, the process is far less exhilarating. Students realize this, and they worry whether their academic pursuits are nothing more than preparation for life as a slave. Traditionally, stories about scientists who escaped being controlled by others, and made a life pursuing goals that they chose, involved larger-than-life figures like Paul Dirac or Albert St. Gyorgyi. I have not achieved their fame, but I have led a successful life, based on what I counted as important. I wanted to fill a need that I perceived by telling a story about a man in which it is perfectly clear that he takes charge of his destiny by means of the choices he makes, none of which are heroic, makes a life in science, and remains free.
Another important motivation was the need for a more inclusive approach regarding the intended consumer of knowledge about EMFs. I didn’t make headway by writing only scientific articles that were intended for experts. Whenever I wrote about an experiment in which EMFs produced some kind of a cellular change, an industry expert soon appeared and wrote about how he had performed an improved version of my experiment but had not observed the cellular change. This state of affairs seemed cacophonous to those outside the EMF orbit, as if the science had not yet ripened to the point where the remedial steps needed to protect human health were clear. So people would say, “More research is needed to resolve the issue,” and then move on to something else. I had been writing for a small polarized audience consisting of truth seekers and truth deniers, and I realized that a better tack would be to explain the cacophony to a larger audience by telling the story that was behind the controversy rather than to try to resolve it on the basis of facts presented to scientists.
“You should write a book that’s factual,” I was told, one that “proves EMFs really cause cancer.” But I wanted to write about something much bigger than that. I wanted to write about what “causes cancer” means, and how we know whether there is any truth to the phrase when we apply it to a particular situation. I learned a lot about these issues in the context of EMFs. I came to see that when we try to understand what EMFs do to people the same way that we understand physical forces such as gravity, we are like a man looking near a lightpost for something that he lost somewhere else. No sane person thinks about breaking the law of gravity, but many apparently sane people smoke. That alone tells you that there’s something fundamentally different between physics and the laws of disease causation. I wanted to explore that difference in the most honest way possible. I decided that way would be to describe particular events I experienced so that you could see and hear what took place, as if I had a video camera and tape recorder, to explain what the events meant to me at or around the time they actually occurred, and then to place all this in a narrative that would allow the deep themes to emerge.
When people read about EMFs in a newspaper or magazine and start to worry about the antenna or powerline near their home, what they often do is call the company and ask about safety. Invariably they are told, “Our equipment exceeds all applicable state and federal rules and regulations.” Often that ends the matter, but some people remain skeptical and so they contact a federal or state agency. They are told that the company is in compliance, just as it said. What happens in all of these cases is that the question “Is it safe?” is metamorphosed into the question, “Does it meet the applicable standards?” which is an entirely different question. Power companies love state regulatory commissions, and cell telephone companies love the Federal Communications Commission. Why? Because companies can use their political influence to set standards so low that they can be easily and economically met. Then the companies can honestly say, “Our equipment meets all applicable standards.” I wanted to make it possible for people to see the situation in a new, more realistic way. EMF standards represent a political choice, not an objective scientific determination. That’s a big part of the truth that I wanted to write about. This was not because I wanted to serve as the vanguard for a movement to raise the standards. I don’t know if they should be raised; maybe they should be lowered. It was because the new way of looking at the situation is more truthful.
The law doesn’t know what to do with science. It just doesn’t. It allows any Tom, Dick, or Harry with an M.D. or a Ph.D. to testify in court as an “expert,” and whatever he says is “true” is regarded as such. The only gatekeeper for the process is the trial judge. But how does he know what is reliable? Like the lawyers, the last time he studied science was in high school. This situation couldn’t be more perfect for the power companies and cell telephone companies, for the law firms that represent them in court, and for the law firms that sue the companies. What these law firms call “science” is a distortion specifically designed to promote victory, not truth or justice; the firms are to science what Rush Limbaugh is to dialogue. The scientific testimony offered on all sides in the EMF cases for the last thirty years has been nothing more than eristic, and not the principled version as in Protagoras or Gorgias, but the kind we get from Euthydemus or Dionysodorus. I finally reached the point where I decided—another motivation—that I had a responsibility to show how our legal system often prevents reliable science from entering the mainstream of society. To tell this story you have to be a working scientist, a lawyer, and a person who is free to do what he thinks best. I met those criteria, and I don’t know of anybody else who has, so I felt qualified and responsible. I’m not trying to solve the underlying problem—nobody commissioned me to do that—just to illuminate it.
EMFs were an obscure, uncharted area when I started to study them. Perhaps I found the area attractive because I had little competition, or perhaps because I sensed that EMFs were important, I don’t know which. I did my first experiments in 1972 and found EMF-induced effects in rats and mice. At that time, there was no ready explanation in terms of prevailing theories for what I observed, nor any obvious application. The experts told me that there was no “persuasive” evidence that such effects could occur and therefore that there was something wrong with my experiments. For a long time I thought “persuasive” was the most hideous word in science because it was a presumably objective way of expressing a completely subjective sentiment. Then I came across “junk science,” and I had to admit that was even more hideous.I began to keep notes of who said what regarding EMFs, and why. Around the time that I was interviewed for 60 Minutes I began to suspect that my experiences were important. I taped Mike Wallace the day he came to our lab to tape me. No one told me, “You ought to write about that,” I just started to do it, and I began collecting a vast amount of material, letters, reports, minutes of meetings of state and federal agencies, and documents that had never been intended to see the light of day but which I obtained as a result of Freedom of Information requests. Sometimes the information came directly from the agencies, other times it came as a result of appeals from decisions denying information; my biggest single haul was four thousand pages of correspondence and reports from the Department of Energy, which arrived after I appealed to Vice-President Mondale. So, I didn’t have to trust too much to memory. All I had to do was decide what to put in and what to leave out.
First, what to put in? Well, the book is about a man on a journey through the world of science. In the beginning he doesn’t even realize that he’s on a journey. Instead, his metaphor is one of science as a beautiful object, to be possessed. He sees that science can be selfish and tawdry, but that doesn’t diminish his love for it. One day he chooses a destination and begins heading toward it, not knowing if he will ever arrive, but completely content with simply the process of traveling. In essence, then, the book is about a man’s growing understanding of the world of science. So I put in the moment in my youth when I realized that the train of life was barreling by and I had to jump on somewhere, and I picked physics. I put in Sam Ensor, Father Wallner, and Nietzsche because they taught me important things about how to travel. I put in Dr. Becker, of course. I never really knew whether he liked me, but he was the greatest man I ever knew; it was during the seventeen years I worked in his laboratory that I learned to be a scientist, and discovered my destination. I put in stories about people who helped me along the way, and about those who tried to stop me from going where I was going. Trying to stop me from doing what I wanted to do, it turned out, was roughly like trying to stop a bull by waving a red flag.
What to leave out? Well, I’m not writing a textbook so I left out all of the deep science and math of EMFs. I’m not writing a legal treatise so I left out almost all of the legal mumbo-jumbo of the court cases in which I was involved. I didn’t include anything unless I had a good reason to put it in, and I refrained from indulging in sentimentality.
At one level, this is a book about who was right about the health hazards of EMFs, and it turned out that I was right. I don’t see the point of being right if you don’t write about it, and now I’m mature and confident enough to do that. But it’s dangerous to describe yourself as a victor because you run the risk of sounding arrogant or impudent. I did the best I could to leave out hubris, or at least to deflect attention from it.
My greatest achievement is that I’ve been married to the same woman for more than forty years, all four of our children earned advanced degrees in law, science, or business, are happily married, and we all still love one another very much. I put in almost nothing about this because it did not directly serve my story even though my family was as essential to my life as the air I breathed.
I intended to write a work of nonfiction literature about what scientists actually do in the laboratory, why, and how lawyers use them in courts. I felt that my most serious responsibility to the reader was to tell the truth. Second-most, was my responsibility to avoid trivial matters; otherwise, the story would drown in a sea of countless insignificant details. The distinction that really mattered to me was between what was true and important, and what wasn’t.
One narrative consequence of my sense of the truth is the use of compression (time, characters, or both) to express in a single story the meaning of a related series of experiences. For instance, I saw many testifying experts exhibit facets of a particular kind of scientific disorder. Combining their behaviors (in Anthony Erdgas) made possible a coherent presentation of how such people think and talk. Similarly, Patty Ryan was the unitary embodiment of a species of defense lawyer against whom I fought, and the chapter on risk assessment was based on contacts with many power-industry contractors. In these cases, compression required me to alter names in order not to misrepresent the words of real people. The reader can see in the index those few of the 253 characters who have been given invented names.
When I look back on my life I am amazed at how fortunate Iʼve been. I’m the son of a working-class Italian immigrant, yet there are few people whose education has been as broad and deep as mine. I can’t remember a day when it wasn’t a joy to go to work in the laboratory. While working there I discovered something new and important about nature. I also learned something about myself. I’m not weak. I’m not a coward. I’m not afraid to speak to power about my understanding of the truth. I did it. With each controversy I became even happier and more energized, and I survived to write this story. I hope you find it edifying.