 When it comes to the potential human health effects of cell phone use, sure, if you text excessively, you might end up with a crick in your neck or even a broken neck for you or someone you hit if you do it while driving. On the other hand, think of the countless lives that have been saved on the road because people are now able to so quickly phone in emergencies. But what about cancer? Since the turn of the century, there have been studies suggesting up to a doubling of brain tumor risk with long-term cell phone use on the side of your head where you use it to talk. That's important, since the radiation only really penetrates a few inches into your head. Looking from the back of someone's head or from the top, you can see why you might develop cancer on the one side of your head over the other. Since it's such a local effect, you can see why there are recommendations for like using the speaker function or using a hand-free headset, which can reduce brain exposure by a factor of 100 or more, and this includes Bluetooth headsets. This may be particularly important in children who have thinner skulls. Yeah, but cell phone radiation isn't like nuclear radiation. It doesn't damage DNA directly, like gamma rays from an atomic bomb or something. But it does appear to be able to damage DNA indirectly by generating free radicals. Out of 100 studies that have looked at that, 93 confirmed these oxidative effects of the kind of low-intensity radiofrequency radiation that comes out of cell phones. Okay, but does that oxidative stress translate out into DNA damage? Most studies found it did, finding signs of genotoxicity, damage to our genes, our DNA, or chromosomes. Yeah, but a lot of those studies were in a Petri dish or lab animals. I'm less interested in whether Mickey or Minnie are at risk. What about brain tumors in people? Yes, some population studies found increased cancer risk. Other studies did not. I wonder if the source of funding of those studies had anything to do with it. Some of the studies were funded by cell phone companies. Researchers suspected that studies would be less likely to show an effect if they were funded by the telecommunications industry, which has the obvious vested interest in portraying the use of cell phones as safe. So they ran the numbers, and surprise, surprise, found that the studies funded exclusively by the industry were indeed substantially less likely to report significant effects. Most of the independently funded studies showed an effect most of the industry-funded studies did not. In fact, had about 10 times fewer odds of finding an adverse effect from cell phone use. That's even worse than the drug industry. Studies sponsored by Big Pharma about their own products only had about four times the odds of favoring the drug compared to independent researches, though big tobacco still reigns supreme when it comes to big bias. Why do research articles on the health effects of second-hand smoke reach different conclusions? Well, turns out studies funded by the tobacco industry had a whopping 88 times the odds of concluding it was not harmful. So 10 or so times for telecom puts it more towards the drug industry end of the bias spectrum. There's conflicts of interest on both sides of the debate, though. If not financial, then at least intellectual, whether it's human nature to be biased towards evidence that supports your personal position. And so you'll see flimsy signs like this published where there appears to be a disturbingly straight line between the states with the most brain tumors and the states with the most cell phone subscriptions. But come on, one can think of lots of reasons why states like New York and Texas might have more brain tumors and cell phones than the Dakotas that have nothing to do with cell phone radiation. Sometimes you might even see outright fraud with allegations that academic researchers that authored two of those genotoxicity papers and this very review were involved in scientific misconduct, which they deny, pointing out that their lead accuser turned out to be a lawyer working for the telecom industry, and on and on. Whenever there's a trillion dollar industry involved, whether it's the food industry or the tobacco industry, the drug industry or the telecom industry, there's so much money involved that the science can get manipulated. Take the nuclear energy industry, decades of high-level institutional cover-ups as to the health consequences of Chernobyl, for example, with the official estimates of resulting health problems a hundred or even a thousand times lower than estimates from independent researchers. Was it just 4,000 who would eventually die from it, or nearly a million people? It depends on who you ask. And who happens to be funding whoever you're asking. That's why, when it comes to cancer, all eyes turn to the IARC, the official World Health Organization body that independently and objectively tries to determine what is and is not carcinogenic. We'll find out what they concluded about cell phones next.