Re:Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
by tzs on Friday May 27, 2016 @06:26AM
(#11785031)
> And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer.
...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it.
It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be.
If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with.
See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).
...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it.
It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be.
If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with.
Here is a submission from a little over a year ago about the fractal antenna aspect of DNA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447964
See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).