Re:Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
by alevskaya on Friday May 27, 2016 @01:34PM
(#11787549)
Cancer is complicated, but it emphatically is a _genetic_ disease, with inherited _genetic_ risk factors. Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation via cell stress (e.g. by promoting local inflammation) and cell proliferation, which in turn increases mutation load. There are subtler influences that could weaken the natural immunosurveillance of neopeptides by T-cells, but the importance of such surveillance in prevention is debated and perhaps more relevant in later-stage cancers. We may not fully understand such a complicated disease, but with modern sequencing we have a pretty good lens on the phenomenology of emergence of cancer, and that "subjective plausibility" is a working gut-bayesian framework that doesn't put a strong prior on ambient microwaves as a likely causative factor. Also, the field of RF- and microwave- induced cancer has been a long-running cottage industry producing bad science for many years now: i.e. studies with poor statistical power and poor replicability… so there’s a reason skepticism prevails on this point among biologists. It’s not just dogmatism: if anyone can get a replicable animal model we could dive into it to find new mechanisms… but these results always seem to sit at the edge of detection.
Re:Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
by dragonwriter on Friday May 27, 2016 @02:09PM
(#11787783)
> Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation
That may be typical, in that there are definitely lots of environmental influences that work that way, but its been established for at least on the order of a couple of decades that there are also influences that impact the emergence and development of cancer when potentially cancer-causing mutations exist, and that genetics while important to cancer, aren't the whole story and mechanism. Attributes of the extracellular matrix, which can definitely be affected by physical and chemical effects that are not mutagenic, are one of the established influences.
We certainly seem to understand many of the processes by which cell mutations are produced, but that's not the same as all of them, and, perhaps more importantly, what we do understand about how cancer is produced is that there are lots of factors besides cell mutation involved, and those of them that we do understand in general terms aren't understood in detail, and aren't sufficient to explain the entire process.
> But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
That seems more like a statement of subjective plausibility than a supportable statement of quantitative probability, and, moreover, in order to be relevant to the result seems also to falsely assume that it is necessary to "produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA" to alter the incidence of cancer. We already know that even when a potentially-cancer-inducing genetic mutation exists, various other non-genetic factors in the body (including qualities of the extracellular matrix around the cells which have the mutation) play significant roles in whether cancer actually develops. Its quite possible that if there is a cellphone-to-cancer link, that the mechanism doesn't involve changes in the frequency of genetic mutation at all, but affects on the body that affect the whether cancer manifests when a potentially-cancer-inducing mutation has arisen through other means.