Do mobiles cause cancer?

The unexpected buzz

Around 1989, somebody at Oftel brought a new digital cordless telephone close to his hearing aid and heard a buzz. The phone was a CT2. It was supposed to make talking easier, not interfere with the equipment that helped him hear.

The problem reached Stephen Temple at the Department of Trade and Industry. He asked British Telecom Research Laboratories to investigate. While they were at it, could they try the new GSM mobile phones too?

The answer was startling. In a room screened from outside radio signals, the researchers moved phones towards a hearing-aid wearer. The cordless phones caused trouble very close to the ear. GSM phones could cause it from much farther away. The noise was so uncomfortable that the tester pulled the hearing aid out.

This was radio interference becoming audible through the hearing aid’s electronics. Some aids resisted it well; others did not. Engineers had a real problem to solve, but it was a problem of unwanted noise. The cancer scare that followed would start with a quite different question.

A new phone, an old anxiety

Mobile phones were escaping from cars and finding their way into people’s hands. A transmitter that had once belonged to a bulky installation was now something you pressed against your head. As the phones shrank, aerials increasingly disappeared inside them.

Temple remembers two other things adding to the unease. Claims from the United States suggested that the bursts of radio energy used by TDMA systems might be more harmful than a continuous signal. He regarded this as propaganda against the technology.

Then there was the word “microwaves”. Parts of the industry used it for the new 1800 MHz band. The description was technically reasonable, but the association was unfortunate. People knew about microwave ovens, and some remembered worries about ovens leaking. The word brought those anxieties into a conversation about telephones.

None of this made explaining the new technology easier. And an entirely ordinary piece of engineering research was about to make the job much harder.

A proposal acquires a new meaning

A university team wanted to measure a mobile phone’s radio power accurately when somebody was using it. A handset on a production line and the same handset held against a head did not behave in quite the same way. The nearby head affected the aerial.

Temple thought the proposal worth supporting. Internal aerials made it harder to predict where the radio energy would go. Engineers needed to understand what the phone was actually doing in normal use. Better measurements were the point of the exercise.

The project appeared in a public list of research work. There the technical press spotted it and supplied a much more interesting explanation: the DTI must be worried about the health effects of mobile phones. Why else would it be studying them?

But that was not what the department was studying. It wanted to know how to measure radio power at close range. It had not commissioned the project to find out whether mobile phones caused cancer.

The Daily Telegraph took up the story and, in Temple’s telling, gave it a slightly more alarming turn. A proposal to improve a measurement had become a sign of government concern. The reason for doing the work had changed as it passed from one publication to the next.

The answer to a different question

A radio journalist then interviewed a university professor involved in radio research. She asked how radio waves might possibly cause cancer. It was the sort of question an interviewer might reasonably put to someone who knew more about a subject than her listeners did.

The professor tried to explain. But an explanation about radio waves is not the same thing as a warning about an everyday phone. The power involved mattered. That context did not survive in the story that other parts of the press picked up.

What other parts of the press picked up was much simpler: a professor had said that mobile phones could cause cancer.

That was not, Temple insists, what he had said. A general question about radio waves had produced an answer which was now being reported as a warning about the telephone in someone’s hand. The story had acquired an expert voice, but lost the question that voice had been answering.

The man without a mobile

At the DTI, the press enquiries were coming in. Officials needed a statement, quickly. Yet the department that had supported an engineering project was now being asked for a medical judgement. It was neither the right organisation to give one nor likely to sound convincing if it tried.

They needed the National Radiological Protection Board. Its expertise could help answer the question the newspapers were now asking.

Temple recalls that the relevant expert was away at a meeting. They could not get hold of him.

He did not have a mobile phone.

For a department caught in a controversy about mobile communications, it was a particularly awkward moment to discover the limits of being out of the office. The expert’s absence was ordinary enough. The news cycle was not going to wait for his return.

Officials understood how the project had begun. What they could not produce, at the moment it was needed, was the authoritative response that might stop its meaning changing any further.

The story outruns the facts

Temple watched the coverage grow more alarming. He remembers an Evening Standard headline about cellular radios frying people’s brains as the low point. The language was a long way from a university proposal about measuring an aerial.

Beyond his account, a striking glimpse of the wider press climate survives in Microwave News. Its July/August 1998 issue quoted an Evening Standard headline of 13 July: “Do Mobile Phones Fry Your Brains or Just Eggs?” The imagery was hard to forget.

In Temple’s story, the NRPB eventually issued a press release. By then, he felt, the chance to interrupt the scare had passed. The alarming version was already in circulation; the explanation had arrived after it.

The immediate storm subsided. Mobile phones became everyday possessions, and the headlines that had seemed so overwhelming faded from memory. For Temple, though, the journey from a research list to a national scare remained hard to forget.

The lesson is not that journalists should stop asking difficult questions. The trouble came when an answer was made to serve a question it had never addressed. A measurement became a health investigation; an explanation became a warning. By the time officials could put the questions and answers back together, the story had travelled much further than the facts.