Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

A cell phone emits about 1 Watt of electromagnetic radiation. Most of that zooms away to find a cell phone tower. The tissues of the user will absorb a part of this radiation. These tissues include the caller’s hand, ear, scalp, skull, and brain. The closer a tissue is to the cell phone’s antenna, the more of the radiation the tissue absorbs. For some reason, however, none of those raising fears about cell phones causing cancer are concerned about skin cancers on palms, fingers, or ears.

The frequency of the typical cell phone radiation is about 2.5 GHz, two and a half billion flips back and forth per second. The radiation travels at the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second — and dividing the one by the other and correcting for the units I used for the speed, shows that the wavelength of this radiation is about 10 centimeters or about 4 inches.

As the electric fields of the waves pass through the body’s tissues, the fields grab and try to shake any molecules or parts of the molecules that they can. These fields like to grab and shake water molecules, and there are plenty available. The fields will grab whatever else they can, which may be all or of parts of many of the critical molecules of biochemistry, such as the DNA in genes, or enzymes, fuel molecules, waste molecules, structural molecules, and so on.

All of these molecules exist within the cytoplasm, and they are in close touch with one another. The molecules are quivering, twisting, and shaking, rattling about and transferring energy between each other. During the time — less than one billionth of a second — that it would take the cell phone’s radiation to shake a molecule or part of a molecule back and forth, that molecule will suffer a thousand or ten thousand collisions with its neighbors. Any energy that the one molecule might begin to gather from the electromagnetic field rapidly spreads throughout all of its neighbors.

Coursing nearby to these molecules is a capillary filled with blood plasma and blood cells. This blood is at body temperature. Any extra energy from any source that appears in cells close to the capillaries will transfer into the slightly cooler blood, warming it. The flowing blood will carry the energy throughout the body. The body temperature will increase imperceptibly, and the extra energy will eventually transfer from the skin into the environment.