Cell phones, DNA damage, and questionable data.

While other ScienceBlogs bloggers (notably Revere and Orac) post periodically on the state of the scientific evidence with regard to whether cell phones have biological effects on those using them, I’ve mostly followed the discussion from the sidelines. Possibly this is because I’m a tremendous Luddite who got a cell phone under protest (and who uses a phone with maybe three functions — place a call, receive a call, and store phone numbers). Possibly it’s because in my estimation the biggest health risk posed by cell phones is that they shift the attention of the maniac driver shifting across four lanes of freeway without signaling.
What has me jumping into the fray now is a news report in Science about fraud charges that have been raised against a group of scientists whose papers offered evidence of the potential for biological harm from cell phone use. From the Science article:

The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers showing that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cell phones can cause DNA breakage are at the center of a misconduct controversy at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV). Critics had argued that the data looked too good to be real, and in May a university investigation agreed, concluding that data in both studies had been fabricated and that the papers should be retracted.
The technician who worked on the studies [Elisabeth Kratochvil] has resigned, and the senior author on both papers [Hugo Rüdiger] initially agreed with the rector of the university to retract them. But since then, the case has become murkier as the senior author has changed his mind, saying that the technician denies wrongdoing. He will now agree to retract only one paper, and he also says his critics have been funded by the cell phone industry, which has an obvious interest in discrediting any evidence of harm from its products.

It’s worth noting that the findings in question here were already contentious when they were reported, due in large part to the fact that there is not an obvious mechanism by which EMFs could cause DNA breakage. This does not rule out findings of a strong correlation between EMF exposure and DNA breakage — after all, plenty of the biological mechanisms that seem obvious today weren’t obvious in the past. But, the lack of an obvious mechanism is likely to make scientists examine the results much more critically.
Obvious mechanism or not, the Rüdiger lab was not the only research group reporting that the EMFs from cell phones seemed to have biological effects:

Other teams have reported only cellular effects of EMFs that are more subtle than DNA breakage, such as changes in gene activation or expression. “If this work isn’t solid, then one really has to give up the hypothesis that these fields cause genotoxic effects,” says Anna Wobus, a developmental biologist at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, Germany, who has studied the effects of EMFs on stem cells.

In any case, perhaps because the results reported by the Rüdiger group seemed so surprising, other scientists scrutinized the data very closely. One of the scientists mounting this scrutiny, Alexander Lerchl, professor of biology at Jacobs University Bremen, concluded that the variation in the data from a 2005 paper in Mutation Research was too low to be consistent with “data from biological experiments”.
Lerchl alerted the editors of Mutation Research, who took his concerns under advisement. However, they noted that with a properly blinded experimental setup, “it would have been impossible to make up data that produced a desired result”.
The ethics commission at MUV, however, launched an investigation of the 2005 paper and a 2008 paper in nternational Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health. That investigation concluded:

The data were not measured experimentally but fabricated.

Since the full report of the MUV ethics investigation wasn’t made public, it’s hard to know on what basis the review panel made this judgment. But it may have been something along the following lines:

[I]n April, unaware of the university’s investigations, Christian Wolf, the interim head of Rüdiger’s former department, was taking an independent look at the data after hearing they were under dispute. Wolf told Science that he and a colleague examined the lab notebook of technician Elisabeth Kratochvil, first author of the 2005 paper and a co-author of the 2008 study. Wolf says that they noticed a column of numbers corresponding to a code from the instrument designed to expose cell lines to EMFs. The code revealed which chamber was exposed to EMFs and which was the control. Rüdiger’s team was supposed to receive the key only after sending their observational data to the device’s manufacturer in Zürich, but Wolf found that the code could be observed by the turn of a knob to an “unused” channel. After being confronted with the notebook, Wolf says, Kratochvil resigned. Later, Wolf says, they found code entries in laboratory notebooks going back to the fall of 2005.

Data that were supposed to be blinded were not. Experimenters thus had biased expectations about what would happen to the cell lines under study. Even if there was no conscious attempt to fabricate or falsify data, unblinding the experiment compromised the objectivity of the results.
Principal investigator Rüdiger argues that only the 2008 paper (done on the lab’s own EMF exposure device — the one that Wolf discovered revealed the secret code) is problematic. However, he defends the 2005 paper. That paper, he says, was based on data collected using an EMF exposure device in a lab in Berlin for which “there is no evidence that she [Kratochvil] knew” the code.
In light of the too-good-to-be-true data from the 2005 paper and the lab notebooks indicating that Kratochvil was doing unblinded experiments that were reported in the literature as being blinded, is the lack of direct evidence of cheating enough here?
There may not be enough direct evidence to prove misconduct in the research that was reported in the 2005 paper (or there may be — again, we don’t know what the MUV ethics investigation turned up. But the serious problems with the 2008 paper raise serious questions about the credibility of the particular scientists involved. If there are good grounds for doubting your integrity and objectivity on a later paper, it’s natural to wonder whether such problems could have affected your earlier published work.
It might not be the sort of paper you’d want to trust as the basis for your own further research. It might not be the sort of paper you’d want to trust as the basis for government regulations on cell phones.
Of course, Rüdiger raises a concern of his own: the conclusions of the MUV ethics investigation may have been biased by the fact that “the chair of the ethics committee was a lawyer who had worked for a telecom company”.
Clearly, objectivity is hard work all the way around.

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Posted in Biology, Ethical research, Misconduct.

11 Comments

  1. Back in the 1960s, when the government wanted to scare people away from LSD, they funded a well-publicized study showing that LSD damaged DNA. This scared a lot of people, and the press had great fun whipping up fears of mutant children.
    At it turned out from peer review, the experimenter got as much damage to DNA from another chemical at the same dosage — sodium chloride. Ordinary table salt, of course.
    Now with cell phones, it occurs to me that the telecoms might think of commissioning DNA studies which would show, expectedly, no damage from cell phones. They might as well prove that cell phones don’t cause dental caries or kidney stones or chicken pox or bunions.
    Having worked with microwave radiation (L, S, X, and Ka bands) I’m well aware of the danger of penetrating radiation, but never have I heard of the principal users of microwave — the Air Force and Navy — ever wondering about DNA damage. No, they worried about blindness, brain damage, and other tissue damage — things the telecoms never had studied (that we know of).

  2. Yes, the studies were repeated by Speit et al. In fact, they were repeated even before the fraud allegations came to light.
    What’s particularly interesting is that Speit et al. went to great lengths to ensure they reproduced the previous results (by Diem et al.). They even went so far as to have researchers from the ‘positive’ study come to their lab and perform the repeats together, just to rule out any unnoticed methodological variables.
    All Speit’s results were negative, in clear contrast to Diem’s previously reported positive results.
    Again, Speit conducted this test before any fraud allegations were raised. As far as I’m concerned, none of the DNA strand break data from Rudiger’s lab should be trusted unless someone else reproduces it.

  3. > Speit et al.
    Thanks for that link.
    This is how it’s supposed to be done.
    It’ll be interesting to watch Medline, I wonder how long til the Rudiger et al. study acquires a flag, or comment, or something about this. It’s
    Int Arch Occup Environ Health. 2008 May;81(6):755-67. Epub 2008 Feb 16.

  4. According to a quote on the German magazine “Der Spiegel”, the MUV rector says that the problem is young women in science:
    “Das ist ganz typisch für wissenschaftliche Betrugsdelikte”, sagt Schütz. “Nicht selten steckt dahinter eine junge Mitarbeiterin, die sich mit ihrem Chef sehr gut stellen will.”
    ( Closing paragraph in this article: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,555365,00.html )
    Translation: “This is quite typical for scientific fraud”, says Schütz. “Often, it is a young female collaborator who wants to get along very well with her (male) boss.”
    German is a gendered language, Der Spiegel usually (and in this specific article) uses the male form as a generic term, so the use of the female form in this place is significant. It is possibly worth noting that this assertion did NOT lead to any controversy in Austria or Germany. (But maybe that’s just because nobody but me read the arcticle to the end.)

  5. Suggest you all read the Bio-Initiative Report 610 pages http://www.bioinitiative.com which was not funded by the cell phone industry.the REPORT by 20 international scientists & EMR experts CONCLUDED UNEQUIVOCALLY that there is sound evidence of harmful long term biological effects which can damage the body’s immune system and lower resistance to illess

  6. …aaannnddd when you visit bioinitiative.com, you find that it is a link aggregation site where the links lead to sites offering things like alternative medicine, colon cleansing, and…(wait for it)…devices to protect you from electromagnetic fields and cell phone radiation.
    All for low, low prices!
    EPIC FAIL, there, Derick. UNEQUIVOCALLY.

  7. “In my estimation the biggest health risk posed by cell phones is that they shift the attention of the maniac driver shifting across four lanes of freeway without signaling.”
    Yep

  8. . . .the biggest health risk posed by cell phones is that they shift the attention of the maniac driver shifting across four lanes of freeway without signaling.
    Funny. Drivers in my area do this all the time without a cell phone to blame.
    Thank you, PS, for the important translation – I see that as a jumping off point for a whole ‘nother blog post.
    Hank Roberts raising an important point that it’ll take awhile for the story to catch up with the PubMed citation – that’s why I read blogs written by scientists. You can stay ahead of the curve on these sorts of things.
    Sorry about any spelling errors since I am writing this from my web PDA while commuting.

  9. Interseting. I am still working on a blog entry on this subject, and you may have just thrown a wrench in it. I shall have to reexamine the data I was collecting.
    It is interesting to note that the FDA admits there is no scientific basis to avoid songram keepsake videos, they still do it. Keep Sake Videos
    Point being, they are being prudent.
    Do you think it is imprudent to allow 5 years to have cell phones (as some of my neighbors do)?

  10. Your post on DNA damage and questionable data is excellent! I’ve done quite a bit of research in the area of EMF & Health. There has been growing public alarm about the possible health effects of EMF. Angry citizens groups in hundreds of different communities across the US have protested against the location of new cell phone towers. The European Parliament has passed a motion criticizing the World Health Organization and its own science advisory board over these issues. Your readers might be interested in a new web site I’ve created with a number of colleagues that deals with these topics: http://www.emfandhealth.com. The site is based on real science and provides a wealth of good information and references.
    Lorne Trottier

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