I'm on the third slide now, which shows a quote from a paper by two of the authors of the report, Foster and Moulder, who say that the “only unequivocal mechanism for bioeffects” of radio frequency is the “heating of tissue”. This just makes no sense at all to a biologist.
As I said, you can measure the temperature of anything, but it doesn't give you insight into biological function. Yes, a doctor will ask you if you have a temperature to see if you have an infection, for example, but that doesn't give you a clue as to how biological function is going on.
There's a list on that same slide of a number of biological parameters that have been established as being affected by EMF exposure. It includes, if you notice, one about enzyme acceleration.
This is the work we did with some of the very basic enzymes involved in cell function, such as the sodium-potassium ATPase, which set ups the ion gradients that are responsible for nerve function, and cytochrome oxidase, which is the basic reaction that generates the ATP that drives all our cells. These are affected and have been shown to be affected in the ELF range, but I haven't studied them in the other range as well.
All of these basic functions are affected by the EMF.
In the fourth slide, I refer to the cellular stress response. This is a cell reaction to environmental dangers. If you ask a cell if it is in trouble and you measure these stress proteins, you're going to get a yes answer, because the stress proteins are generated when there's trouble. That's not the kind of trouble that we read about in the newspapers, but things like heat shock, which means the temperature is going above and/or below the range. There's a heat part and also a cooling part, and you get a reaction of stress proteins generated by this cell. Changes in osmotic pressure will generate stress proteins, as will acidity, the changes in pH. These are the basic parameters that a cell will react to.
If you look at the next slide about the natural safety mechanism, you'll see that this is the mechanism that I refer to. It protects the body by activating DNA in a particular region. If you look at the sixth slide, the next one with the picture, you'll see that it shows what the DNA looks like. There's a diagram of a chromosome that I pull apart. In other words, you tear it apart and you see what it's actually composed of. Everybody recognizes the end piece, which is the double helix.
The double helix is the stuff that became famous from the Watson and Crick story, but the fact is that this is the stuff that's in all our nuclei. When I went to school I was told that's the stuff that parents pass on to children, and for the rest of the time you had the feeling that it was sitting there doing nothing. But it's active all the time. It's making stuff all the time.
Also, it makes stress proteins when it comes in contact with some dangerous situations. We've actually studied that reaction. We found the particular groups that it reacts with. It reacts with a combination of four particular residues—these are bases—CTCT. That's a particular combination that we found was responsible for the response to heat shock, to a temperature stimulus.
The interesting thing about it is that this particular combination, just on a chance basis, since there are only four of these bases involved in the DNA.... If you look at that slide of the picture, you see that the DNA is two metres long and it has three billion base pairs. In other words, this has many of these things sitting along there. When you're talking about a particular combination of four particular ones, CTCT, you can get that every 250 base pairs, on average. This means that there are many opportunities along that three-billion base-pair array that's sitting there on the DNA. There are many opportunities for interaction.
I have here this picture that shows you the double helix slowly being coiled into a coil, and then a coiled coil, and then a super-coil. In other words, there are many different sizes of coils in the nucleus that's sitting there in that chromosomal structural.
I don't know how many of you will remember this, but way back when television first came in, the antennas used to go up on the roof for reception of TV. TV used to be transmitted in two particular wavelengths. You had two different sizes of wires in there—or metal bars—that would pick up the different frequency ranges. In other words, the antenna functions by reacting to the wavelength of the radiation that's coming at it. That is what's happening with the DNA.
With the fact that you have all these different sizes of loops, you can get reaction like an antenna does. Why does it react like an antenna? It does because for the DNA—in the same picture I have there—where you have the double helix, these two twisted coils with the bonds between them are lined by electrons, which can move. They've been shown to move. There's a whole bunch of papers on this that come from Caltech. Barton has done many studies on that. She's a world-famous scientist and has shown that you can get movement of electrons.
As well, I think the reactions of the DNA with these environmental influences show that it does indeed happen with the different EMF frequencies. Because you have loops of different sizes, you can get reactions of the DNA with different frequencies of radiation.
That's why we ourselves have found interactions in the ELF range and in the RF range. Others have published interactions all along. In other words, these arbitrary boundaries are set by the engineers and physicists who set up that table. They're just arbitrary. When you set up an RF at one point and cut it off at a particular.... Notice that the cut-off is always at a point where the frequency has the number 3 in it, so it's either 300,000 waves per second or 3 million megahertz. The fact is that the set-up was arbitrary, totally arbitrary.
Naturally it's a continuum, so when you look at DNA, you see that it's the continuum also. It's almost as if you can react with almost any part of it that happens to present itself at the surface. I think this is reasoning from the observations. We have found, wherever we have looked at different frequencies and wherever it's been looked at by scientists, that you can get reactions all along.
I think the division between ELF and RF is entirely arbitrary, as you can see by the arguments that are given by the committee itself. The report we are reading actually talks about the fact that they have to understand what's going on in the ELF range in order to explain what occurs at the very low end of the RF part of their range. That's the way DNA responds. It has antenna properties.
In fact, one of the papers we published recently, which was also ignored, was about how DNA is a fractal antenna. That's a technical term and means that it has the capability of responding with frequencies at a very wide range. This is something that you can look up. Technology people are very wise to this kind of thing. It's a very useful thing to have a multi-purpose antenna. In other words, you can pick up a lot of different frequencies.
I would like to move on to the next slide, which is a reference to the research by Professor Alexander Lerchl.