Maxwell's Silver Hammer 289
direct effect on the thyroid or whether, like the stress response, it's at
least partly caused by alterations in brain function.
One more link in the bioclock-interference-and-stress response has
come from 1980 work at the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory in
Richland, Washington. Working with rats, researchers there found that
a weak 60-hertz electric field (only 3-9 volts per centimeter) canceled the
normal nightly rise in production of the pineal gland hormone
melatonin, the main hormonal mediator of biocycles.
The cardiovascular system responds
to electromagnetic energy in at
least two ways. The composition of the blood reflects the stress response
and concomitant activation of the immune system, while many frequen-
cies exert a direct effect on the electrical system of the heart.
Soviet scientists have observed a variety of blood changes in animals
exposed to microwaves, radio waves, and ELF fields. These include de-
clines in red blood cell count and hemoglobin concentration—and hence
oxygen capacity—as well as changes in the relative numbers of various
types of white blood cells and the relative amounts of blood proteins,
and a possible reduction in the blood's ability to clot.
Most of the discomforting studies of electropollution have been done by
the Soviets, and they've been given short shrift by Western scientists.
There are many reasons for this attitude. There's a simple prejudice
against all things Russian and a feeling that their science, technologically
less flashy than ours, is necessarily cruder. Western researchers have
hamstrung themselves with the dogma that there simply can't be bioeffects
from low levels of electromagnetic energy—so why bother looking?
Then, too, Russian publication standards are different; procedural details
are often omitted, making replication difficult. In addition, there are
often troubling contradictions in the data themselves. Results are often
inconsistent from animal to animal. If red blood cell count goes up in one,
it will go down in another, so the experiment shows no statistical change
even though every animal's blood composition is going haywire. In such a
situation, the ultramechanistic Americans tend to believe the statistics,
while the Soviet biologists concentrate on the animals. Russian scientists
have been systematically studying electromagnetic bioeffects since 1933,
and we can hardly afford to dismiss their entire body of work simply
because it comes from a country we fear.
My associates and I therefore proceeded from one of the most detailed
Soviet reports and designed an experiment to measure effects on the
blood of mice as our test fields were turned on and off. We concluded
that these effects weren't a reaction to the fields themselves but rather a