Maxwell's Silver Hammer 277
Friedman decided to duplicate Kholodov's experiment with a more
detailed analysis of the brain tissue. He made the slides and sent them to
an expert on rabbit brain diseases, but coded them so no one knew
which were which until later.
The report showed that all the animals had been infected with a brain
parasite that was peculiar to rabbits and common throughout the world.
However, in half the animals the protozoa had been under control by the
immune system, whereas in the other half they'd routed the defenders
and destroyed parts of the brain. The expert suggested that we must
have done something to undermine resistance of the rabbits in the exper-
imental group. The code confirmed that most of the brain damage had
occurred in animals subjected to the magnetic fields. Later, Friedman
did biochemical tests on another series of rabbits and found that the
fields were causing a generalized stress reaction marked by large amounts
of cortisone in the bloodstream. This is the response called forth by a
prolonged stress, like a disease, that isn't an immediate threat to life, as
opposed to the fight-or-flight response generated by adrenaline.
Soon thereafter, Friedman measured cortisone levels in monkeys ex-
posed to a 200-gauss magnetic field for four hours a day. They showed
the stress response for six days, but it then subsided, suggesting adapta-
tion to the field. Such seeming tolerance of continued stress is illusory,
however. In his pioneering lifework on stress, Dr. Hans Selye has clearly
drawn the invariable pattern: Initially, the stress activates the hormonal
and/or immune systems to a higher-than-normal level, enabling the ani-
mal to escape danger or combat disease. If the stress continues, hormone
levels and immune reactivity gradually decline to normal. If you stop
your experiment at this point, you're apparently justified in saying, "The
animal has adapted; the stress is doing it no harm." Nevertheless, if the
stressful condition persists, hormone and immune levels decline further,
well below normal. In medical terms, stress decompensation has set in, and
the animal is now more susceptible to other stressors, including malig-
nant growth and infectious diseases.
In the mid-1970s, two Russian groups found stress hormones released
in rats exposed to microwaves, even if they were irradiated only briefly
by minute amounts of energy. Other Eastern European work found the
same reaction to 50-hertz electric fields. Several Russian and Polish
groups have since established that after prolonged exposure the activa-
tion of the stress sytem changes to a depression of it in the familiar
pattern, indicating exhaustion of the adrenal cortex. There has even been
one report of hemorrhage and cell damage in the adrenal cortex from a
month's exposure to a 50-hertz, 130-gauss magnetic field.
Soviet biophysicist N. A. Udintsev has systematically studied the