290
The Body Electric
transient compensation that the animals were making in response to any
change in their electromagnetic environment. By themselves, none of the
blood fluctuations were especially hazardous. However, since we all live
amid EMFs that are constantly shifting as we turn appliances on and off
or travel from place to place, the continual blood instability could be
significant.
American attitudes began to alter in 1978-79 when Richard Lovely of
the University of Washington took advantage of a detente-inspired ex-
change of microwave results to visit the Soviet Union for a month and
study Eastern methods closely. His research group then painstakingly re-
created a major Soviet experiment in which rats had been irradiated seven
hours a day for three months with 500 microwatts. The Russian work was
confirmed in every detail, including disruption of the blood's sodium-
potassium balance, other pathological changes in blood chemistry,
damage to the adrenal glands from stress-induced hormonal changes,
diminished sense of touch, a decline in explorativeness, and slower learn-
ing of conditioned responses. Donald I. McRee, director of the EPA
electromagnetic-radiation health research program, termed the results
"very interesting" and called for an end to the American establishment's
contempt for Soviet work.
Electromagnetic energy has other adverse effects on blood composition
and tissue function. Yuri D. Dumansky, one of many Soviet bio-
physicists who have done detailed work on microwave hazards, found
changes in carbohydrate metabolism, including a rise in human blood-
sugar levels, resulting from 100 and 1,000 microwatts. Power-frequency
(50-hertz) fields were also linked to altered sugar and protein metabo-
lism in rats, as well as decreased muscular strength in rabbits. Like
many other Russian results, these were questioned because of American
failure to corroborate them. In this case a research team headed by N. S.
Mathewson of the Armed
Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in
Bethesda, Maryland, reported no such metabolic changes in response to
the Sanguine-Seafarer 45-hertz frequency.
However, the Mathewson group made a fundamental mistake. They
neglected to account for the 60-hertz background field near the test
cages in their lab, even though they'd measured it when setting up the
work station. When we reanalyzed their data in light of this omission,
the experiment showed exactly the same changes in blood levels of
glucose, globulins, lipids, and triglycerides as the Russians had found.
The most frightening data so far on blood composition come from a
preliminary study for Project Sanguine. Dietrich Beischer found that one
day of exposure to a magnetic field such as would be produced by the