Patent Law

Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute confused?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

By now everyone has heard the news frenzy over Ronald Herberman, Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, advising faculty and staff to limit cell phone use because there is no proof that it's not a cancer risk. Nonsense! All cancer agents act by disrupting chemical bonds. In a classic 2001 op-ed LBL physicist Robert Cahn explained that Einstein won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that cell phones can't cause cancer. The threshold energy of the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won the prize, lies at the extreme blue end of the visible spectrum in the near ultraviolet. The same near-ultraviolet rays can also cause skin cancer. Red light is too weak to cause cancer. Cell-phone radiation is 10,000 times weaker.

Einstein won the 1905 Nobel for several discoveries in physics. The underlying data for the photoelectric effect concerned metals, which have different types of chemical bonds than do human beings.

The idea that the energy of UV/visible radiation can disrupt chemical bonds and the energy of radiowaves cannot is generally correct, except in the western part of Pennsylvania. John Kanzius of course is splitting water with radiowaves, at least according to some. Bob Park has not fully connected all the dots on this one. Confusion in the Pittsburgh area is more rampant than Park realizes. Maybe it's because copper sulfate is a metal in western Pennsylvania?

See also

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/04/fool-born-every-minute-lesley-stahls.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/06/kanzius-and-burning-water-again.html

Full post as published by IPBiz on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).