If you’ve ever wondered why a law from 1968 can call the shots on today’s wireless era, here’s the answer: by the time Congress passed the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act (Public Law 90-602), the United States already had a crowded history of radiation problems from “everyday” electronic products—and lawmakers were done playing catch-up. They wrote a statute that wasn’t aimed at one gadget or one decade. They built a standing, future-proof health program to keep science out ahead of technology, forever.
And we’ve forgotten how far-sighted that was.
Before Smartphones, There Were Shoe Fluoroscopes and Leaky Microwaves
The 1950s and ’60s weren’t a blank slate. The medical literature had decades of hard lessons from ionizing x-rays: cataracts and cancers in clinicians, unnecessary exposures to patients, even mall-store shoe fluoroscopes that beamed x-rays through children’s feet for “fit.” By the late ’60s, federal officials were also fielding very public scares about color TVs emitting x-rays because of high-voltage circuitry. In hospitals, dose was too often an afterthought. In kitchens, microwave ovens weren’t yet standardized for leakage. On factory floors and flight decks, radar and communications microwaves could cook tissue and scar eyes.
But the case for an all-weather law wasn’t just thermal burns and x-ray injury. It was the new frontier: non-ionizing radiation—microwaves, radiofrequency fields, and lasers—that didn’t split atoms yet did interact deeply with biology. Early reports—some public, many buried in Cold-War files—described nervous-system changes, EEG alterations, blood-brain-barrier effects, reproductive endpoints, and enzyme shifts under low-level microwave exposures. The quality was uneven, but the signal was persistent enough that federal agencies and the military quietly studied it. Congress didn’t want to bet American health on the assumption that “heating is the only thing that matters.”
So they wrote a law with no wiggle room.
Why the Law Is So Broad—and So Durable
Read the key sentence and you hear the intent:
“The Secretary shall establish and carry out an electronic product radiation control program … and shall … plan, conduct, coordinate, and support research.” (21 U.S.C. §360ii)
Congress then defined electronic product radiation to include “any ionizing or non-ionizing electromagnetic … radiation” emitted by electronic products. Translation: x-rays today, microwaves tomorrow, lasers next, and whatever comes after that. It wasn’t a patch; it was an operating system for public health. Keep the research running, keep the standards fresh, and never again let industrial speed outrun medical sense.
That’s why it feels “revolutionary.” It was.
How We Slid Backward
Fast-forward. As wireless moved from military and broadcast into every pocket and classroom, the official conversation narrowed to “thermal-only”—as if heating were the beginning and end of RF biology. At the very moment exposures became cradle-to-grave and ambient (phones, routers, towers, wearables, IoT), the standing research engine Congress designed to track that shift sputtered. In January 2024, the National Toxicology Program (housed at NIEHS/HHS) stated it had “no plans for additional RFR exposure research.” Calling that a “pause” is generous; the statute says “shall.” It requires an ongoing program and continuing research. Ending it is not just unwise. It defies the law’s purpose.
Meanwhile, the scientific record hasn’t gotten friendlier to thermal-only thinking. Animal studies and evidence maps now show DNA damage (base lesions, strand breaks, micronuclei) in whole organisms under real-world signals, sometimes at intensities below current public limits. Mechanistic work keeps pointing to oxidative stress/free-radical pathways, mitochondrial stress, and non-linear (often U-shaped) responses—precisely the kinds of effects a heater-meter can’t see. Whatever one’s policy preferences, this much is clear: the question space is not closed, and it is exactly the kind of terrain Congress ordered HHS to survey continuously.
What They Weren’t Hiding—What They Built
It’s tempting to see a cover-up behind every curtain, but the more important truth is hiding in plain sight: in 1968, Congress already knew enough to design a permanent research-and-standards program for all electromagnetic emissions, ionizing and non-ionizing. They didn’t assume the science was settled. They assumed technology would keep changing. And they gave the health agencies a mandate that grows with it.
We haven’t been living up to that mandate.
What Compliance Looks Like (and Why It Matters Now)
Compliance isn’t complicated. It just requires doing what the statute says:
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Restart, publish, and fund a multi-year RF research program within HHS (NIEHS/NTP and FDA/CDRH), with transparent exposure systems that reflect real signals and duty cycles, and endpoints that reflect modern health concerns (fertility, neurodevelopment, genotoxicity, cancer, sleep/cognition, multigenerational effects).
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Report to Congress annually—what was studied, why, what was found, and how standards or public guidance should evolve.
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Coordinate across agencies (HHS, CDC/NIOSH, FDA, NIEHS/NTP) and interface with the FCC so exposure policy is anchored in current biology, not a 1990s thermal frame.
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Acknowledge non-thermal biology where evidence warrants, and design standards that protect for chronic, low-level, whole-body exposure—not just 6-minute heat averages.
This isn’t anti-technology. It’s pro-civilization. A society that uses waves to move information needs the discipline to ask what those waves do to living systems—continuously, not once per generation.
The Takeaway
Public Law 90-602 was not a museum piece. It was Congress’s answer to a pattern they already recognized: new electronics, new exposures, delayed health guardrails. They wrote a living mandate so science would always be ahead of the next wave. By walking away from federally led RF research while exposure soars, we’re not just losing a policy fight—we’re breaking the original deal between technology and public health.
The fix is simple and long overdue: enforce the law you already have. Restart the program. Rebuild the evidence. Update protections as the data demands. That’s what Congress intended in 1968, and it’s exactly what the 2020s need.
