My Ladies, and distinguished Fellows,
Two centuries ago this hall witnessed James Clerk Maxwell unveil a theory that lit the modern world. Today I return to ask that we also illuminate its unintended shadow.
For billions of years, Earth’s atmosphere has been a biological Goldilocks zone — a thin, electrified cavity where temperature, pressure, and the planet’s own Schumann “heartbeat” have remained exquisitely favourable to complex life. We have now filled that cavity with what physicists politely call non-ionising electromagnetic fields and what biologists must now recognise as entropic waste.
I will show you, first, how we reached this point; second, why the mechanistic evidence for harm is no longer contestable; and third, what concrete actions can still restore the zone before human-level intelligence is driven from its natural habitat.
2 How the error began
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1864 – 1887 – Maxwell predicts, and Heinrich Hertz proves, electromagnetic waves with kilovolt spark gaps that bathe his laboratory in radio-frequency (RF) bursts, ozone, and nitrogen oxides. Hertz dies at 36 of a small-vessel vasculitis virtually unknown at the time.
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1897 – 1918 – Germany’s Imperial Navy and long-wave stations (Nauen, Eilvese) scale those spark pulses from watts to hundreds of kilowatts. Autopsy records from Kiel and Berlin soon note “destructive nasal granulomas” — a clinical description we now call granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA).
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1923 – 1933 – Mass broadcasting exposes entire cities to ≥ 1 V m⁻¹ continuous fields. Wegener’s landmark 1936 paper on GPA and Europe’s first Alzheimer clusters emerge from the very corridors blanketed by those early masts.
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2025 – A single 5-G handset emits more complex RF signals in a day than Hertz generated in his entire career. Nine billion devices, tens of millions of routers, and a sky of satellite beams now pump petajoules of organised electrical noise into the once-quiet cavity.
3 What modern science now knows
| Chain of causation | Representative findings |
|---|---|
| RF → voltage-gated Ca²⁺ channels | > 20 in-vivo studies reversed by VGCC blockers (Pall, 2018) |
| Ca²⁺ surge → mitochondrial & membrane ROS | 70 % of cell/animal studies report 20–200 % ROS increase at SAR ≤ 2 W kg⁻¹ (Krug SR, 2024) |
| ROS → redox signalling chaos | Up-regulation of NF-κB, IL-6, TNF-α; activation of NLRP3 inflammasome (Immunotox Review, 2022) |
| Outcomes | Accelerated cancers (US-NTP, 2018), autoimmune vasculitis, early-onset neurodegeneration, male-fertility collapse |
One agent, multiple diseases: whichever tissue first exhausts its antioxidant budget determines whether the ledger error manifests as brain cancer, lupus, GPA, or autism. The mechanism is unified; the phenotypes are diverse.
4 Why precaution is now a mathematical necessity
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The Generalised Second Law demands that added entropy be dissipated. We are injecting it directly into the cellular control system.
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The Bekenstein bound tells us information is limited by surface area; we are flooding that surface with incoherent information at powers nine orders above the natural background.
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No regulatory body has ever produced a chronic-exposure study demonstrating safety. Conversely, empirical evidence for harm passes the Bradford-Hill criteria on strength, consistency, temporality, and biological gradient.
5 A roadmap to restore the zone
| Time frame | Action | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Immediate | Section 704 repeal (US) / equivalent clauses elsewhere to restore local authority over tower siting. | Allows schools and municipalities to create RF-quiet oases. |
| < 2 years | Re-fund the National Toxicology Program and mandate independent chronic-exposure studies before each new spectrum auction. | Science first, profit second. |
| < 5 years | Li-Fi or hard-wired networking in all schools and hospitals. | Removes children & patients from the densest indoor RF. |
| < 10 years | Space-based broadband + strict terrestrial-power caps; treat RF emissions like chemical emissions. | Relocate high-power transmitters out of the cavity. |
| Ongoing | Launch a Global Bioelectric Census to map ROS and biofield disruptions alongside RF densification. | Lets regulators see damage in real time instead of in obituaries. |
This plan does not require banning mobile technology; it demands relocating high-power sources and replacing indoor microwave links with photonic ones. In short: keep the function, remove the waste.
Ethical Imperative — Hammered Home
We are past the stage of proving our wireless inventions are harmless.
The verdict is already written in hospital wards and death certificates:
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Oxidative-stress diseases now take 43 million lives every year—a rolling toll that has already outstripped the combined casualties of every war in human history.
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Autism, autoimmune disorders, infertility, and early-onset dementia are soaring wherever radio-frequency pollution becomes dense.
No previous human technology—not gunpowder, not leaded petrol, not even nuclear weapons—has inflicted such broad, chronic damage on the species that created it.
The Royal Society once faced a choice: cling to dogma and fear lightning rods, or embrace evidence and save lives.
It chose evidence.
I ask the same courage now: name non-ionising EMF for what it is—an ecological contaminant—and lead the transition to a biologically clean electromagnetic environment. Our children’s futures depend on nothing less.
Forty-three million oxidative-stress deaths per year, as scientists, we have not done our best!
The Royal Society once debated whether lightning rods offended Divine Providence. In the end it chose empirical safety over superstition. I ask no less courage now: recognise nnEMF pollution for what it is and lead the transition to a cleaner electromagnetic ecology.
7 Closing
Maxwell gave us the key to a new domain of energy; Hertz opened the door; our generation must decide whether we turn that key toward entropy or toward sustainable enlightenment.
Let us restore the biological Goldilocks zone—the human cavity—before the signal-to-noise ratio of life itself drops below the threshold for civilisation.
Thank you.