For thirty years the public has been told the same sentence: “If it doesn’t heat tissue, it cannot hurt you – and there is no known mechanism for anything else.”
That sentence is no longer defensible in 2025. The evidence has crossed every threshold that science and medicine normally require.
1. Two large, independent, lifetime animal studies using completely different exposure systems both produced the same rare cancers in the same organs
- National Toxicology Program (U.S., $30 million, 2018) → malignant schwannomas of the heart + malignant gliomas of the brain
- Ramazzini Institute (Italy, 2018) → identical malignant schwannomas of the heart + identical malignant gliomas of the brain, but at far-field, environmental exposures 15–1 500× lower than NTP
These are not “rat-only” oddities. In 2024 the tumours from the Ramazzini study were genetically sequenced (Brooks et al., PLOS ONE): they look like low-grade human gliomas under the microscope and carry the same driver-gene mutations (TP53, CDKN2A, PIK3R1, ERBB2, etc.) that appear in human brain-tumour databases (COSMIC). The lead author’s exact words: “morphologically similar to low-grade human gliomas… ~25 % of the mutations have corresponding alterations in homologs of human cancer genes.”
A WHO-commissioned systematic review published in 2025 applied the same GRADE criteria used for tobacco and asbestos and concluded: high-certainty evidence that radiofrequency radiation causes malignant schwannomas of the heart and malignant gliomas of the brain in animals.
2. The doses are not “unrealistically high” – they are at or below current phone and safety limits
- NTP’s lowest tested whole-body dose: 1.5 W/kg Current U.S. phone limit (localised 1 g SAR): 1.6 W/kg Many tested iPhones and Android flagships hit 1.58–1.60 W/kg in simultaneous cellular + Wi-Fi mode (FCC filings).
- Ramazzini’s highest dose: 0.1 W/kg whole-body – typical of a person living 100–400 metres from a cell tower.
Independent benchmark-dose modelling of the NTP data (Uche & Naidenko, Environmental Health 2021) finds the most sensitive carcinogenic and non-cancer endpoints already appearing at 0.2–0.4 W/kg – and no demonstrable safe threshold.
3. We now have two independent, peer-reviewed biophysical mechanisms that explain exactly why certain tissues are hit and others are spared
A. Voltage-sensor (S4) disruption in excitable cells Polarised, modulated radiofrequency drives forced oscillation of ions inside voltage-gated ion channels → adds timing noise to the S4 arginine “paddles” → distorts calcium signalling → mitochondria and NADPH oxidase over-produce reactive oxygen species. Organs richest in S4 channels + richest in mitochondria = heart conduction system, cranial nerves, glia, Leydig cells. Exactly the organs that get cancer in the animal studies.
B. Radical-pair / spin chemistry in haemoglobin and flavin systems Even cells without voltage channels or mitochondria (mature red blood cells) respond within minutes. A 2025 human ultrasound study (Brown & Biebrich, Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine) directly filmed reversible red-blood-cell stacking (rouleaux) in a living person’s leg vein five minutes after placing an ordinary smartphone against the skin – predicted twenty years earlier by spin-chemistry modelling (Sebastián et al., Physical Review E 2005).
4. A low-power radiofrequency device using exactly these mechanisms is already FDA-approved to treat liver cancer in humans
TheraBionic P1 (27.12 MHz, amplitude-modulated, < 1 W total radiated power) is approved for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. It works by delivering specific patterns to the T-type calcium channel Cav3.2 → forces cancer cells to differentiate and stop dividing. If the same biological pathways can be used therapeutically, it is no longer scientifically credible to claim those pathways cannot be disturbed harmfully by uncontrolled environmental waveforms.
The honest conclusion in 2025
The combination of:
- high-certainty animal carcinogenicity at exposure levels we already experience,
- genetic and histological similarity to human tumours,
- two independently confirmed biophysical mechanisms that predict the exact pattern of organ vulnerability,
- direct visualisation of acute human biological changes from ordinary devices, and
- an FDA-approved medical device that proves these pathways exist and are targetable,
means the thirty-year “thermal-only” paradigm is over.
This is not a call for panic. It is a call for honesty, for updated safety standards that consider waveform, modulation, and tissue vulnerability instead of crude heating, and for the same rigorous precaution we apply to every other environmental agent once the evidence reaches this point.
The data are in. The mechanism is known. The rare cancers are the same in rats and humans, down to the mutated genes. We now protect, we now mitigate, and we now use these same pathways to heal when we choose to.
That is where the science stands today.