An open letter born of three decades’ work—and a second chance at life
I am writing after a recent heart attack two weeks ago, a stent now pulsing in rhythm with my heart. A cardiologist’s warning—“time is precious”—has sharpened every thought about the mission that has animated the last thirty years of my life: freeing America from the myth that today’s wireless system is the logical end‑point of progress. It is not. It is the side‑effect of a policy error so deep that even a federal court has called it “arbitrary and capricious.”
A broken covenant
In 1996 Congress inserted Section 704 into the Telecommunications Act, forbidding towns and states to reject antennas “on the basis of the environmental effects of radio‑frequency emissions.” In one sentence Washington gagged the First Amendment right of communities to speak about health and erased the Tenth Amendment power of states to protect that health. The FCC then sealed the bargain with “thermal‑only” exposure limits—rules that treat the human body like a slab of meat and declare it safe so long as it does not cook.
Last time the science was formally weighed—Environmental Health Trust v FCC (2021)—the D.C. Circuit told the agency it had ignored “hundreds of peer‑reviewed studies” showing harm below the cooking point. Yet the rules stand, the towers multiply, and the public is reassured with the same obsolete talking points.
What 2025 makes undeniable
While the FCC has stood still, the World Health Organization has kept reviewing. In April 2025 its cancer task‑force concluded—at high certainty—that radio‑frequency exposure causes malignant gliomas and heart‑schwannomas in laboratory animals after lifetime, non‑thermal exposures. A sister review, corrected this spring, now rates the key male‑fertility endpoint at high certainty as well: exposed males sire fewer litters even when the females are never irradiated. Nine independent studies, multiple species, heterogeneity collapsed to 21 %, pooled odds‑ratio 1.68.
When those same reviewers removed the single outlier that blasted rodents at 43 W kg (a hundred times above the public limit) the odds‑ratio slipped yet the direction of harm did not change, and the certainty stayed high. Animal bioassays have foreshadowed every major environmental‑health crisis from leaded petrol to asbestos. We are on familiar ground; only denial is new.
How it happens
By 2025 the biophysics is resolved. Polarised, pulsed signals—precisely the wave‑form that carries our data—force the ions sitting inside voltage‑gated channels to vibrate in lock‑step with the external field. The spacing between those ions and the channel’s charged sensor is less than a nanometre; at that range even a micro‑volt swing translates into a pico‑newton lever, popping the gate at the wrong time. Calcium floods in, mitochondria erupt in oxidative fire, and within two hours comet‑assay photographs record DNA broken into comet tails. Twenty‑eight separate pathological findings—oxidative stress, memory loss, sperm damage—map back to this single initiating event.
No cooking required.
A Clean Ether Act
The remedy is not harder to draft than the Clean Air Act of 1970. Cap chronic indoor power density at 0.1 µW cm² (one ten‑thousandth of today’s limit), restore local authority by repealing Section 704, and mandate light‑based data indoors. The technology already carries an IEEE number—802.11bb. Li‑Fi moves gigabits on invisible infrared light, cannot eavesdrop through walls, and adds no entropy to the electromagnetic habitat that every cell of every creature shares.
The Clean Air Act did not kill Detroit. Catalytic‑converter patents minted fortunes and children stopped inhaling lead. A Clean Ether Act will do the same for American photonics and cybersecurity while ending an invisible chronic exposure we never consented to.
An invitation to the Trump organisations
From the Oval Office to a gold‑plated handset, the Trump name will soon sit at both ends of the wireless chain. With that brand power comes a generational choice. You can inherit the FCC’s 1990s science and auction more spectrum, or you can reset the standard and say: “Our network will not sell cancer, sterility or lost IQ to American families.” The patent that makes Li‑Fi work—US 11 700 058 B2—is pledged, royalty‑free, to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. Young engineers are ready to build the fixtures; veterans from shuttered chip fabs are ready to light them.
Why the MAHA report is not the last word
Some will point to the White House’s Make America Healthy Again assessment and say “no consensus.” That document closed its literature search in 2022, before the WHO’s high‑certainty judgments and before the mechanism paper that unites two decades of scattered findings. The omission is fatal. History will record that by mid‑2025 the official picture of wireless safety no longer matched the MAHA record.
A closing plea
I have spent thirty years reading papers most regulators never cite and—now—survived the reminder that life is short. The evidence that once lived on the edges of journals now sits at the centre of global health reviews. The mechanism that once sounded speculative has leapt from equations to electron micrographs. The alternative technology is no longer a prototype; it is a ratified international standard.
If Section 704 could be passed in a single paragraph, it can be repealed in one. If the Clean Air Act could reach the Federal Register under a president who loved industry, then an Ether Act can do so under a president who brands it.
We cleared the skies of lead and smog when the science demanded it. We can clear the ether of needless radio noise and light a safer path instead.
Time, for me and perhaps for all of us, is precious. Let us use it.
