How Money and Power Dominate RF Research - The Lai-Singh DNA Breaks 30 Years On - A Conversation with Henry Lai

"All too often, money and power dominate science."

How Money and Power Dominate RF Research
The Lai-Singh DNA Breaks 30 Years On
A Conversation with Henry Lai
microwavenews.com, 12 June 2023

Henry Lai (photo: Seattle Magazine)

Unremarkable science can sometimes tell a remarkable story. Two papers that were published in the last few weeks —and passed mostly unnoticed— have important, though very different, backstories.

One offers a surprising glimpse of change in the usually static field of RF research, while the other shows how much has stayed the same over the last many years. Yet, in the end, they offer the same well-worn message, always worth repeating: Those who sign the checks, run the show.

The two papers come 30 years after Henry Lai and N.P. Singh began an experiment at the University of Washington in Seattle that would set off alarm bells across the still-young cell phone industry —and the U.S. military. Lai and Singh would show that a single, two-hour exposure to low-level microwave radiation (today, we’d say RF) could lead to breaks in the helical strands of DNA in the brains of live rats.

Physicists have long said that RF is too weak to break a chemical bond in DNA or anywhere else. Lai-Singh were not trying to rewrite the laws of physics, only reporting that they saw more DNA breaks when rats were exposed to RF radiation. They had some ideas about what might be going on but were the first to concede that they didn’t really know.

The news from Seattle spread quickly. Lai had a reputation as a careful investigator with years of experience. Singh was even better known. He had developed the comet assay, which had become a standard technique for measuring DNA damage. As for the university’s bioelectromagnetics lab, it was state-of-the-art. It had been designed and built with support from the U.S. Air Force (USAF) by Bill Guy, a talented engineer, who would become one of the cell phone industry’s most senior RF experts.

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