Call of the wild

From the “Research That Is Disturbing for All the Wrong Reasons” file: Scientists have discovered that microwave energy, like that emitted by cellular telephones, causes cell disruption in microscopic soil worms.

The study results were reported the day after the British government determined there is no scientific proof that cell phones cause health problems in people. The British and Canadian scientists who authored the worm study — which exposed the creatures to continuous microwave radiation overnight — note that their research does not link cell phone use to human health problems. But they do claim “current exposure to microwave equipment might need to be considered.”

The frozen burrito industry has yet to respond to that suggestion. But one has to wonder about the timing of a university study that questions cell phone safety a day after a major-government proclamation that cell phones have not been proven unsafe. It didn’t help that it was followed shortly by a U.S. decision to remove saccharine — long considered dangerous to health — from a list of known carcinogens.

One also has to wonder exactly how many steps humans are up the evolutionary ladder, if microscopic worms can be used as a reliable gauge of cell phone’s effects on our health — although those who have been trapped behind certain car-phone-wielding motorists on the highway might conclude the link between the two species is disturbingly short.

“From the earth, returned to the earth,” theologians remind us of our life cycles; herein, more proof that we are, in the end, an amalgamation of atomic masses, conserved as the physicists say we are.

More research will be needed to conclusively tie the research released last week to a known human health risk. It’s how we’re going to go about getting to that conclusion, and the ancillary questions such research will create, that could prove much more provoking than what popular conviction already says about pasting a wireless phone to one’s ear.