Yesterday brought some bracing headlines about cell phones and cancer. A new study, run by the government’s National Toxicology Program, proposed a link between exposure to the radiofrequencies used by cell phones and certain kinds of brain and nerve tumors. The study was conducted in rats, but big, population-based studies of humans have made similar suggestions.
This is an important new piece of a puzzle: Is there any harm from cell phones? But some experts were critical of the report’s conclusions. Both Michael Lauer, the NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research, and Donald Berry, chair of statistics at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, told me that they think the study’s results are purely due to chance. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the
But even Brawley’s summation of the results strikes me as less alarming than the first headlines that emerged from the press. The Wall Street Journal, one of the first with the story, blared: “Cellphone-Cancer Link Found In Government Study.” Mother Jones, which published around the same time, called the study headlined its story with an expert's claim the study is “game-changing.” (To its credit, Mother Jones also clearly noted Lauer’s concerns, at least in the updated version of the piece.)
What was different from the way these kinds of studies are usually released is that the study was not offered up en masse to reporters via what’s known as an embargo. The deal is we all agree to keep a piece of news quiet and report it at the same time.
Some investors have pointed out that it’s tricky that I essentially get inside information that might be stock moving. But the system does work to make sure big scientific papers are digested before we write about them.
This paper was different. It was published on something called bioRxiv, a server for scientific papers run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It’s modeled on similar servers used by economists and physicists to share papers quickly, without the cumbersome process of going through peer review at medical journals. This is already par for the course for economists and physicists, but news in those fields tends to dribble out to the public. For medical studies, news can come in a giant, crushing wave.
Are journalists ready to engage with this kind of faster-paced science? Yesterday’s performance doesn’t make me optimistic. The first reporting fell too much on the scary side, and the rest of us were caught flat-footed.
The government NTP seemed unprepared for the story, hosting a noon press conference in which reporters asked tense questions about problems with the study and didn’t get many answers. Lauer, himself a government official, was not on the call even though his criticisms were published in the final report.
“The direct translation of these findings to the way humans are using cell phones is not completely worked out and that’s part of the evaluation going forward,” said John Bucher, the associate director of the NTP. “This may have relevance, it may have no relevance.”
Those caveats should have come with the study when it came out. Instead, readers were told why they should be scared before they found out the reasons they should calm down.
