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13. Enzyme activities, cancer risk
The research team at the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., headed by Professor Theodore Litovitz has worked for more than a decade on the effects of EMF on the activity of the important enzyme ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) in different cell lines, human and animal, and in chicken embryos. ODC is involved in DNA replication, i.e., cell growth. Increased ODC activity has for many years been used as a marker for cancer. ODC is very active in fetal development.
The CUA team has consistently found EMF-induced changes in the activity of ODC, and corresponding EMF-induced increase in the rate of fetal abnormalities in developing chicken embryos.
Pictures (a)-(d) show normal, unexposed embryos following a 48 hour incubation. The spinal cord is the "tail" of the embryo, and the neural tube inside this appears completely normal; so does the developing brain. Picture (h) is a transverse section at the level of the hindbrain for embryo (a) as indicated by line (h) in picture (a). This brain is normal.
Pictures (e)-(g) and (i) show neural tube and brain defects induced by electromagnetic fields. In (e)-(g) arrows indicate neural folds of open neural tubes in the spinal cord. This is an abnormality known in humans as spina bifida. The hindbrain shown in (i) of embryo (g) is abnormal - totally flattened - compared to the normal brain shown in (h).
On February 13, 1998 [ref. 33], an international team of collaborating scientists representing five research institutions: Hughes Institute, St. Paul, Minnesota; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; University of California, Riverside; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; and Kansai Medical University, Moriguchi, Japan, published the results of two new studies, funded by NIH, showing that 60 Hz EMFs trigger a cascade of enzyme-driven cell-signaling events that could result in cancer. The EMFs activated a tyrosine kinase enzyme dangling from the inner surface of the cell membrane. The EMFs triggered also a second tyrosine kinase, known as BTK. Studies in people have shown that excessive activation of BTK can lead to leukemia, lymphomas, and other cancers.
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