From an Interview with
Louis Slesin, Editor of Microwave News

"Today, it is close to criminal that the U.S. press has not reported recent findings on long latency tumor effects associated with cell phones. As I reported any number of times in Microwave News, it's front page news in Europe—in Switzerland, England, Scandinavia—and it's not even in the back pages in the United States. It is totally ignored.

I often point out that none of the institutions that we as a society rely upon to get new ideas out to the public is interested in EMF issues. Right now, the environmental groups, consumer groups, labor groups, and conservation groups are all silent. It's as if they have

completely lost track of EMFs and they don't care about what's going on. Every year, the Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, puts out a report on cell phones. Topics include: What are the best service plans? Which company has the fewest dropped calls? What's the cutest phone with a Mickey Mouse logo? Yet, not a word about health. And this is the premier consumer organization in the country.

Does anyone care that cell phone companies are targeting our children as their next big market? Does anyone think it may be a good idea to protect the next generation from an avoidable health risk?. . . ."

"Most people in government, academia, and the general public think wireless technologies are great and that there's no danger. But that's only because they've not been given any reason to think differently. It's dangerous to overstate hazards or to scare people without reason. But, from a public health point of view, it's more dangerous to reassure people when reassurance is not appropriate." —DAVID CARPENTER, MD

"Chemical pollutants or electromagnetic radiation can change genetic expression without changing genes. If we change genetic expression in a global way, affecting populations of individuals, then the next generation will look and be different. A perturbation is very clearly occurring, but it's one that we haven't evolved to withstand. We don't have the immune systems or the detoxification systems for EMF, or for certain chemicals in plastics, and so on. We might come up with organisms that are resistant, but why should we be doing a largescale selection?"
—STUART NEWMAN, PhD

"Heat shock proteins are synthesized as a result of the DNA coming apart and making the code for this particular protein....We have gotten DNA responses and heat shock protein synthesis from EMF exposures as low as 8 milligauss, and have unpublished data showing the same at even lower EMFs. It appears that DNA will respond to a host of frequencies, including all the broadcast frequencies, AM and FM, wireless phones, and across the spectrum....We're right to be concerned about the biological effects of various frequencies, but we should also be concerned about the effects of increasing, cumulative exposures."
—MARTIN BLANK, PhD & REBA GOODMAN, PhD

"With communication towers, we conservatively estimate that 4 to 5 million birds are killed each year from collisions, but the actual number could be as high as 40 to 50 million. The greyest area, however, for which we have virtually no information in this country, is in the area of radiation effects associated with communication towers....We've been looking at European studies, such as Alfonso Balmori's study in Spain, where there appear to be strong correlations between the proximity of cell towers and feather deformities, abandonment of sites, injuries and in some cases bird deaths."
—ALBERT MANVILLE, PhD

As the Institute for Inquiry's "A Wireless Age?" progresses at instituteforinquiry.org, changes taking place in the earth's biology quickly become observable and questionable. How, exactly, are we changing the ecology of the air in a wireless age? What kind exists? How do EMFs, natural or manmade, act on or within living things? Are EMFs key to genetic expression, and of evolutionary consequence?

Such questions are not difficult to ask, but such an orientation to the biological world is exceedingly rare in today's news media. At best, we build distant, after-the-fact pictures through evidence of harm, which, as we are well-aware, add up to a 'big picture' that is failing us.

Competing interests cannot describe the actual, biological world as it undergoes change, nor describe the kind of world we might hope to achieve. By the time the public becomes aware of genetically engineered foods, GE crops have grown for decades on millions of acres. Or, wireless EMFs have already affected countless lives.

All of which signals, first and foremost, a crisis within journalism that runs far deeper than corporate control. What we need to be paying attention to, in the moments and places such attention would matter, has yet to occur to us.

The Institute for Inquiry (IFI), an independent, non-profit organization, arose from a newsprint journal founded in 1994 in Northern California. We intend to produce news inquiries, one after another, which place first priority on biological and cultural change, and open such changes to rigorous questioning. Our vision is to build a new picture of those realities most at stake and least understood—a physics and biology billions of years old and human cultural life tens of thousands years old—from which concrete, new knowledge can emerge that will serve a growing, global public.

We'd think such a vision absurdly ambitious were it not for the fact that the Internet provides greater access to information anytime, from almost anywhere on earth, for larger numbers of people than any other media source. And, were it not for the fact that since launch six months ago, IFI has received over 350,000 hits, with 199,000 taking place in the last six weeks (see map).

Nonetheless, IFI's proposition comes from the proverbial 'left field' and is in need of your support. While we have received early seed monies, it is now crucial to raise additional funds. Will you get involved? Will you give what you can?

—Welcome, and thanks,
Casey Walker, IFI's Founder