Fields And Human Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes: A Big Breakthrough In
Drs. Tamara Galonja-Coghill and Roger Coghill
January 31, 1999
Recently in our laboratory
Tamara and I have been investigating the importance of endogenous electric
fields. These are the fields emitted by every living creature as a result of
internal processes such as heart regulation, brain rhythms, muscular
activity and the like.
Last March (1998) we first conducted an experiment where we extracted white
blood cells essential to immune comptetence and tumour protection, called
lymphocytes, from a human donor. We put them into three 1ml sealed glass
containers and then into a mu-metal box protecting them from external
readiative influences thereby. Into one of the containers we fed a gold wire
attached to the donor's skin surface, and taped the mu-metal box to the
donor's forearm overnight. The second container only had the cell culture
(control), and the third container had a gold wire sealed inside it, but
going nowhere (sham-exposed).
The next day we checked the cell cultures in the three containers for
viability using a standard test known as trypan blue exclusion. In this test
any cells whose "skin" (plasma membrane) has been damaged turn bright blue,
but intact cells stay white. So one can count both types to see how viable
is the culture of interest.
We found that the cells exposed to the donor's cutaneous (endogenous)
electric fields stayed significantly more viable than the controls and the
sham-exposed: exposed cells were usually more than 70% viable, whereas
unexposed cells treated in exactly the same conditions were never more than
50% viable the next day. Over the next month we repeated this test six
times, always with the same result, and eventually had counted (blind) some
10,000 cells. ("Blind" means that the person counting the cells under the
microscope does not know from which container they have come). Then we
substituted an ELF field (50Hz,. square wave, 32mV) and found that this
damaged the cells more than normal. The same when an RF/MW field from a
mobile phone on standby (ETACS, 900MHz.)was used.
Finally we wondered if any endogenous human field would be protective, but
found that only the donor's field has a protective effect. This last study
was scrutineered by scientists from Oxford University and the Karolinska
Institute, who came to our laboratory and stayed several days while the
study was repeated.
Why were they so interested? It is because this is the first time any
experiment has shown the existence of an important protective biological
mechanism at levels of electric field strength so weak that it is far below
thermal levels. It is clear that this
hitherto unsuspected communications mechanism between immune system cells
and the electric field present in all of us plays a vital role in
self-recognition. Because we used a gold wire to feed in the signal, it is
also evident that the communication does not involve any chemical reaction
or magnetic fields, but that the signals are solely electric or possibly
photonic in nature.
We have been invited to repeat the experiment (this will be the fourteenth
time!) at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden under the surveillance of their
Because electric fields are additive our study shows for the first time
unequivocally how other weak fields such as from powerlines or cellphones
are disturbing this communications mechanism. Physicists can no longer argue
that the artificial fields cannot have any biological effect. It really is a
big insight into how the weak fields of modern technology sometimes disturb
our health, and has many practical implications for modern life. These
influences may not always be adverse, by the way.
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