In January 2024, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) announced it had no plans to further study the effects of cellphone radiofrequency radiation (RFR) on human health — even though the program’s own $30 million study, which took about 10 years to complete in 2018, found “clear evidence” of cancer and DNA damage.
Why did the NTP shut down the studies?
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, John Bucher, Ph.D., discussed what likely led to the demise of follow-up studies despite the NTP’s findings of DNA damage in rats exposed to 2G and 3G cellphone radiation.
Bucher is a former senior scientist in the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) NTP division. NIEHS is one of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) 27 institutes and centers.
After starting in 1983 as a NIEHS staff toxicologist, Bucher served as NTP’s associate director from 2007 to early 2018. He retired in April 2021 but maintains volunteer status. He has been highly involved with NTP’s research on wireless radiation.
Bucher named a “convergence” of issues that likely led to NTP’s decision to stop studying the biological effects of wireless RFR. He told The Defender on Wednesday:
“We were having technical problems, there was really no interest on the part of the regulatory agencies for us to continue these studies, the technical expertise and the drivers behind getting the work done were retired, and there’s competing priorities — always competing priorities in a program like that.”
Those factors likely fueled the decision to halt the research, he said. “I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have reached the same decision had I been there.”
Bucher added:
“I think I would’ve pushed harder [to keep studying wireless radiation’s biological effects], but I can’t say that the overall decision would’ve been different had I been able to influence it.”
As NTP’s former associate director, Bucher oversaw the program’s two-year study of 2G and 3G cellphone radiation that found “clear evidence” of malignant heart tumors in male rats, “some evidence” of malignant brain tumors in male rats, and “some evidence” of benign, malignant and complex combined adrenal gland tumors in male rats.
He was a collaborator on the study’s 2018 technical reports of its findings. He also was co-author of a 2019 genetic analysis of some of the rats and mice used in the two-year study. The 2019 study also found a link between wireless RFR exposure and DNA damage.
According to its website, NTP is an “interagency program composed of, and supported by, three government agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services.”
Those agencies include the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) National Center for Toxicological Research, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and NIH’s NIEHS.
After the results from NTP’s two-year study were published in 2018, NIEHS scientists undertook more research “to better understand” some of the findings from the 2018 study, according to NTP’s cellphone radiation website, which stated:
“The goals of this new research were to determine the impact of RFR exposure on behavior and stress, conduct real-time physiological monitoring, including evaluation of heart rate, investigate whether RFR exposure induces heating, and evaluate further whether RFR exposure causes DNA damage.”
However, in January 2024, NTP announced it was abandoning the research because it was “technically challenging and more resource-intensive than expected.”
In April 2024, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with NIH to obtain records and communications related to the halted studies to find out why the government shut the studies down and what results, if any, the studies had generated.
FDA, FCC were uninterested in NTP’s results
Bucher said he did not know who exactly made the decision to stop the research. However, both he and former NTP Associate Director Brian Berridge told The Defender that NTP’s research portfolio was under the governance of the NTP Executive Committee, so the decision may have involved that committee.
According to the committee’s website, its members are the heads, or their designees, of federal agencies including the FDA, NIEHS, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, National Cancer Institute, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, U.S. Department of Defense, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Bucher and Berridge said the final decision-maker would likely have been Rick Woychik, Ph.D., who currently directs NTP and NIEHS.
Bucher provided detailed information about the “headwinds that go into making a decision like this,” starting with why NTP began studying RFR in the first place.
Most of the studies NTP conducted while Bucher was NTP’s day-to-day operations director were undertaken because another federal agency asked NTP to do so, he said.
“We operated pretty much on a basis of receiving nominations from other agencies for the work that we ended up doing,” he said. “The original radiofrequency radiation nomination came from the Food and Drug Administration, which … has jurisdiction over the biological aspects of harms … from radiofrequency radiation.”
The FDA nominated RFR as an NTP study topic in 1999. NTP soon after began designing its $30 million study that would finally be published in 2018.
Bucher said studying RFR was “kind of a departure for NTP because we were primarily a chemical-oriented cancer and toxicology organization. We had done some studies with things other than chemicals … but to move into an area that was sort of at the intersection of physics and biology was new for us — and it required a fair amount of convincing of staff that we could actually take this on.”
NTP worked with the “absolute top engineering firms in the world” to design and monitor the RFR exposure chambers used in the study, Bucher said. “We had an exposure facility built in a laboratory in Chicago where we performed these studies.”
He added, “All the government people involved in setting up those studies are now fully retired … The one person that’s left following up on any RFR-related activities is, I guess you would say, of lower influence.”
In 2017, Bucher and his NTP colleagues were reporting the initial findings to the relevant regulatory agencies, including the FDA and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which were “polite but not that interested,” he said.
He added:
“This was the beginning of the first Trump administration. I think they could see the handwriting on the wall that science wasn’t a high priority, and it would be a difficult task to actually come up with [RFR exposure] regulations that could get through any kind of a process.”
The FCC hasn’t complied with a court-ordered mandate to explain how the agency determined that its current guidelines adequately protect humans and the environment against the harmful effects of exposure to wireless radiation.
Smaller exposure chambers were problematic
Bucher confirmed that when he was in charge of the NTP division of NIEHS, he funded the facilities for subsequent studies. The goal of those studies wasn’t to fully replicate the 2018 study. Instead, the follow-up studies were smaller “mechanistic” studies to understand biological changes related to RFR that could be causing cancer.
By “mechanistic,” Bucher meant the researchers would look for activation of or mutations in genes known to be involved in cancer or the genetic toxicity effects the researchers saw in the 2018 study.
“We would be looking primarily at changes in gene expression in the brain or other target organs, and then relate those to what we know about processes involved in cancer.”
So they designed new RFR exposure chambers because the old chambers from the 2018 study were located in a lab that NTP no longer had a contract with — and the chambers’ electrical parts were wearing out and needed to be replaced.
“They were just dismantled because they were taking up space and we were paying for it. So we created smaller chambers … in a contract laboratory where we had an active contract,” Bucher said.
Unfortunately, the researchers encountered technical difficulties in getting small exposure chambers to work.
“Building them was not a problem,” Bucher said, “but getting them to actually work in a way that would reproduce what was done in the larger chambers in the earlier study was challenging — more challenging than we expected.”
The researchers made some progress “but then COVID hit and things just became difficult, so that project sort of languished for a long time.”
‘By the time we would come out with the next generation of studies’ industry would be on to something else
The research faced other challenges, too, Bucher said. “The government has always been way behind the technologies that are being developed in the telecommunications industries.”
NTP’s 2018 study involved 2G and 3G. “So we would’ve had to start from ground zero to try to keep up with 5G.”
Bucher said:
“One of the frustrations that we all had was that we were one or two technologies behind, and the relevance of the results applied only to those wavelengths and frequencies that were still incorporated in 4G and may still be incorporated in 5G, but they wouldn’t cover the entire spectrum.”
By the time 4G was rolled out, NTP’s RFR researchers were already “losing the battle” with regard to galvanizing the interest of the FDA and FCC and overcoming technical challenges.
“These studies take so long that by the time we would come out with the next generation of studies, they [the telecommunications industry] would be on to something else,” he said. “It was very frustrating.”
So it didn’t come as a huge surprise to Bucher that NTP eventually decided to stop the research.
Telecom industry should be doing this research ‘on their dime’
Bucher said he thinks it’s unfortunate that it falls on the government to study the biological effects of the telecommunication industry’s products. That research “is what the industry should be doing on their dime and using their expertise and their predictions as to where the technology is going.”
A government-industry collaboration might be helpful, he said. “But to have it be government only — where we’re just basically guessing from trade publications as to where the field is going — is nuts.”
When asked if he thought a different government agency might be better suited for studying RFR, Bucher said the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research has a laboratory in Arkansas that’s capable of doing this kind of work.
It would be appropriate for the FDA to study RFR “because they’re the agency charged with making recommendations to the FCC with respect to the biological aspects of the need for regulation.”
But it would be critical for the other FDA centers to commit to an acceptance of the study’s results before the results are available, he said.
“We didn’t think this would be necessary in 1999 when NTP was asked to study RFR,” Bucher said. But when NTP’s study results came out in 2018, “the FDA put out statements that, let’s put it this way, they were very dismissive of the findings.”
Even though it had been the very agency to ask NTP to study RFR, the FDA repudiated the study in November 2018, and in February 2020, released an unsigned literature review that criticized the study.
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.