280
The Body Electric
As soon as I got back from Washington, I found that two power
companies were planning a network of 765-kilovolt power lines linking
nuclear reactors in upstate New York and Canada. One of the lines was
to pass through a rural area near the village of Lowville, where I'd just
bought land for a vacation-retirement home. I immediately wrote the
head of the state's Public Service Commission. Without releasing the
Sanguine report—I felt it wasn't my place to do so, even though its
suppression was wrong—I informed PSC Chairman Alfred Kahn of its
major conclusions. The commission in turn asked the Navy for a copy of
our report but was turned down flat. In mid-1974, however, Andy Ma-
rino and I were asked to testify at PSC hearings on the power lines.
We presented the best evidence then available, some of which seemed
to shock the PSC members. ELF fields at power line intensity or less had
by then been linked to bone tumors in mice, slowed heartbeat in fish,
and various chemical changes in the brain, blood, and liver of rats. Bees
exposed to a strong ELF field for a few days in Russian research had
begun to sting each other to death or leave the area. Some sealed off
their hives and asphyxiated themselves. Attorneys for the power com-
panies hurriedly asked a year's postponement of the hearings, which the
PSC naturally granted.
Andy and I spent that year reading the rapidly accumulating scientific
literature on EMF biological effects, including the enormous amount of
Russian work becoming available in English. Andy also investigated the
stress response further. He ran ten separate experiments with rats, expos-
ing them for one month to 60-hertz electric fields of 100 to 150 volts
per centimeter, simulating ground level underneath a typical high-ten-
sion line. Three generations of rats bred in this field showed severely
stunted growth, especially among males. At lower field strengths (35
volts per centimeter) some of the animals gained more weight than con-
trols, a response we tentatively traced to abnormal water retention,
which, like underweight, could also result from stress. A few years later,
a study commissioned by the Department of Energy to duplicate this
research also produced contradictory but disquieting results. With every
known variable controlled in an expensive, high-tech facility at Battelle
Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio, one test showed severe growth retarda-
tion over three generations, while a second run under exactly the same
conditions produced significantly greater weight gain than normal.
Andy's original work also revealed large increases in the infant mor-
tality rate. Between 6 and 16 percent of the pups born in various tests
failed to live to maturity because of the electric field. That is, these
percentages were in
excess of the normal death rate for newborn rats.