#2642.5: George Carlo

Nonsense

Silly and pseudoreligious fear-mongering about new technology is nothing new, and although one could argue, in a non-lunatic way, for a cautionary principle, when the evidence is in, concerns should be adjust usually aren’t with these people –  rather, the concerns get augmented with conspiracy theories. Cell phone radiation and wifi are already classics off the genre – the idea that radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation used by cell phones and wireless networks is the cause of adverse health effects, from cancer to mental illness, is an idea that, like homeopathy, just won’t go away, regardless of the evidence; instead, we get fake diagnoses like “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”, and cynical (and/or incompetent) practitioners and promoters who make names for themselves as authorities in conspiracy theory circles. It doesn’t help that the idea has sufficient sensationalist potential for shoddy pseudoresearch to be picked up by mainstream media, or that the IARC erroneously categorized cell phone radiation as a “possible carcinogen” (even if “possible” in their classification system actually means probably not).

 

One of the main promoters of cell phone radiation misinformation and conspiracy theories is George L. Carlo, an epidemiologist, lawyer and notorious science-for-sale entrepreneur. Carlo started out as a hired expert for the Dow Chemical Company to tell people that they shouldn’t care about dioxins, before founding the Health and Environmental Sciences (HES), which is most famous for their work on behalf of tobacco companies to show that medical doctors were biased against smoking and therefore unreliable sources for information on passive smoking. Because of this background, Carlo was hired by the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) in 1993 to do whitewashing campaigns on behalf of the cell phone industry, but broke with them when the money ran out in order to make money for the opposition instead. There is a nice rundown of Carlo’s career and various … activities here.

 

Carlo subsequently founded the Science and Public Policy Institute, and went on to claim that the CTIA was responsible for covering up scientific findings that showed cellphones were dangerous – he never specified which findings he were referring to, but he managed to draw some media attention – which landed him e.g. a stint with Peter Angelos, a product liability lawyer who sought to sue the mobile phone companies on behalf of clients who had brain cancer (ultimately unsuccessful because they were unable to even remotely suggest a link between cell phones and brain cancer), and a book-contract with journalist Martin Schram for Cellphones: Invisible Hazard in the Wireless Age, which has become a classic in the cell phone radiation conspiracy industry despite its ridiculous cherry-picking and avoidance of discussing actual science. Carlo even joined forces with BioPro, a ‘bio-shield’ company, to promote a laughable, tin-foil-hat-derived stick-on device to protect yourself from “harmful cellphone radiations”, and he has later, with one David Solomon, run a project with “Protege Sports inc” to market a “clothing enhancement” that ostensibly protects baseball players from radiation and enhances their performance.

 

Carlo also founded the EMR University, an institution that purports to provide “professional training” in the “risks and interventions related to electromagnetic radiation exposure” and provides their own certification for “Certified Electromagnetic Radiation Safety Advisors” to people like Carlo’s partner Tamara Mariea, who offers treatments for autism, a condition she attributes to electromagnetic radiation exposure for children made vulnerable by “contaminated vaccines”. The faculty consists, in addition to Carlo, of Jill Ungar, an administrator at Carlo’s group the Safe Wireless Initiative, as well as a “Certified HypnoBirthing Practitioner” and Reiki Master, and the late David James, a Florida-based British naturopath and author (with his wife Ora James Murphy) of Handy Way to Cook Your Brain: What’s the damage? and Cellular Radiation: Is this our next Titanic?, who believed that electromagnetic radiation was a threat partially because cloud-seeding, alien organisms from the stratosphere have overwhelmed our immune systems.

 

Carlo still manages to persuade journalists to write positive spins about him, such as a 2018 piece in The Nation penned by conspiracy theorists Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie, discussed here, which continued to do what conspiracy theorists do: When the evidence overwhelmingly shows that you are wrong, declare conspiracy, then declare victory – yes, all the large-scale studies showing no connection between cell phone radiation and any harmful effects, involving multiple scientists and institutions: it’s all shillwork. We admit, though, that Carlo is rather good at misrepresenting them as saying the opposite of what they actually say.

 

In addition to promoting studies that are shoddy at best (but usually not even qualifying as studying anything whatsoever), Carlo continues to produce bullshit (much of it reports written together with his long-term associate Rebecca Steffens Jenrow), and it continues to be cited by cranks and quacks who push pseudoscience and woo related to electromagnetic hypersensitivity (and producers of “shielding” devices). Said work includes e.g. a paper, co-authored with the aforementioned Tamara Mariea, on links between electromagnetic radiation and autism – work that has been amply cited by leading antivaccine activists such as Heidi Stevenson and Joseph Mercola (an ardent fan of Carlo’s), and which is discussed here. 

 

Another notable contribution is his 2006 theory – apparently dreamt up from thin air – on “Information Carrying Radio Waves (ICRW)”, which quickly became the catch-cry of anti-cellphone activists everywhere (Carlo himself promoted it by sending it to anti-cell-phone-tower activists Milt Bowling and Eileen O’Connor with “Privileged and Confidential — All rights Reserved” stamped on every page as a marketing ploy to suggest importance and urgency), and which predictably resurfaced in 2020 among the “5G is the cause of COVID” crowd; the paper itself – laughable from any scientific or professional perspective – was a clever piece of salesmanship and pseudoscientific technobabble. Carlo has also e.g. appeared on Good Morning America to spread the claim that Radiation Is Killing the Bees Despite the Cell Phone Industry’s Disinformation Campaign, his only actual evidence (i.e. beyond speculation and pseudoscientific technobabble) being a German study which, completely unrelatedly, showed that bees could be disoriented by radio signals and which also turned out not to be replicable. There is little in his portfolio that even remotely resembles scientific studies from Carlo’s hand, at least since 2000 – to be sure, he and his associates have published “findings” in various pseudojournals, such as the International Journal of Clinical Bioenergetics … which was run by BioPro Technologies and for which Carlo was both the Editor-in-Chief and peer-reviewer. His Institute for Healthful Adaptation has certainly advertised the undertaking of a number of studies, though the advertisement appears mostly to be a marketing strategy to sell products and attract funding.

 

Some of his organizations and projects, such as the Safe Wireless Initiative, which has accumulated a vast database of people who claim (anonymously) to have symptoms and/or illnesses related to or caused directly by EMR exposure; the Mobile Telephone Health Concerns Register (MTHCR); or the international Help for Wireless Victims network, which ostensibly helps people who suffer from the made-up “ElectroHyperSensitivity Syndrome (EHS)” and “Membrane Sensitivity Syndrome (MSS)”, might also still be active; we haven’t checked. But through his initiatives, Carlo has certainly become a person of influence, shaping court decisions and public policy. In 2007, for instance, he was invited before a Parliamentary committee in the UK (representing the activist group Radiation Research Trust), and his work has been used and cited by a variety of EU legislators and lobbying groups.

 

Lately, Carlo has promoted Memon, a “bionic instrument” based on pseudoscientific gobbledygook and designed to re-harmonize you and your environment from the harmful effects of mobile phones, WiFi and electromagnetic radiation in general. The technological foundation for the device is nebulous, but a core point apparently concerns the putative distinction between right-turning electromagnetic frequencies, which is good, and left-turning ones, which are destructive and carry pathogenic information’s [sic] – the “Memon device uses Information’s Polarizations Interference Chip Technology (IPICT) to sense an interference” and, “via a massive library of information’s [sic] stored within it, transform the pathogenic information’s by rotating them 180 degrees then reflecting them back out again,” thus cancelling them out. Oh, yes. And Carlo can certify that the device “is clearly positive efficient on each level of biological systems” and an “‘anti-oxidant’ and restorative for disrupted inter-cellular communication”, and that the mechanism of action “is both biologically mediated and direct energetic.”

 

There is a decent, though older, portrait of George Carlo and his work (in six parts) here, here, here, here, here and here.

 

Diagnosis: One of the most influential, successful, dangerous and cynical promoters of pseudoscience and denialism in the world today. It remains unclear whether he actually believes any of the FUD-promoting materials he producers, but given that he might, he deserves an entry. And in any case it is a name you really should be familiar with, in case it ever pops up in any context.

 

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ SciencebasedMedicine

 

[It turns out that we have written about George Carlo before … we didn’t remember, but that is the reason for the ‘.5’ designation – the previous entry is here, and complements the present one]