EDITORIAL Cellular Telephones and Cancer: How Should Science Respond?

The first exposure of most people to new scientific or medical findings is through the media, particularly television. The media stories that should inform the public, however, have usually been selected more for entertainment value than for news con-tent. Most people first heard about a possible cell phone/cancer connection when David Raynard, whose wife had died of brain cancer, was a guest on the television show Larry King Live. Raynard was suing the cell phone industry, insisting that his wife’s cancer had been caused by a cell phone. “She held it against her head, and she talked on it all the time, ” he explained. It was January 23, 1993; from that day on, it seemed that every media story dealing with cell phones brought up the cancer issue. Make no mistake about it, cell phones are dangerous whe