CHAPTER ONE
WHEN SCIENCE MEETS POLITICS
THE STREETS AND sidewalks of Long Beach, California, were bake-oven hot on this mid-June day in 1999, but that was nothing compared to the heat that was being generated inside the air-conditioned comfort of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. There, in a conference room, more than 100 scientists and dozens of trade-press journalists from five continents were attending a "State of the Science" colloquium, convened to discuss the public-health impact of cell phones. The audience was listening with more than just scientific interest. For at the podium was the organizer of this colloquium, Dr. George Carlo, a public-health scientist with graying hair and a grayer beard, who many in the hall used to refer to as the cell phone industry's "hired hand" (but always behind his back, of course!). Now Carlo was sounding the one warning the industry executives who had funded his research least wanted to hear.
"It is very clear to me that everyone is doing their job—and the consumers are not being protected," Carlo declared ruefully. He outlined new evidence indicating that cell phones may indeed cause cancer and other health damage to consumers. Months earlier, he had given the findings to the cellular telecommunications industry's top Washington lobbyist, Thomas E. Wheeler—the man who hired him six years earlier to run the industry's science research program. But the industry had kept Carlo's troubling new findings carefully under wraps. Now, Carlo stunned most of the audience by calling upon the industry's top officials to tell the public everything they knew about the health risks posed by mobile phones—and to develop an entirely new standard for the amount of radio wave emissions that can safely emanate from these instruments which people everywhere hold against their heads. The old standard, he said, was based upon old data, old science, and old theories that were now invalid—perhaps dangerously so. His words rang alarm bells throughout the industry.
Tom Wheeler had not bothered to fly out from Washington, D.C., just to hear this too-public warning issued by the scientist he'd personally brought into his cell phone inner circle in 1993. Back then, the industry's strategy seemed to be a masterstroke of science-veneered damage control; it would take a scientist to keep the scientific community in check, keep the government regulators at bay, and keep the cell phone consumers blithely buying—by assuring one and all that cell phones are safe.
At first, back in the early and mid-1990s, Carlo, a medical professor of epidemiology and a cautious, deliberate researcher, had been quite comfortable issuing public assurances that scientific research had found no health risks in radiation from cellular telephones. But then, as he followed the science, he came up with new research evidence that cast serious doubt on those early studies. Early in 1999 the new evidence raised cause for serious concern about health risks and made additional research an urgent imperative. Carlo had gone to the offices of the president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and told Wheeler about the existence of credible new evidence of health risks. When he added he could no longer say publicly that the research showed no health risks from cell phone radiation, the industry lobbyist moved quickly to distance himself from the scientist who was the bearer of bad news. And he did it in a mover-and-shaker sort of way.
"We need to talk privately," said Wheeler. "Let me buy you a shoeshine." They'd walked down Connecticut Avenue from the trade association's headquarters to Washington's stately Mayflower Hotel, the site of many presidential inaugural balls and a fine shoeshine stand. Sitting side by side in the stand's tall chairs, they were a most unlikely looking Washington power duo: one a clean shaven, bespectacled power-lobbyist wearing a finely tailored dark suit, white custom-made shirt with "TEW" monogrammed above the pocket, shiny cufflinks clasping white French cuffs; the other a gray bearded, shaggy-haired epidemiologist, in a tweedy sport jacket, shirt, and sweater.
"You and I are tied at the hip on this," Wheeler said, speaking candidly as if oblivious to the presence of the two middle-aged gentlemen who were in front of them, shining their loafers. "If you succeed, I succeed. If you don't succeed, I don't succeed."
What the lobbyist wanted, Carlo believed, was not Siamese-twin comradery, but political separation: an ample degree of detachment from the bad news and himself. When the new scientific findings had to be reported to his powerful multibillion-dollar association's board members, Wheeler told Carlo to deliver the news—at a board meeting that was closed to the public and the press.
And to that very public worldwide scientific colloquium in Long Beach, Wheeler sent CTIA vice president Jo-Anne Basile to represent the industry and do what she could to stroke the scientists and spin the journalists. Meanwhile, Wheeler remained at his Washington, D.C. command headquarters 3,000 miles away— where, being a Civil War buff, he was putting the finishing touches on a book, to be published by the end of 1999, about leadership lessons that 21st-century business executives can learn from the generals of the Union and Confederate armies.
Wheeler's new war-game strategy for the cell phone industry seemed clear: regroup, retrench—but never retreat.
So it was that in Long Beach, when Carlo finished issuing his public call for new industry safety standards, all eyes seemed to shift from the podium to Wheeler's CTIA representative in the audience. Jo-Anne Basile rose from her seat; surely she was expected to say something in response. "You have caused us a few sleepless nights," she told Carlo, who was still standing at the podium. Her public response in that hall indeed emphasized the civil, rather than the war.
But shortly after the meeting adjourned, Basile and Carlo came face-to-face in the corridor—and their chance meeting quickly erupted into a shouting match. The dark-haired industry rep blasted Carlo for daring to make a public call for a new radiation-emission standard without first clearing it with the CTIA.
Carlo responded that the industry was failing to meet its public-health responsibility—"and that's shameful."
Basile fired back: "How dare you talk to us like that after all the money you've been paid!"
Suddenly, Carlo was aware that people in the corridor had stopped to listen. The fact that his research project was funded by the industry had always been a sensitive point with Carlo. He saw himself as an independent researcher whose only goal was to follow the scientific evidence and protect public health. Yet he knew that people had long been saying he was industry's hired hand. Over the past five-plus years, he'd heard it every time he issued a public statement that basically brought aid and comfort to the industry CEOs by discounting some of the early scientific scare studies on the grounds that they were, in fact, flawed.
"I take my job seriously," Carlo said, now making sure he was speaking loudly enough for all eavesdroppers to hear. "Money has nothing to do with that."
A SUIT HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD
It is easy to pinpoint the moment that set in motion the chain of events that caused Wheeler to put Carlo in that job—and eventually resulted in an epic collision of science and politics.
It was January 21, 1993, and Washington was alive with new beginnings. A new president had just been inaugurated. A new Congress had just been installed. At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the powers of the nation's capital were still celebrating their good fortune. But at CTIA headquarters Tom Wheeler, the newly appointed president and chief lobbyist of the powerful trade group, was scrambling his troops in an effort to stave off an indus try crisis and, in fact, a nationwide panic.
On this politically charged day after Inauguration Day, CNN talk-show host Larry King wound up making major news by booking a guest who had nothing to do with politics at all—a private citizen from Florida whose story ignited a crisis that would shake the power brokers from Washington to Wall Street. David Reynard of Tampa, Florida, told Larry King why he was filing a lawsuit naming cell phone industry companies as defendants. Reynard was alleging that his late wife, Susan, had suffered a fatal brain tumor due to her repeated use of her cellular telephone.
"Suit Over Cellular Radiation Raises Hazard Questions," said a headline in The Los Angeles Times.
"Cellular Phone Safety Concerns Hammer Stocks," said The Wall Street Journal. In the week following that Larry King Live interview, Motorola's stock prices dropped by $5.37 to $50.50 after a brokerage house lowered the stock rating for the nation's largest cellular phone manufacturer. And stock prices for cellular service provider companies dropped as well: McCaw Cellular stock fell $2.87 to $33, and Fleet Call stock fell $1.62 to $20.52.
Meanwhile, the cellular phone industry had its own headline spin: "CNN Runs Scare Story," the CTIA Newsletter had dismissively declared. But the industry's problem was that the story really did seem scary to millions of cell phone users. News of the lawsuit, and its hard-to-prove claim, quickly became a national and international news sensation. It triggered an instant inquiry from a subcommittee chairman in the U.S. Congress, and it quickly caught the attention of an even more powerful and influential opinion-shaper: Jay Leno made it part of his late-night TV comedy monologue. Before the year would end, Tom Wheeler would write a memo to his top advisers that aptly characterized his beleaguered industry's view of its public enemy: "The Hydra-Headed Cancer Scare."
WHEN CARLO MET WHEELER
It was, in a sense, a fluke that first brought George Carlo and Tom Wheeler together in 1993. But in another sense it was the sort of happenstance that actually occurs just about every day somewhere in the nation's capital. The two were introduced by a public-relations man who was trying to become a power broker between industry and government.
In the spring of 1993, Carlo was at a bed-and-breakfast inn he owned on the Maryland shore of the Chesapeake Bay when he received a telephone call from Mark Shannon, of the Ketchum public relations firm in Washington, D.C., who knew of Carlo's work as a pathologist and epidemiologist willing to get involved in the business of giving advice to industries. Shannon wanted to consult—to get a few expert thoughts and phrases. He was about to meet with the cell phone industry's chief lobbyist, when he would be making a pitch on damage control in the hopes of landing a lucrative PR contract.
Carlo listened, then gave some quick advice. Almost as an afterthought, Shannon asked Carlo to come along to the meeting with Wheeler, thinking this would add scientific credibility to his PR pitch. And so, a few days later, Carlo found himself in an office building on 21st Street NW that at the time housed the CTIA. (As the industry's fortunes soared in the years to come, Wheeler moved the association into its current headquarters on Connecticut Avenue.) A dark-haired, 46-year-old career lobbyist, Wheeler had already earned a reputation for his ability to move within Washington's corridors of power. He'd become known as one of the capital's most savvy movers and shakers when he served for five years as president of the cable television industry's trade association. He'd been with the grocery manufacturers' trade association before that. In short, Wheeler had long ago proven his mastery of the Washington art of political science. In the coming years of crisis in the cell phone industry, he would expand his skills into the selective use of highly political science.
Wheeler struck Carlo as a formidable and commanding presence, a takecharge CEO. Indeed, he was that. His book, entitled Leadership Lessons from the Civil War, summed up his own management style in his choice of chapter titles: "Lesson One: Dare to Fail; Don't Confuse Victory With Avoiding a Loss . . . Lesson Three: Yesterday's Tactics Make Today's Defeats; Embrace Change . . . Lesson Five: Information Is Only Critical If It Is Used Properly; Use It or Lose It . . . Lesson Seven: Small Skirmishes Decide Great Battles; The Power of the Individual... Lesson Nine: If You Can't Win . . . Change the Rules; Think Anew."
Wheeler's literary table of contents became his literal battle plan when the cellular telecommunications industry came under attack. The standard Washington response of any political organization being attacked in the media is to mount a strong, well-financed PR campaign. And to be sure, Wheeler would see to it that his forces mounted one of the best. But in January 1993, with his fledgling industry buffeted by the forces of CNN, the Congress, and Leno, Wheeler had come to another quick conclusion: He was not about to be seen just sitting in his headquarters, firing off press-release popguns in response to the salvos of media allegations of this life-or-death magnitude— allegations that there might be a connection between cell phones and brain tumors.
To keep the public buying and the government regulators at bay, Wheeler decided that the CTIA must mount its own initiative quickly and publicly. Just one week after that Larry King interview on CNN, Wheeler held a press conference and announced that the industry would be sponsoring a huge industry-funded research program.
"Despite the many research studies showing that cellular is safe, it has become necessary to reassure those whose doubts have been raised by this scare," Wheeler said in his January 29, 1993, press statement. "It is time for truth and good science to replace emotional videotape and unsupported allegations. Therefore, the cellular communications industry is today announcing that it will fund research to re-validate the findings of the existing studies, which have found that the radio waves from cellular phones are safe."
Reassurance—a scientifically vouchsafed guarantee of cell phone safety— was what the research program was about. The cell phone industry would pay $15 to $25 million over three to five years for a scientific study that would be expected to "re-validate" previous findings that "cellular phones are safe."
Wheeler began hunting for the right person to oversee his research effort. It would be two months before his announcement that he had found that man in a 39-year-old Washington-based epidemiologist, Dr. George Carlo, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at The George Washington University School of Medicine, who held doctorates in both pathology and law. It would be years before George Carlo would come to understand the message that was implicit in the wording of Wheeler's initial announcement of the research program—that he and Wheeler did not exactly share the same sense of mission and purpose for the research effort that Wheeler's trade group was going to finance and Carlo was going to direct.
Looking back, it is also easy to see that Wheeler may have viewed Carlo in a way far different from the way Carlo viewed himself. Wheeler understandably would have deduced from his background check of Carlo that he was hiring a public-health research coordinator who could be counted upon to be an industry kind of guy. After all, in addition to his teaching at the university, Carlo also ran a company that did public-health risk management studies for some prominent corporate clients who themselves had been caught up in controversies. Carlo had performed breast implant studies for Dow Corning that had concluded there was minimal public-health risk to their products. And he had made dioxin studies for the Chlorine Institute that concluded low levels of this chemical did not endanger public health. Wheeler might well have expected that any work Carlo did for the cell phone industry would produce results that would be equally welcomed by the industry executives whose companies were paying for this research.
• • •
In April 1993, Wheeler told Carlo he wanted him to run the cell phone public health research effort. The deal was drawn up quickly and the two men shook hands on it. Carlo didn't realize this new assignment would prove far more controversial than anything he had ever done before. In fact, he was both pleased and impressed with his new role.
I sensed that Tom Wheeler was one of Washington's most savvy lobbyists. And there was no doubt that he was a forceful leader. I remember the day in Wheeler's office conference room when we came to terms. Tom leaned back in his chair and said to me, "It's a good idea. But I'm not going to be the fall guy if this goes bad . . ."—and suddenly he sprang forward, jabbed his index finger at my solar plex-is, and added—"You are!"
• • •
Carlo's appointment by the CTIA to direct its $25-million scientific study project was greeted with little enthusiasm within two sectors that would be crucial to his efforts.
Among the scientific community's narrow circle of recognized researchers and experts in the field, there was widespread surprise and puzzlement at the choice of a fellow they considered an outsider who lacked their expertise. Carlo was a public-health scientist whose specialty was epidemiology—the study of epidemic diseases and their effects on the population. Carlo had never researched, let alone published, anything about bioelectromagnetics—the core discipline of the cell phone radiation controversy. Scientists inspect each other's credentials in the same way that our grandmothers once inspected chickens at the poultry market: they sniff here and there and then shake their heads. So the scientists frankly didn't expect Carlo could accomplish much of significance in this area that was, after all, their life's work and not his.
Among reporters who cover the telecommunications industry, there was a widespread view that Carlo would be a lackey and shill for the cell phone industry. He was, after all, a handpicked expert who they frankly expected would merely provide a polished scientific patina for the industry's standard, high-gloss "no-problem" refrain.
Carlo was very aware of what the scientific community and the news media had been saying about his appointment.
To ease the concerns of the experts who thought he was lacking in credentials, Carlo created two panels of prominent scientists. First, he formed the Science Advisory Group (SAG), and recruited two top experts to work with him. As he recalls, the key to its success was that he was able to convince two top experts to work with him.
I first recruited Dr. Arthur (Bill) Guy, perhaps the dean of all bioelectromagnetics scientists and certainly one of the world's foremost experts in the measurement of radio frequency radiation. He was Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and had done work for the cellular industry before. The CTIA had suggested that I approach Dr. Guy about participating, but I did not follow the suggestion until I had the opportunity to vet him myself. That process was easy—a simple literature search yielded his name on virtually every important committee over the past two decades, and what seemed like literally hundreds of publications had him in authorship. My first contact with him was at a meeting in Washington, D.C., at CTIA headquarters. He was in town giving advice to CTIA about the siting of base stations for transmitting cellular telephone calls, and I had arranged to meet with him. I believed it was important for me to reach out to him, out of respect for his stature in the field. After the first five minutes I knew we not only wanted him to be part of the SAG, but we needed him. He was a tall, rugged-looking man in his early 60s, with a disarming and low-key demeanor. He looked like a professor, probably the type that every student wanted to work with. We talked radio wave dosimetry, the concept I had developed for the SAG, and what his role would be—the head of all the dosimetry work. He had many tough questions, and I sweated it out for a while. After all, I knew very little about this science, had done no research in it, and I was about to embark on, and in fact head up, the largest program ever attempted in this field, with no prior experience. So I was worried, at first, about trying to impress the man who many people believed was "the field." But when the conversation drifted to salmon fishing, it was clear we were comfortable with each other. He agreed to sign on. To round out the SAG I recruited Dr. Ian Munro, a world-renowned toxicologist with whom I had worked on a number of prior projects involving herbicides and drug development. A former high-ranking official in the Canadian Health Ministry, Dr. Munro would handle oversight on all nonhuman research in the program. He was also a fisherman. So the SAG was in place with Dr. Guy overseeing dosimetry, Dr. Munro toxicology, and me covering epidemiology, public health, and general management. We began daily phone conferences and designed our program. This was April of 1993, and we needed to present our overall program to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on May 22.
Carlo made one other major move to ease the concerns of the scientists— and to impress the politicians. He created a Peer Review Board (PRB) that would be headquartered at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, led by the respected Dr. John Graham, of the Harvard University School of Public Health. The peer-review group would be comprised of internationally recognized experts who would examine the findings of studies done by or funded by Carlo's SAG project and also review funding proposals from outside researchers. That clearly pleased the officials at the FDA; their agency was already enmeshed in a major controversy over breast implants and did not relish the prospect of having to be on the front lines of two political wars simultaneously.
Those moves enabled Carlo to ease, at least initially, the concerns and jealousies within the scientific community.
To ease the concerns of the journalists who thought he would be an industry shill, Carlo—well, Carlo frankly did not know what, if anything, he could do quickly. He didn't see how he could win the media's respect, or at least a decent interval of benign silence, until he had time to prove himself by doing his job. Carlo knew, deep down, he was not going to be a shill; but then again, truth be told, he always thought, deep down, that his research project would conclude what the early studies and the cell phone industry had always asserted—that there was no evidence that wireless phones cause cancer. So Carlo just went about his job, hoping his SAG and the Harvard-led peer review group would provide valuable credentials of respect. He believed that if he conducted himself responsibly, he would be judged responsibly.
THOUSANDS OF STUDIES?
The cellular telephone industry unwittingly created the first impossible task for its new research chief. In the wake of the first wave of scare stories in the news media and panic selling of cell phone stocks on Wall Street, the industry had offered instant reassurance.
On January 26, 1993, a senior Motorola executive told reporters that "thousands of studies" had already shown cellular phones were safe. It was a classic overstatement that all in the industry would regret enormously.
News accounts everywhere began referring to the existence of thousands of studies as if it were, in fact, a fact. Carlo found himself swept into the rushing stream of assuring rhetoric, as he too was quoted on several occasions talking about these thousands of studies. Naturally, news reporters began asking the industry to make those 1,000 studies public. Carlo put his staff to work at the task. A research firm was contracted to conduct a huge Internet database search for the thousands of studies. But thousands of studies were not to be found. Months later, the CTIA staff was still scrambling, to no avail.
On July 13, 1993, the CTIA's director of industry relations, Cilie Collins, wrote an urgent plea to Dr. Om Gandhi, of the University of Utah, one of the pioneer scientists in the field of cellular telephone research. "We need copies of any studies that are pertinent to this issue to be available to the press," Collins wrote. "As you know, one of the main causes of the cancer-scare media coverage was that the industry was unable to produce the 'thousands of studies' that have been conducted on the cellular phone frequency."
There was of course only one reason why the industry was never able to produce evidence of those "thousands of studies" that said mobile phones were safe: The studies did not exist. The entire industry regretted its initial reflexive-response "thousands of studies" posture, as journalists began to view a bit more skeptically every assertion the industry would make during the coming years of political and scientific war-games.
BELATED BACKGROUND CHECK
In mid-May 1993 Wheeler opened a meeting of his top policy and public relations advisers and his science adviser, Carlo, in the CTIA boardroom by announcing that their agenda for the session consisted of two items: One was the credibility of Carlo, and the other was the credibility of the SAG program Carlo had been appointed to run just a month earlier. Wheeler had a habit of writing meticulous, printed notes in his day-timer calendar, and he was reading from those notes.
"What do you have to say about the flap in Science magazine?" Wheeler was looking directly at Carlo, who was clearly caught off guard. He was referring to a magazine article about a controversy that had caused Carlo to end his six-year relationship with the Chlorine Institute—after the industry's public-relations representatives had put Carlo's name on top of a PR paper that he had not only never written but never even seen. Wheeler had never mentioned this issue before—it seemed obvious to Carlo that someone had brought the matter to Wheeler's attention as a way of questioning whether Carlo should be running the industry's science research program.
Carlo explained the dioxin uproar: In February 1991 Science carried a story about a controversy that had erupted after publication of a paper listing Carlo as its author. It characterized the views of a scientific advisory group sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official. When one participant wrote an angry letter to Carlo and others protesting these comments Carlo had allegedly written, Carlo was shocked. He had not written the paper, and had not even seen it before. All he had done was write a summary of a conference he had attended which carried the notation that "the meeting reinforced the notion that dioxin is much less toxic to humans than originally believed." That phrase became part of a new chlorine industry position paper The chlorine industry officials told Carlo they had put his name atop the paper as its author to give the document added credibility. The industry and the PR firm each said they thought the other had told Carlo about it—which of course would still have been unacceptable because he simply hadn't written the document. Wheeler listened intently to Carlo's explanation.
I had the sense that he saw this as an issue on two levels: First, could he trust me to carry his interests forward? It surely appeared to him that I may have turned against the Chlorine Institute. And second, would there be any spillover onto the SAG program? Had the "flap" as Wheeler termed it, harmed my reputation as a scientist?
I tried to reassure him on both counts. I saw the "flap" as a simple indication that I played by the rules, and that I expected those with whom I was working to play by the rules as well. The feedback I had gotten about the controversy from my scientific colleagues in the months following the Science article was overwhelmingly positive. Many of my friends in the chemical industry thought the situation was unfortunate but did not blame me for my response.
"I am satisfied with your explanation, George, but I still don't think you can be out there alone on this," Tom said.
"That is precisely why we'll have a Peer Review Board," I answered. "With some of the world's top scientists helping us, our science will be above reproach. It will speak for itself."
"Not good enough," Tom responded. "Politically, and from a public relations view, we need more cover."
I disagreed with him and argued that everyone's interests would be served if we trusted in the science and did the best science we could. Everything would flow from that. We didn't need to contaminate this with politics.
Tom gave me an angry rebuke: "You do the science. I'll take care of the politics."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From CELL PHONES: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age by Dr. George Carlo, 2001, pp. 3-18, CARROL & GRAF PUBLISHERS, INC: NEW YORK
--
