The safety of mobile telephones is a pressing question, now that the brains of nearly half the humans on the planet have become exposed within a short span of time to a physical agent to which their ancestors' genes could not have adapted. It is no surprise then that epidemiologists have taken an interest in possible health effects of microwave exposure from mobile telephony. Few had experienced this novel exposure until 25 years ago, but nonionizing radiation from mobile telephones now regularly bathes the cerebral cortex of billions of people. This radiation has been demonstrated to affect communication channels across cell membranes by inhibiting or closing gap junctions,1,2 lending some plausibility to the idea that use of mobile telephones might have consequential biologic effects.
