Motorola Has Left the Building
Will never be quite the same again.
On Friday, February 13, Motorola will close down its RF research lab in Florida....
Read the whole story at: http://www.microwavenews.com
Louis Slesin, PhD
Editor, Microwave News
A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation
Phone: +1 (212) 517-2800; Fax: +1 (212) 734-0316
E-mail: <mwn@pobox.com>
Internet: http://www.microwavenews.com
Mail: 155 East 77th Street, Suite 3D
New York, NY 10075, U.S.A.
February 9… Call
it the end of an era. Motorola,
which has by any measure been the dominant force in the RF health
arena for more than 15 years, is stepping back from the fray. The
field will never be quite the same again.
On Friday, February
13, Motorola will close down its RF research lab in Plantation, FL.
C.K. Chou, Mark Douglas, Joe Elder, Joe Morrissey and their support
staff have all lost their jobs. A few days later, Ken Joyner, another
key player on RF regulatory affairs based in Australia, will leave
Motorola after 12 years with the company.
"I don't know
who will fill the gap," Morrissey told Microwave
News.
The
layoffs in the RF group are part of a major restructuring at Motorola
in response to plunging sales of its cell phones. In January,
Motorola announced that it would cut an additional 4,000 jobs —3,000
from its handset unit— after axing 3,000 jobs late last year.
Last week's financial headlines tell the story: "Dark
Days at Motorola" (Forbes
on Tuesday); "Motorola:
Becoming a 'Peripheral Player'" (Businessweek
on Wednesday).
Motorola's management must have decided that
the company could no longer afford to lead on RF radiation safety,
which it has done since 1993, when cell phones were first accused of
causing brain tumors. After David Reynard made his claim in court and
on the Larry
King Show,
the company got involved on all fronts: Motorola determined what
health studies needed to be done and then sponsored them in the U.S.
and Europe. In the process, it also specified how they should be done
and by whom. Motorola's staff and allies served on editorial boards
of journals, which judged what research was good enough to be
published. Motorola also ran standards committees which translate
research results into allowable exposure limits. Mays Swicord, who
left the FDA to
become Motorola's head of biological research in 1995, even took over
as the editor of the Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) Newsletter,
allowing him to decide what news and opinions would be presented to
the research community. Simply put, Motorola ran the RF show. (For
examples on how the game was played, see our 2004 report, "Industry
Rules RF".)
Here's a snapshot from our coverage of
the BEMS annual conference in Long Beach, CA, in 1999 when Motorola's
influence was at its peak (see MWN,
J/A99,
p.5):
Motorola was everywhere. Motorola scientists, engineers, consultants and administrators came to Long Beach from three continents. To keep order, the company sent a lawyer and a PR man. In all, there were about a dozen Motorola staffers at BEMS, not counting those actually doing Motorola-funded research.
To its credit,
Motorola did fund a broad-based RF research effort in the 1990s, when
CTIA, the cell
phone trade group, and its main man George Carlo, reneged on a
commitment to sponsor $25 million worth of health studies. But its
initiative came at a price: Motorola micromanaged the research, which
prompted charges that it was less interested in doing science than
buying results that would show cell phones are safe. For instance,
when Ross Adey, in a large animal
study paid for by Motorola, found that cell phone radiation could
inhibit
brain tumors, Motorola forbade him to speculate about a protective
effect. Motorola insisted that the radiation could not have any
effects, good or bad, and would not allow one of its contractors to
say otherwise (see MWN,
J/A96,
p.11).
In the late 1990s, as Europeans grew more and more
concerned about possible health impacts, and with a major research
program taking shape in Brussels, Motorola turned its attention
overseas. First, it helped set up the Mobile Manufacturers Forum
(MMF)
and together they were instrumental once again in shaping which
studies were funded, how they were done and by whom. In some cases,
Motorola's control led to ambiguous and ultimately unusable results.
A set of $10 million RF-animal studies organized by Motorola and the
MMF —known as PERFORM
A— was a washout because Motorola-designed exposure
equipment used in all the experiments put the animals under so much
stress that it confounded any chance of seeing any effect from the
radiation (see "Wheel
on Trial").
Motorola played an equally commanding
role in the development of health standards and of measurement
protocols for cell phone exposures. At the IEEE's International
Committee on Electromagnetic Energy (ICES),
Chou
served as the chair of the ICES subcommittee that wrote the most
recent revision of its RF exposure standard, and Mark
Douglas ran one of the groups writing protocols to estimate the
SARs
from cell phones. Chou traveled widely to protect Motorola's and the
rest of the industry's interests —for example, to Washington to
lobby the FCC and
as far as Beijing to dissuade the Chinese government from adopting
tough cell phone standards. Motorola wanted uniform standards in
every country. It became a principal supporter of the World Health
Organization's (WHO) EMF
Project, and its mission to "harmonize" EMF standards.
(No one in Geneva seemed to care that such corporate contributions
violated the WHO's own rules.) Motorola gave WHO's Michael Repacholi
$50,000 a year and when Motorola bundled corporate contributions
through the MMF, WHO got three times that amount.
What
happens now that Motorola is bowing out? The most predictable change
is that the U.S. military, the Air Force in particular, will reassert
its influence in the RF-health arena. The military has been able to
stay in the shadows while Motorola took center stage, but, with
Motorola gone, the Air Force will want to make sure that it can
continue to freely use its radar, communications and weapon systems.
It cannot afford to take the risk that a group like the BioInitiative
Working Group which doesn't share Motorola's and the Air Force's
thermalist perspective, might take control. Symbolically, in June,
Michael
Murphy, who works on microwave
weapons at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, will become the
president of BEMS, replacing Niels
Kuster of IT'IS in Zurich, which has long had close ties to the
cell phone industry and Motorola in particular.
Less clear is
who will step up and take control of the cell phone issue. CTIA would
be the logical pick, but CEO Steve Largent has steered CTIA clear of
the health controversy. The trade group simply ignores the issue and,
if pressed, directs inquiries to the American
Cancer Society, which also maintains that there are no health
risks other than driving while on a handheld phone. That leaves the
MMF, but its future may be somewhat precarious given that most of the
manufacturers, not just Motorola, are in financial trouble. MMF has
always had a stronger presence in Europe and Asia, and it might have
trouble expanding in the U.S. during these hard economic times. As
for consumer groups, not a single one has shown any interest in
getting involved. Consumer
Reports,
for instance, devoted twice as much space to "BlackBerry
thumb" than to tumor
risks in its annual cell phone issue last month (though some may
consider that progress since the magazime has ignored the radiation
issue for years).
Maybe Motorola's management got it right. If
no one in the U.S. is paying attention to cell phone risks, what's
left of its cash might be better spent elsewhere. But that's not
really the point. RF-health research is a job for public health
professionals —whether it's setting priorities or implementing
them— not for corporations whose financial wellbeing depends on
the outcome. The same applies for setting exposure standards.
Motorola may no longer be an active player, but many questions remain
to be answered. Unfortunately no one wants to address them.