HENRY LAI HAS A VIVID RECOLLECTION OF HIS INTRODUCTION to the politics of big science. It was 1994, and he had just received a message from the National Institutes of Health, which was funding work he was doing on the effects of microwave radiation, similar to that emitted by cellular phones, on the brain. He and UW colleague Narendra "N.P." Singh had results indicating that the radiation could cause DNA damage in brain cells.
The news was apparently unwelcome in some quarters.
Someone had called the NIH to report that Lai was misusing his research funding by doing work not specified in the grant (the grant didn't mention DNA). And the agency wanted to know what was going on.
"It really scared the hell out of me," says Lai, a research professor in the UW's Department of Bioengineering who earned his Ph.D. from the UW in 1977. "I was awake all night, worrying about it, wondering what to do."
No comments:
Post a Comment