SHIFT: What if cellphones cause cancer?

[NewsHottie]

The concern that there may be a connection between cellphones and cancer has been around for years — the first lawsuits that tried to make the connection were filed in the mid-1990s. There are many studies out there that have found no correlation between the two, and some more recent ones that have.
Additionally, many people criticize the studies that let cellphones off the hook, as it were, arguing that the technology has just not been around long enough for us to know for sure either way. After all, we don't expect people who have smoked for only a few years to have developed lung cancer. Yet.
I'm not here to argue that cellphones cause cancer. I have no evidence to contribute, just an ardent hope that scientists will continue to study the subject rigorously. Instead, I want to ask the question that I haven't seen addressed anywhere else: What if cellphones do indeed put us at risk for cancer? What if some years from now it's shown that using a cellphone for 35 years doubles, triples or quadruples your risk for brain cancer (or cancer of the salivary gland, perhaps)? If the results were concrete, but the government didn't intervene, would you stop using your cellphone? Could we live without mobile phones and, even given some risk, would we want to? Is it possible to go back to landlines, or are cellphones so important now (already!) to our quality of life that we'd be willing to take enormous risks to continue to use them? Click Continue to follow my thought experiment through to a few troubling conclusions.


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