Expert: Daniel Mazur - 1/2/2008

Question
I am doing a science fair project on cell phones. My research question is, "Does cell phone radiation increase the risk of developing acoustic neuroma?". However, I do not know or have any ideas for ways to conduct an experiment on this. All suggestions are greatly appreciated.


Answer
Hello Daniela,

I have nothing but very general advice. Your project sounds challenging, because to correctly work it out you will need a close collaboration with hospitals. More precisely, you will need to cooperate with the ear specialists, who have registered cases of AN, you will need lots of them to make a good statistics and, most importantly, they will have to be willing to share the patient records. The last point will be the most difficult one, because of its sensitive nature. Even if they are all really willing, you won't have much to work with I suspect: I seriously doubt that the doctors have been keeping records about whether or not their patients had been using cell phones, how frequently etc. I don't hesitate to say that to conduct a fair research on your topic would require a rich sponsor, a number of involved people and at least a year of hard work on your part - after all, the AN is still pretty rare condition.

You might have been thinking of an alternative approach: find a list of known and verified circumstances under which AN develops and then speculate how many of these the cell phone use creates. This is more like a high-school-level science project, but it lacks the ambition of finding out anything scientifically valuable. It is the approach of social sciences, where speculation is allowed. There you can just try to find a match between the known effects of one thing (cell phones) and the known causes of another thing (AN) and when you find a match, hooray.

In exact science the only valuable results can be obtained a) when a hypothesis is developed into a rigorous theory (a "tree" of implications like "from A and B follows C") or b) when we do a correct analysis of real-life data, take into account all possible factors that may be confounding our conclusions and use the correct statistical measures.

I must say that to take on your problem in the exact-scientific sense you will need to exhibit a power of a deity. As much as I wish you the biggest success, I think there is a great chance of failure and subsequent bitter disappointment. If you take the social-scientific approach, you only have your own conscience to deal with: you will have, at best, only created a hypothesis "it seems likely/unlikely that cell phones may have an effect on developmnet of AN". My only appeal is this: Never fool yourself into believing that your work is anything else (more significant or less significant) than it really is. The results of your work will not be automatically correct, just because you worked hard and did your best. In science we must work with this knowledge every single day.

I wish you best luck and do not hesitate to post further questions.
Cheers,
Daniel