Ars Technica Refutes WiFi/Autism Connection - But There's Still Plenty of Controversy To Go Around

John Timmer, of the Ars Technica website and blog, has taken a good deal of time to review the recent journal article which purports to show a clear connection between wireless technology and autism. His article is certainly compelling, drawing as it does on historic debates, findings and perspectives.

Timmer also reviews the science surrounding the claims. Among other things, he notes:

Radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (EMR) in general is mostly impeached by proxy, blamed for a variety of things including bee colony collapse. Its relationship with heavy metal toxicity, however, comes through claims about ion channels on the cell surface. Specifically, EMR is proposed to "harden" cell membranes and shut down active transport channels, trapping toxic chemicals inside the cell (there is an elaboration of this concept available).

Not only does this proposal appear to be completely unsupported in the scientific literature, it seems impossible to support. The cell surface is studded with a huge array of active and passive transport channels with varying degrees of selectivity. There's simply no one active transport channel for all heavy metals that will respond in a well-defined way to EMR. Even if that part made sense, EMR radiation heats the water surrounding cell membranes—if anything, that should make them more fluid, rather than hardening them.

Timmer holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and teaches genetics at Cornell. While this may not make him the ultimate authority on the connection between WiFi and autism, it certainly should give him some credibility.

Perhaps this is one theory - and controversy - that will actually fade away over time. Which, of course, means that we're left with only a few hundred other controversies.

In fact, only today, David Kirby headed his blog in the Huffington Post with these words: "Memo to those who wanted the autism-vaccine contretemps to just go away: You lost."