University calls for mobile phone research to be withdrawn after technician admits faking data

The rector of the Medical University of Vienna, Wolfgang Schütz, has asked researchers at his university to withdraw their two publications based on faked data supposedly showing that electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones causes DNA breakage in human tissue cells.

The study had caused considerable public concern about the health risks from mobile phones. In a statement the university says that a laboratory technician from the department of occupational medicine has since confessed that she fabricated the data. The department was closed in October 2007 after the retirement of its head, Hugo Rüdiger.

The studies based on the faked data were published in 2005 in the journal Mutation Research (2005;583:178-83) and in 2008 in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health (2008;81:755-67). The journals’ …