Intro
When searching for books about EMF, to add to a growing list, my thoughts went after a while to Russia, Russian books, since Professor Yuri Grigoriev is Russian: his name and studies are after all often to be found in sources of scientific papers and/or articles. Googling on EMF, and books, in the Russian language, found via Google translate, I did not get so much results, but starting to use the name Yuri Grigoriev, translated into Russian, I found some. Very interesting was also to find the name of “Grigoryev, Oleg Alexandrovich”: I knew this name via Twitter, and a former post, but was it indeed the same person? It was not so easy to find the right “Oleg”, but this page brought the answer: Олег ГРИГОРЬЕВ. Биоэлектромагнетизм науки.
The very interesting article, that I translated via Google, and edited a bit as far I was able to do so, and often just letting it exactly as Google has translated it, follows here. It is a story about his family, about Russia, the Old Believers, his studies, and his career….. It was this term “Old Believers” that made me writing this post. In 2008 I found a, me personally, very moving video of a Russian Old Believers village, uploaded on 30 October 2007 by Russian YouTube channel cortezawwris:
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Oleg GRIGORIEV, Science of Bioelectromagnetism
A man of science rarely becomes the subject of an unbiased business interest in telecom and IT. The biophysics of Oleg GRIGORIEV, who has been leading the direction of radiobiology and hygiene of non-ionizing radiation and biomedical support for the development of new radio technologies for many years, brought the professional excitement with cellular communications back in the mid 90’s.
“For the past twenty years I have been reminding myself of Wikipedia, because without end I have to talk about the effects of electromagnetic fields and the notorious cellular communications on humans. It seems that the scientific interest coincided with the media history, at the initial stage it was supported by cell phones, in particular, «ВымпелКомом». But this is a small part of my scientific life and work of a dream.
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«Пацанство» Boyhood
– I remember myself well in kindergarten. How can you not love kindergarten?! A kid’s team, a team with their roles and confrontations, which, reformatted, accompanies the boys through life, whether you are a 50-year-old doctor of science or a 90-year-old academician. The whole model of life is a kindergarten.
Файл:Александров. Успенская церковь..jpg — Этот файл доступен по лицензии Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported — Борис Мавлютов
My parents are blue-collar workers, engineers in the Soviet science city, Alexandrov, Vladimir Region, where I was born and went to school. The main person of my childhood is my grandmother, who went through a difficult life, torn apart by the events of 1917-1918. She never spoke about it, but implicitly taught me decency, non-possessiveness, the priority of the moral over the material. Although in my early youth I was a pioneer-Komsomol leader, I later ended up in the current tower of ivory, which I have no regrets about.
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– We have a long family history along the mother’s side, since about 1700. It starts with my cousin, great-grandfather Gerontiy Lakomkin, the well-known Old Believer bishop of the provinces Kostroma and Yaroslavsky, who became a saint in the 21st century. My ancestors are inveterate Old Believers, they live in the same place for three hundred years, in the same house in the Kostroma province. In the past it was a rural intelligentsia. The library of my great-grandfather, like the icons of the great-grandmother, were kept under special registration and under special guard, until they were removed during Khrushchev’s regime.
It is believed that I am an absolute copy (from appearance and ending in character) of Herontius‘ nephew, Boris Astashev, a graduate of the Old Believer monastery, who became a Komsomol member and naval officer.
Otherwise, the fate of my family is not very separable from the history of the country. My great-grandfather disappeared in the Kharkov Cheka. My father, born in 1941, at the age of two months, was with his young grandmother in the Gestapo dungeons near Smolensk – they were saved by a Russian attack in December, 41. True, as a result of the total bombing of their home, there remained a funnel of monstrous proportions. It is not built up yet.
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Family Life
When there was no cellular connection
– In my struggle with making a choice in possible professions, electrophysics defeated chemistry and history. I loved physics as an application to biology, to electric fields, and even at school I conducted experiments to model the effects of electric current and electric fields on plants. Now I understand that I intuitively followed the path of science at the turn of the 19th and first third of the 20th century. I entered МЭИ, and am still convinced that I received an excellent fundamental physical education there, which helps me everywhere and in everything. Further he became interested in radiobiology and medicine.
Closer to graduate school in my life appeared Teacher – Professor Yuri Grigoryevich Grigoryev, который из дикого осленка слепил ученого. You will not believe me, but with age I become more and more like him – anatomically and physiognomically. There are a couple of absolutely amazing photos where he stands in his summer village on the Можайское водохранилище, holding судака (fish) in his hands. If you put my father near, they could be siblings. Who knows, somewhere, somewhere there is a consanguinity between us.
At the Institute of Biophysics of the Ministry of Health of Russia, where I started working after high school and where my career actually begins, a unique situation developed: the local organizational structure turned out to be tenacious and in demand in different formats, for different purposes and tasks. Here, not just a school was formed, but a society. For some, I’m actually a son here, and I have “children” – they’re running around, small and lesser small.
To become a specialist who is engaged in research, takes time and careful selection. It is very expensive – financially and morally. You, as a leader, are forced to actually plan the life of a student. It is especially difficult with female students: they are eager to come here, and they start a family, have a husband; must give birth, and they have a dissertation.
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Cellular Supervision
– I well remember the first examination of a cellular base station, which was located on the roof of the TASS building. The 1994 standards created by my senior colleagues were more or less plucked out of the air. It is absolutely a fact that the developers of the document at that time did not see the reality of the base stations, not in the way that they could analyse the research results as it should. Dmitry Borisovich Zimin, being the head of VimpelCom and doctor of science, understood that we should expect a tangible effect of the influence of electromagnetic radiation of a Base Station on a person. However, everyone knew that. But it was VimpelCom that funded the study of this problem. Since the mid 90’s. The Institute of Biophysics, or rather, the Center for Electromagnetic Compatibility engineered in it, took this subject under its wings and supported it for many years.
It was a large, even by modern standards, program that brought together operators, biologists, physicians, and biophysicists. Within this framework, we studied the electromagnetic effects of mobile phones, base stations. Since 1996, we have been occupied practically without interruption with cellular communications, which provided some of the subjects for my candidate and doctoral degrees. We have developed applied techniques, instrument based. Thanks to this, they were able to commercialize their activities, on the one hand, selling services, on the other – doing science on the material received. A certain integral conceptual idea has already been developed about the impact of various elements of cellular communications on humans and the environment, so today this is not the most interesting topic for science.
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Science lags behind technology
Looks like? Why not? The London Museum of Natural History.
– The problem is that the dynamics of generations of technology, and the same cellular communications, are noticeable – by orders of magnitude! – ahead of the rate of accumulation of scientific data and decision-making based on them. While we are working with the 2nd generation of mobile communications and writing articles, 5G is presented with might and main. After all, what is the scientific technology in radiobiology and hygiene? The first stage is to study what forms the impact. Then identify the target organs. Then see the epidemiology. Then conduct experimental research. And then summarize it all. These are the years! Ten years is required!
In my doctoral dissertation in 2012, I concluded —for which they criticized me, and then reconciled— the existing approach to risk assessment must be changed. Our task is to evaluate the impact of the technology and its safety at affordable costs and in a short time, not limited to sanitary and epidemiological well-being. My young colleagues are now busy substantiating this accelerated approach, which also applies to mobile communications. Effectively, this can and should be done in the form of a law, a law on the security of new technologies.
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Dream work
“Life beyond the profession isn’t a path set out for me..” I do not have work as such, the process of life goes along with work and is focused on it. But this is a dream job! And as the experience of my senior colleagues shows, the key to creative longevity. I do not regret that my son chose another path, after graduating from the Higher School of Economics he works in a large international investment fund, has CFA certificates (Chartered Financial Analyst). I hope science is ahead of him.
The components of my life have developed long ago. The one that is called a hobby, the history of science, has now entered the stage of the idée fixe: I am trying to build a history of bioelectromagnetism, in other words, biophysics as applied to electric fields and current. I can confidently say that I have the best library in the country on this subject with a retrospective until 1795 – partly on paper, partly in electronic format. The task is to build a system in the continuity of knowledge and preserve the scientific school of radiobiology and hygiene of non-ionizing radiation in a rather difficult period for science. The ultimate goal is to digitize all materials, introduce this story into scientific circulation.
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Grigoryev, Oleg Alexandrovich: Chairman of the Russian National Committee for Protection against Non-ionizing Radiations, Department of Non-ionizing Radiations, Federal Medical Biophysical Center named after A.I. Burnazyan FMBA, member of the scientific advisory committee of the WHO International Electromagnetic Program, laureate of the RF Government Prize in the field of science and technology, co-author of the book “Cellular Communication and Health”, written jointly with his teacher and “not even namesake” Grigoryev, Yuri Grigoryevich. Source.
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See also: RusCNIRP versus ICNIRP
