An excerpt from:

Swimming Against the Current
The Life and Work of Reba Goodman
A Tribute and Remembrance
Published: August 5, 2025
By: Louis Slesin, PhD
In: Microwave News

Louis Slesin: “I asked Henderson whether she ever had doubts about the EMF work. “Of course, I doubted the results,” she replied. “In all cases, the experiments were coded so even I did not know experimental from control results. They were not beautifully consistent, nor would the values knock your socks off. But, they were positive.”

Beyond the science, Henderson had sharp words for the way she and Reba were treated. “The marauders,” she called them, “would not have dared do this if we were male. They were hardly a noncommitted and unbiased group.”

Reba continued to work at Columbia, now partnering with Martin Blank, a long-time member of the biophysics faculty. Together, they turned out a good number of papers, but it wasn’t the same. The utility campaign to discredit the science had succeeded. DOE closed its EMF research program. Other funding dried up too. Without new papers coming out, the issue went dark and lost its audience. No one cared much about power line EMFs anymore.

What happened to Reba was nothing new in bioelectromagnetics research. Many of the most productive and original scientists have been attacked when they identified effects that were unwelcome to their sponsors. Robert Becker is one of the best-known examples. His lab at the VA Hospital in Syracuse, New York, was closed after he advised caution in the siting of power lines. Among the many others are Robert Liburdy, Hugo Rüdiger and Henry Lai. When Jerry Phillips moved from studying power lines EMFs to cell phone radiation, Motorola, his sponsor, tried to stop him from publishing a paper showing effects on DNA.

Looking back on the Goodman-Henderson controversy today, it’s impossible to say whose experiments were right. Maybe they were all right. But it doesn’t matter. Science isn’t about replicating a single experiment. It’s about the body of work from all laboratories and looking for a coherent picture. Some 100 proto-oncogenes have been identified to date. How many might EMFs activate? We don’t know, because the experiments have not been done.

I asked Phillips if he thinks power-frequency EMFs can affect the expression of proto-oncogenes. “Absolutely,” he replied, “I have no doubt.”

You can see why Phillips is so sure when you look at the overall gene expression literature. Few know it better than Henry Lai, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and one of the world’s best-known EMF researchers. In his retirement, Lai has been keeping track of what gets published. By his count, there are now more than 200 papers on static and power-frequency EMFs and gene expression —over 90% show effects. Among them is a 2020 study from Iran that saw EMF-induced changes in myc expression.

Quashing the cancer link turned into a mission to discredit Reba. It was successful. “I always believed that the National Grid was out to demonstrate that the Goodman and Henderson work lacked credibility and that EMF research was nothing but junk science,” Phillips told me as I was finishing up this article. “Money has always been the motivation, period.”

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