"Is EMF Cooking Your Mitochondria?"

“Dr. Martha Herbert and activist Camilla Rees warn about a new set of proposed bills that would place 5G telecom towers every 750 feet, overturning local limitations on siting these dangerous structures. They explain what 5G and other EMF fields do to plants, insects, animals, and humans. From brain damage and higher cancer rates to diabetes symptoms and systemic damage at the cellular level, they make the case that these technologies create an environment in which we cannot possibly thrive. The new bills pose an existential threat. Four-alarm warning: take action. View the complete bios of our guests below.”

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Camilla Rees, MBA is a former financial industry executive in Corporate Finance, venture investing and Corporate Communications who has more recently been a researcher, author, and producer on technology risks focused on biological and health risks from electromagnetic fields.

She has studied widely in medical, scientific, complementary and alternative medicine, health enhancement and self-empowerment fields for thirty years and also serves as a personal and business consultant to change agents, using her Wide Angle Health TM framework. Camilla founded Manhattan Neighbors for Safer Telecommunications, ElectromagneticHealth.org, Campaign for Radiation Free Schools and co-founded the International EMF Alliance, in Oslo, Norway. She is Senior Policy Advisor to the National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy in Washington, D.C., where she has overseen policy papers on electromagnetic fields, the smart grid and telecommunications, including the landmark “Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks”. This paper explains why hard-wired, fiber optics to the premises (FTTP) is superior to wireless access networks, and the safer alternative to 5G.

In 2025, she co-authored a paper with Richard Lear, “Safety of Wireless Technologies--The Scientific View” which explained that unheeded warnings in a U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute review study in 1971, which found 132 different biological effects, symptoms and diseases associated with wireless exposures, has significantly contributed to the explosion in chronic illnesses in the U.S. since 1990. Twenty-three of the fastest growing chronic illnesses today were identified in the Navy report as being associated with electromagnetic field exposures.

Today, Camilla is co-leading a collaborative initiative among 100+ health and environmental advocacy groups aimed at dismantling Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which took away state and local rights to influence the siting of cell towers and antennas on health and environmental grounds. “No More TM” was initiated by Children’s Health Defense to restore state and local control over cell towers and antennas, and legal recourse to injured parties. The coalition is also focused on new proposed FCC rules and certain bills in Congress which aim to further strip local rights over cell towers and antennas so cell towers and antennas can go up wherever the industry would like with no hearings and no local resistance.

Camilla has organized dozens of expert panels on technology risks across the country for over a decade, including several groundbreaking programs on special risks to children, and has presented six times at the Commonwealth Club of California, the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum. She has also spoken at several medical conferences offering continuing education credits (CEUs) for physicians and serves on the advisory Board of the Building Biology Institute.

Camilla is an award-winning health and environmental activist, having received the “2018 Award in Public Health” from the Global Foundation for Integrative Medicines, and “The Jonathan Forman Award” from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, its most prestigious award for outstanding contribution in the field of Environmental Medicine.

Camilla is a graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University and received an MBA from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Dr. Martha Herbert is a pediatric neurologist, neuroscientist, systems thinker, and autism researcher best known for challenging strictly genetic explanations of autism and advancing a systems-biology, whole-body approach to neurodevelopmental disorders.

She earned a PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness, which aroused her interest in the brain and sharpened her systems integration analytical skills. Between her PhD and starting medical school at Columbia University, she became engaged in public critical discourse about science, including brain evolution and development, neurotoxicology, environmental health and genetic engineering. These activities continued through medical school and her residencies at Cornell and the Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard Medical School and continued into her fellowship and then faculty appointment. For a decade she served as a Board member and then Vice-Chair with Claire Nader as Chair, of the Council for Responsible Genetics, the world’s first biotechnology watchdog group, which had a preeminent Board of Advisers including two Nobel Prize winners).

At the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (a Harvard-MIT endeavor), where she did her brain-imaging research, her initial focus was on MRI volumetric brain imaging, where she analyzed the first (1989) MRI study of children with autism, documenting white matter enlargement and not just neuronal changes in their brains. This, alongside identification by other researchers of brain inflammation in autopsy studies of brains of people with autism, led her to question whether autism is “a brain disorder” or “a disorder that affects the brain,” and further led her to become widely known for arguing that autism is not a fixed, hard-wired genetically determined brain disease but a dynamic, treatable condition involving immune, metabolic, gastrointestinal, and environmental factors and their impacts on the coherent organization of the nervous system. Subsequent literature review published in her lengthy two-part paper “Autism and EMF? Plausibility of a Pathophysiological Link” showed many parallels between the impacts of high-intensity new-to-nature telecom electromagnetic radiation as compared to impacts of physical (including toxic) stressors in autism and other chronic illnesses.

Besides publishing many papers, Herbert is the author of the influential public-facing book The Autism Revolution, which presents whole body-brain research suggesting that inflammation, oxidative stress, toxic exposures, and gut-brain interactions play significant roles in autism and explaining how these problems can be reversed. She has advocated for earlier intervention, multidimensional personalized treatment, and greater openness to non-pharmaceutical and integrative systems approaches—positions that have made her both highly respected and controversial within mainstream medicine.

Herbert has spoken publicly about medical ethics, scientific censorship, and institutional resistance to paradigm-shifting research, particularly in areas touching on vaccine safety, chronic illness, pesticides, hazards of electromagnetic fields among other areas of environmental concern, as well as about forward-looking emerging systems approaches that honor the delicate intricacy and vulnerable complexity of the electromagnetic as well as other physiologic activities in all living beings.

Dr. Herbert is widely regarded as a bridge figure between conventional neurology and emerging whole-systems medicine, and her work continues to influence clinicians, researchers, and parents seeking broader frameworks for understanding autism and related conditions, and to be applicable to upgrading health more broadly.

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