Edward A. Ornelas
Eleanor R. Adair, a scientist who studied microwave radiation, at a test chamber at an Air Force base in San Antonio in 2000.
Eleanor R. Adair, a scientist who spent decades exposing monkeys and eventually people (including herself) to microwave radiation to determine whether it posed serious health risks — she concluded, emphatically and somewhat controversially, that it did not — died on April 20 in Hamden, Conn. She was 86.
The cause was complications of a stroke, her daughter, Margaret Adair Quinn, said.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Adair, who had done her doctoral work in sensory psychology, was pursuing an interesting but not necessarily provocative topic: how people and animals react physiologically to external heat sources. Yet over the next three decades — after her research led her to study heat generated through microwave radiation, which is used in microwave ovens and emitted at low levels by things like cellphones and electrical transmission lines — Dr. Adair became an increasingly prominent and firm voice of assurance that microwave radiation posed no health risk.
"All the emphasis that we need more research on power line fields, cellphones, police radar — this involves billions of dollars that could be much better spent on other health problems," Dr. Adair said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. "Because there is really nothing there."
For some people close to the issue, those were fighting words.
Even as numerous studies have found that microwave ovens are safe and many scientists say there is no evidence that cellphones cause cancer or other health problems, the rising use of cellphones, wireless Internet signals and some medical and military devices has continued to raise questions about their risk. Last year, a panel of the World Health Organization listed microwave radiation as "possibly carcinogenic." In March, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would review its standards for cellphone use for the first time since 1996.
Some scientists do not use the term microwave radiation because they are concerned it is misleading and scares people unnecessarily. Microwave radiation is far weaker than the radiation in X-rays or gamma rays.
Advocates for more research count Dr. Adair in to a camp that focuses too much on heat or thermal effects from microwaves and is too quick to dismiss other ways microwaves might affect health.
"There's something going on, and the question is what that is and whether it's dangerous," said Louis Slesin, the editor of Microwave News, a Web site that is often skeptical of the role industry and the military play in influencing health standards related to the issue. "Don't let anyone tell you they know the answer to that question."
Although Dr. Adair said she did not receive money from cellphone makers or industries whose products released microwave radiation, she served for five years late in her career as a senior scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory in San Antonio. The Air Force uses radar that emits microwaves.
Dr. Adair was indisputably an innovator in studying microwave radiation, work she began in the mid-1970s while a fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven. First with squirrel monkeys and then with human volunteers, she placed subjects in a chamber into which she released relatively high levels of microwaves for about 45 minutes, followed by a cool-down period. She focused on what impact the heat generated by microwaves might have — and she said she never found much more than perspiration. She said the monkeys and the people mostly enjoyed the experience.
"Particularly if the environment is cool, they love it when the field comes on," she told The Times. She said: "It is very easy to sense it and it feels good. If they are in a warm environment, and the field is strong they may start to sweat and they may feel quite uncomfortable. They always have an option of getting out of the chamber at any time, saying, 'I've had enough.' "
Richard A. Tell, who consults for cellular companies and other industries and who served with Dr. Adair on a committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that helps set standards for permissible microwave levels, said she "did the first and only studies that have ever been done so far in which humans were studied under controlled conditions."
Eleanor Campbell Reed was born on Nov. 28, 1926, in Arlington, Mass. Her father owned a Dodge dealership near Boston and her mother worked as a fashion illustrator before she married. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1955. In 1952 she married Robert K. Adair, who would later become a prominent physicist at Yale. Mr. Adair became involved in his wife's work in her later years and sometimes appeared with her at conferences.
Besides her daughter, survivors include her husband; her son, Douglas; two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
"She would always be the first human subject in all of her experiments," including those involving exposure to microwaves, her daughter said. "She said it was absolutely the most comfortable heat that she ever experienced. She described it once as like having the sun come out — you just suddenly feel all warm and cozy. You're warm on the inside, not overly hot on the outside."
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