I can speak to that although only in part, recognizing that my role is not to discuss the health impacts per se. I was brought on more as a person to understand public perception and risk perception. But the process was that we were given a very specific question to answer: to evaluate the scientific rigour.

Why I say that, I frame that, is that I believe there's a bigger question that could have been asked or could be asked again. We're hearing a lot of concerns around the health impacts and risks of those technologies, but this was not a risk-risk or risk-benefit analysis. We didn't hear from people who were happy about RF, who found RF important for their work. So the question was bounded very much by what the scientific evidence of harm was. It wasn't a bigger question of how we manage this risk or how we deal with competing risk-benefit interests.

So that very narrow question.... There were scientists and experts from all over the world. There was lively debate among them about how we were going to collate all the evidence: the discussions of lower dose exposures and what the health impacts were, and the frustration of not being able to say with any sort of certainty what's going on in low dose levels. I believe that one of our major recommendations, which I'm hearing echoed, is that we need better, more robust research on this area. It looks as if there are signals in that large body of literature, but it's very scattered.

The information on thermal heating, which is what Safety Code 6 is all about, is quite clear. The rest of it is quite scattered. We need better informed research to bring that together so we have clear answers and can take precautionary steps to try to find a level that might be more acceptable to everybody.

But when you start to talk about questions of acceptance and risk management, that's a bigger question than just a scientific question. It's what is our society...? What do we want to do as a country around regulating this exposure? That doesn't just have to do with science. It has to do with the benefits of the technology, the impacts on a larger scale. We're a big country. We need technologies that move information across the country, but we also need to do it in a safe way. I think that's a much bigger question than what we were asked to address in the Royal Society panel. I believe those questions are valid and need to be addressed.

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