Do cell phones cause cancer?

Those five words have been floating around for over a decade, but only recently has it caught the attention of mainstream cell phone users, some of whom out of fear have changed their usage habits.
My take on this, and I’ll get it out of the way up front so I can get on with my real point here, is that I have no idea if cell phone use causes cancer, but I do feel confident in saying that I sincerely doubt that holding a radio frequency transmitter of the power of a cell phone up to the side of one’s head is conducive to the long-term wellbeing of the individual.
There. I said it. Standing out on my limb, I feel certain that some types of cell phones use could be dangerous to the health of the user.
But don’t just take my word for it, here is a more informed perspective:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-naATQX5Jo4[/youtube]
My real point here is that we as teachers are now able to take a public tour into the very heart of big science—complete with all the personal biases, desired outcomes, and endless questions that muddy the scientific waters to the point where it often takes years before the answers settle out. We have studies. We have measurements. We have correlations. We have plenty of opinions. And most of all, we have an extremely large amount of personal involvement in the outcome of this grand test as we experiment upon ourselves.
This would be a great time to collect digital documents for a classroom debate about the interworkings of science, the methods, the measurements, the controlled variables, the depending and independent variables, the confounding variables, and of course, the interpretations of all of the above based on the data.
I won’t suggest that money, lobbyists, Fortune 500 companies, and personal desires should cloud the science classroom exercise, but depending on the sophistication your audience, you might share why some things are just not quite as simple as we would like them to be.
In the end, the large-scale study of something that affects billions of people including the very students and teachers in your school,  with just few days of reading, discussing and concluding might be the springboard for an intellectually rich fall semester filled with real-time science.
Oh, and a personal note. My uncle was a heavy cell phone user beginning with the toaster-sized bricks of 80s, as well as the paperback book-sized handhelds of the early 90s, and so on. He is recovering as well as can be expected from a rare form of jaw cancer.
Here are some links to get started.

• The WHO report on IARC Classifies Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields As Possibly Carcinogenic To Humans
• National Cancer Institute: Cell Phones and Cancer Risk
• The American Cancer Society: Cell phones and cancer
• Environmental Working Group’s Cell Phone Radiation Level Look-Up