I was appointed by Mayor David Coss last year as one of two citizen advisors to the committee charged with examining the pros and cons of installing Wi-Fi in city buildings, and with submitting a plan to City Council. The council is expected to make a decision on that plan at its June 11 meeting.

Thirty years ago, I was in medical school in California. I learned anatomy and physiology, microbiology, pharmacology and all the other academic subjects. I was taught to examine and treat patients and I assisted at surgeries. But I learned the hard way that something vital was missing from the curriculum: The interaction of electromagnetic energy with biology and health, a discipline known as bioelectromagnetics. I learned it by getting sick.

My illness was acute: My heart rate dropped below 50, and weeks later I collapsed with symptoms similar to a heart attack, but with a normal EKG. I lost a lot of weight, was confined to bed for a period, and became short of breath with the least exertion. It took me three years to recover. And during those years, I learned two important facts: My recovery depended on avoiding exposure to electromagnetic fields as much as possible; and my illness was precisely described in the medical literature of Eastern Europe and was called radio wave sickness. I also learned that the electrocautery devices used to cut tissue and seal blood vessels expose surgeons to much higher levels of radio frequency radiation than is allowed in any other profession.

In 1996, when the wireless revolution began in earnest in the United States, I joined a worldwide network of concerned scientists and doctors and became active in disseminating information about the health and environmental effects of these new technologies. I also began advocating — because no one else was doing it — for the surprisingly large numbers of Americans who might have been injured, disabled, made homeless and driven to suicide by the increasingly inescapable radiation emitted by cell phones and towers, wireless computers, routers and access points and the seemingly endless variety of other products containing radio transmitters.

A 1998 telephone survey by the California Department of Health Services found that 3.2 percent of respondents stated that their health was seriously affected by electromagnetic fields, and that an estimated 120,000 Californians were disabled by such fields and couldn't work. This study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, received no publicity.

The alarming experiments conducted on more than 2,000 laboratory animals since 1988 by neurosurgeon Leif Salford and his colleagues at the University of Lund in Sweden have received no publicity either. Their studies show that a two-minute exposure to an ordinary cell phone causes leakage of the blood-brain barrier; that a two-hour exposure causes permanent damage to brain cells; that chronic exposure causes permanent impairment of memory; that DNA is altered; and that all these effects can occur at power levels equivalent to holding a cell phone or a wireless computer four feet from your head, or living 500 feet from a typical cell tower.

Wi-Fi is newer than cell phones, and the experiments done with phones haven't yet been done with computers. But in principle, the biological effects should be identical, and in practice complaints about Wi-Fi, everywhere in the world, are more widespread, and the health effects appear to be more severe.

This technology has effects on environment, health, and access to buildings by people with disabilities, that our society has yet to come to grips with. The council should do the right thing and vote "no" on this plan.

Santa Fean Arthur Firstenberg is the founder and president of the Cellular Phone Task Force.