Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (22 page)

“Where the hell do you get that crap?” he said. “I’m sick and tired of kooks not acquainted with serious research who go around spreading that stuff!”

I told him about some of the research, particularly Ott’s. “I know about that guy,” he said. “He’s no scientist, and people are paying far too much attention to him. He doesn’t even have a biology degree.”

I asked him if he’d read any of Ott’s books or papers, which, after all, had been published in “serious” medical journals and had been supported by medical schools all over the country. I pointed out that Ott’s board of medical people was highly respected.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m really too busy to waste time on conjecture. There’s a difference between careful research and pseudoscience.”

I answered by reminding him that the work of
his
organization was usually called “pseudoscience” by corporate and government scientists, whose conceptions he himself usually attacked. Could he now be falling into the same trap? I asked him again if he’d read any of Ott’s work.

“Listen,” he said again, loudly, “we are now discovering that artificial light might be terrific for you. It’s good for people, not bad. If you want to read something really serious, go get a copy of
Scientific American
and read the article by Dr. Richard J. Wurtman on how artificial light is curing all kinds of diseases.”

“Well,” I asked, “are you saying that some artificial light has beneficial effects? If so, could not some other artificial light made up of other spectra have negative effects? Have you read Ott?” “No I haven’t,” he shouted. “I don’t read quacks. Nor do I talk to quacks!” and he hung up. I went out and bought
Scientific American
(July 1975).

I was astonished at Wurtman’s article because it completely contradicted the views my irascible interviewee had ascribed to it. Wurtman, who is a professor of endocrinology and metabolism at MIT, was arguing that the body can be seriously affected by changes in light spectra. This is the same argument Ott makes. Wurtman’s descriptions are very similar to Ott’s.

“Since life evolved under the influence of sunlight, it is not surprising that many animals, including man, have developed a variety of physiological responses to the spectral characteristics of solar radiation. The findings already in hand suggest that light has an important influence on human health, and that our exposure to artificial light may have harmful effects of which we are not aware. The solar spectrum is essentially continuous, lacking only certain wavelengths absorbed by elements in the sun’s atmosphere, and at midday it has a peak intensity in the blue-green region from 450 to 500 nanometers . . .

“The most familiar type of artificial light is the incandescent lamp . . . [which] is strongly shifted to the red, or long-wave length end of the spectrum. Indeed about 90% of the total emission of an incandescent lamp lies in the infrared.

“Since the [human] photoreceptors are most sensitive to the yellow-green light of 555 nanometers, most fluorescent lamps are designed to concentrate much of their output in that wavelength region . . . since fluorescent lamps are the most widely used light sources in offices, factories, and schools, most people in industrial societies spend many of their waking hours bathed in light whose spectral characteristics differ markedly from those of sunlight.” Wurtman offered a chart that traced the path of light through the eye showing graphically what Ott had called the “dual function.” The light passes through the eye and creates chemical interactions in the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, the spinal cord, various nerve systems as well as the ovaries and the gonads, thereby affecting sexuality and fertility.

“When young rats are kept continuously under light, photo-receptive cells in their retina release neurotransmitters that activate brain neurons; these neurons in turn transmit signals over complex neuroendocrine pathways that reach the anterior pituitary gland where they stimulate the secretion of the gonadic hormones that accelerate the maturation of the ovaries.”

Wurtman indicated that among rats that had had their eyes or their pituitary gland removed, ovarian growth was no longer affected by light. He suggests that no one has yet identified
which
light spectra are the catalysts for ovarian action.

Louise Lacey, in her book
Lunaception,
makes the argument that women’s menstrual cycles in pretechnological times were attuned to moonlight. Wurtman, who perhaps had not read the book, was effectively presenting evidence for how this could happen. (Dr. Wurtman: I suggest a spectral analysis of moonlight.)

Wurtman indicated there are some diseases that are known to be affected by specific light spectra.

A skin disease, erythropoietic protoporphyria, is caused by an imbalanced reaction to wavelengths in the region of 400 nanometers, the region of the color violet.

Herpes infections and psoriasis represent imbalances within a similar range: 365 nanometers, ultraviolet. (The treatment for these now combines light-therapy with the ingestion of certain herbs and foods. The light apparently interacts with the food, just as Ott said it would.) With respect to infant jaundice Wurtman reports:

“Perhaps 25,000 premature American infants were successfully treated with light last year as the sole therapy for neonatal jaundice . . . blue light is the most effective in de-composing pure solutions of bilirubin, an imbalance of which causes the problem . . . however full spectrum white light in almost any reasonable dosage has proved effective in lowering plasma-bilirubin levels. . . . The observation that ordinary sunlight or artificial light sources can drastically alter the plasma level of even one body compound opens a Pandora’s box for the student of human biology. It represents the strong possibility that the plasma or tissue levels of many additional compounds are similarly affected by light. Some such responses must be physiologically advantageous, but some may not be.”

Wurtman also considers the periodicity of light and the mammalian relationship to the light-dark cycle. He says that as we make our days longer with artificial light, there are major changes in the body. He reports relationships between time of day or night and contents of the blood, temperature of the body, sleep and wakefulness, the production of catecholamines, magnesium, sodium, potassium, phosphates and other minerals.

“In our laboratory at MIT we have investigated the daily rhythmicity in the body temperature of rats to see what colors of light are most effective in inducing a change in rhythms to a new light-dark cycle and what intensities are needed. The body temperature of rats normally rises by one or two degrees centigrade at the onset of darkness and falls again at daybreak. We found that green light is the most potent in changing the phase of the temperature cycle and that ultraviolet and red wavelengths are the least potent.”

Wurtman concludes: “Both government and industry have been satisfied to allow people who buy electric lamps—first the incandescent ones and now the fluorescent—to serve as the unwitting subjects in a long-term experiment on the effects of artificial lighting environment on human health. We have been lucky, perhaps, in that so far the experiment has had no demonstrably baneful effects.”

While he supports the idea that variations in artificial light affect our health, Wurtman never once mentions television light, which by now is a primary artificial light for most Americans.

Frustrated, I decided upon one more interview, with Dr. Kendric C. Smith, professor of radiobiology in the Department of Radiology, Stanford University Medical School, and former president of the American Society for Photobiology. I had read a paper by Smith in
BioScience
(January 1974) which seemed promising.

He said, “Sunlight is probably the most important single element of our environment, yet it has been largely ignored by the scientific community . . .

“Visible light has the ability to exert measurable biological effects. Medical uses of the visible spectrum have been virtually ignored by physicians for the past ninety years . . .

“Light intensity as well as wavelength specificity may alter productivity and mood. In the infant, sensory overload by prolonged exposure to highly intense illumination may produce undesirable effects on development. Indeed the manipulation of the light-environment of adults as well as of infants can have consequences of which we may be quite unaware.”

(One wonders, for example, about the effects on a newborn child of emerging from darkness into the dazzling bright fluorescent light of delivery rooms. Most primitive cultures deliver infants in
darkened
environments.)

When I went to see Smith, I asked him what is known about the effects of television light.

His answer? Nobody knows.

“We know less about the effects of light on humans than almost any other thing. We know, however, that ultraviolet light is essential to man for the synthesis of Vitamin D, and visible light is essential for vision. We know that we need light to survive, but too much can be dangerous. Somewhere there’s a balance.” I asked him where to start determining the balance.

“The first step has been to copy the sun, but we may not need all parts of the solar spectrum. For example, some plants use some parts, some plants use other parts of the spectrum. If we knew which wavelengths were best for each type of plant, we could design lamps that were optimal for each plant’s growth and well-being.

“Except for vision and Vitamin D synthesis we have very little information on what part of the solar spectrum man uses and what part he doesn’t.”

Although he believes that you have to start with the characteristics of sunlight, Smith denounced what he called believers in “Godslight”: people who believe that what is natural is automatically good.

I didn’t tell Smith that I was one of those myself. In the end, I expect science to conclude that since “natural” was all we had for virtually the entire course of human evolution, that is what our bodies are attuned to.
Anything
that intervenes in this arrangement is potentially dangerous. Smith, on the other hand, has more faith in human intervention, believing that it will eventually be possible to find just which spectrum humans need for which growth characteristic, and that we can then plan our lighting environments accordingly. Visions of totally artificial underground environments and/or space stations, celebrated as offering everything humans need, flew through my mind. So many trees, so much light, so much recreation. Suburbs in the sky. I brought the subject back to television.

“What I’m really here for today,” I said, “is to try to get at one narrow issue. If red, blue and green phosphorescent light is being projected at 25,000 volts directly into human eyes and from there to the endocrine system, and if humans are receiving light in that way for four hours a day on the average, while depriving themselves of natural light, what can be said about the possible effects of this?” “There’s been no data on that,” he repeated.

I told him that I was alarmed at the fact that nobody was looking into such questions.

“I’m alarmed too,” he answered. “I’m amazed at the lack of intellectual grasp of the situation. There has been a tremendous amount of research on the effects of temperature and pressure on man. Yet it has not been fashionable to study the effects of light on man, and light is probably the most important single element in our environment.

“What does it mean, for example, that people who are pre-disposed to motion sickness immediately become sick when they walk into a room illuminated with blue light? Why does this happen? What is the effect of blue light? These are the kind of data that are needed before we can even approach your question.

“We know that blue light will reduce the concentration of bilirubin in the blood of infants and now jaundiced infants are put under banks of light to treat them, but we don’t know yet what the
other
wavelengths of light in the lamps might be doing to the infants.

“In another area, we know that our bodies are relatively transparent to red wavelengths of light. You can tell that by putting a flashlight inside your mouth. What you can see from the outside is not blood; it’s the red rays passing through you. People are now beginning to be interested in the effects of red light on man.”

Smith told me one last story which resonated with the Hopi Indian practice, mentioned earlier, of “keeping the top of the head open,” and which was the highlight of my visit. It threw me back to my instinctive feeling that for knowledge about the effects of light, pretechnological medicines and practices may be as reliable as our own.

“There is research now underway,” Smith said, “to gain further knowledge about the effects of light entering the body through the skull. It is known, for example, that light affects the testicular growth of sparrows and it’s the light that comes in through the top of the head, not the eyes. We need to know if light entering the bodies of higher mammals by other routes than through the eyes has biological effects on them, and if so, what wavelengths are the active ones. We need to do this kind of research on the higher mammals, and we need to do it now.”

I could quote from a few more interviewees of varying credentials and authoritativeness, but they all say the same thing. There is not the slightest doubt that light taken through the eyes affects the cells; there is no doubt that variations in light spectra cause variations in cellular activity; there is no doubt that sitting and looking at television light affects our cells in some way. But no one can say how, and not many are asking.