78. Astrophysics Meets Biology: Robert Fosbury, PhD on Light and Human Health

We discuss the incredible interactions of near-infrared light with life on earth, how organisms have evolved to harness this light, light:mitochondria interactions, consequences for human health of removing infrared light in modern built environment and much, much more.

Robert Fosbury is an honorary professor at University College London and Emeritus Astronomer at the European Southern Observatory. He has applied his astrophysics background to matters of light & biology interaction with fascinating insights and perspectives.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome back to the Regenerative Health Podcast. Today I am speaking with Bob Fosbury. He is an emeritus astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and an honorary professor at University College London. So he is also a colleague of previous podcast guests, Scott Zimmerman and recently Glenn Jeffrey and he is applying his astrophysics training and background to these fundamental problems of the interactions of light on biology. So, Bob, thank you for joining me today Very pleased to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:51

So tell us how someone with such an extensive physics and astronomy background gets interested and involved in solving or attacking some of the most important problems that I believe are in biology and human health.

Speaker 2: 1:12

I mean, it's a very good question, of course, and I think it raises a very fundamental issue with the way science operates at the moment. I mean, okay, I was an astrophysicist. I started off in the late 1960s at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Hurstman's Zoo in Sussex and I became the first research fellow to be sent to the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Coonabarabran in Australia in 1975. And since then I've spent a career in astrophysics not very much in a university environment but more in an international environment. I was employed by the European Southern Observatory and the European Space Agency during my career to work on various space projects, notably the Hubble Space Telescope and, to some extent, the James Webb Space Telescope. But I had an active research career. We had these positions where we could spend 50% of our time on research as well as 50% of the time on running observatories and so on, and so I became familiar with many techniques in astrophysics. And when I retired from the European Space Agency more than 10 years ago now, they kick us out fairly young from the space agency, so you have to survive in other ways. I realized I'd had a wonderful career in astrophysics. I'd used the biggest telescopes on the ground and the biggest telescopes in space and you know we'd worked on many problems in astrophysics. You know the galaxies at the edge of the universe, which are very pertinent to the James Webb telescope program at the moment In fact I'm actually actively working on that problem as well as biology. But when I retired I thought, well, I could carry on doing this with my colleagues you know, not get paid anything, but just do it for free and carry on. Many of my colleagues did that. But I wanted to look around and look at other things that interested me and I'd always had an interest in the colours of life, which included biology and geology and so on. And I'm an avid spectroscopist. I'm obviously a professional spectroscopist with astronomy, but I also was an amateur spectroscopist. I'm obviously a professional spectroscopist with astronomy, but I also was an amateur spectroscopist. In fact I have a set of spectrometers in my study here with me at the moment which I use all the time on this biological problem.

Speaker 2: 3:38

And it was by accident that I got involved with Glenn Jeffery at UCL through the problem of the vision of the reindeer, which was the problem that I first worked on with him. But when he started telling me about the work he was doing with red light and its potential effects on mitochondria. We had an extraordinary conversation and he said well, we're using 670 nanometer light to study the effect on mitochondria. And I said, you know, naively, I said, well, why are you using 670 nanometers, why are you using that wavelength? And he kind of said well, you know, it's a available wavelength and these leds are not so easy to get at that time and we're using it seems to work. And I said do you realize? That's the wavelength where chlorophyll does photosynthesis? And he looked at me and he nearly kicked me out of the lab. He said look, if people here in the Institute of Ophthalmology know that I'm working on plants, they'll kick me out and I'll kick you out. So this became a bit of a joke but a sort of verboten topic that you know we talk about photosynthesis.

Speaker 2: 4:53

Since then we've realized there's such a close connection. This is a very, very fundamental wavelength in all of life and I observed this myself everywhere. I call it the 42 of biology. You know, douglas Adams, life, the Universe and Everything 42. Many of your audience I'm sure will have heard the number 42. But anyway, the number in biology is 670 nanometers. Okay, and we very recently, just in the last couple of days we've come across a huge amount of evidence that this is indeed very, very relevant.

Speaker 2: 5:31

Anyway, that was the way I got into the subject and so I did provide, because Glenn Jeffrey is a visual neuroscientist. We have Mike Powner, who works at City University, who is our biologist. I mean, he's a very expert biologist. But then we started working with other people and we were talking to people in photodynamic therapy. We were talking to people in sort of raw medical biology, and we then eventually got into touch with Scott Zimmerman and Roger Schrelt, who does his podcast on medical education in the US, and so we realized we had a very multidisciplinary team together and in fact biology because Mike Pown is so busy all the time, biology was our weak point because he had so little time to spend with us.

Speaker 2: 6:29

So we looked at this problem, I think, in a very, very different way from the medics and the biologists. And you know, I realised as time has gone on that the you know, the kind of science we kind of science I was doing in astrophysics is very, very pertinent, this subject in biology, and perhaps we'll go into that in a little more detail in a moment, but that was really the way I got into the topic and in retrospect I realize I've come down a path which is almost unique. Which is almost unique I don't know anyone else who's doing quite this interface between astrophysics and biology, but it gives us a very unique perspective on what's going on with the fundamental problem of the way light interacts with biology.

Speaker 1: 7:20

Yeah, it's a very fascinating field and the multidisciplinary aspect of what you're doing, I think, is some of the most interesting to me, because there's not a better way, I don't think, of getting a fresh set of eyes, a fresh perspective and a fresh way of tackling problems and getting people from different fields to really look at the same problem. So maybe you can frame for the listeners what is the, I guess, what was normal in terms of these light-life interactions and why and how are things gone so wrong in the 21st century?

Speaker 2: 8:00

Yes, in the 21st century. Yes, well, it starts with the evolution of life on the planet Earth. Now we don't know about evolution of life on other planets yet. Hopefully we will, at least relatively soon. But on Earth life is basically driven by sunlight. It wasn't necessarily in the very beginning. I mean, the current idea is that life perhaps started off in these deep ocean vents. But as soon as life got to the surface, the existing life structures realised that they had a wonderful source of energy in the form of sunlight. So the photosynthetic process evolved very early.

Speaker 2: 8:50

We had the cyanobacteria in the oceans producing oxygen, gradually filling the oceans with oxygen as the waste product they produce from photosynthesis, and then the oxygen started filling the atmosphere and that opened up the possibility of life moving from the oceans to the land. We're talking about billions of years ago now, three and a half billion years onwards, and by the time we got to about just over two billion years ago, the atmosphere was pretty pumped up with oxygen and life moved out, was able to begin to move out onto land, and life formed a kind of Faustian pact with oxygen, because most of the life in the early days found oxygen to be highly toxic. They were anoxic forms of life. If there was too much oxygen around it killed them. So the adaptation to living with oxygen, which something happened early in the history of the evolution of life and when complex life started, when we got the first eukaryotic cell, the first complex cell which had ingested what became the mitochondrion and what became the chloroplast. The function of the mitochondrion was to basically to protect the cell from the toxic properties of oxygen. So that was the Faustian pact saying look, we'll use the oxygen because it's a wonderful source of energy for us to burn our food and make all our energy.

Speaker 2: 10:31

But we've got to be pretty careful with the way we handle the oxygen inside the body. We've got to protect the cells from the oxygen. We've got to package the oxygen up so it can transport into the mitochondria where it gets used in respiration. We can do that without doing too much damage to the cells. And the kind of damage that it does is the damage that is done by reactive oxygen species, which I know you've covered before on these talks so I don't really have to describe what those are. But if you have too many reactive oxygens you trigger cell death and so on. You have all kinds of problems, a bit like throwing a hand grenade into a cell. On the other hand, these reactive oxygens, I think, are more critical than we realized in the process of energy flow and energy generation in the body.

Speaker 2: 11:22

In the process of energy flow and energy generation in the body, they're an essential element in the way that we make ATP, the energy currency of the cell, which I think I don't have to define. You've discussed this before. I don't know. I've seen triphosphate. It's the energy that the cell uses to do all the things that cells have to do and drives the way we move and the way we think and so on.

Speaker 2: 11:47

So this, this way of um using the waste product of photosynthesis, on the one hand, the oxygen and the light coming from the sun, which is essential for photosynthesis but also, as I will hopefully demonstrate, essential for life on the biosphere as well, is the coupling that we're dealing with. It's the way the mitochondrion uses the oxygen and the products produced by photosynthesis, the food that we all eat and also the plant material that makes all the gas, coal and oil that we burn and you know, the whole energy source. Basically is the solar photons coming and first of all hitting plants, but also hitting animals as well. And so this sunlight, these solar photons and the interaction with the biosphere is what life is. I mean, this is life, it's the process, and it's a process which has a characteristic which, of course, is very unusual, because life is very unusual and the process is that it's life is a system that is way from thermodynamic equilibrium. Life is a system that is way from thermodynamic equilibrium.

Speaker 2: 13:05

You know, your body has a constant temperature, hopefully, of about 37 degrees centigrade, that's about 310 kelvins on the absolute scale. Your body has a temperature of 310 kelvins which it maintains, and if you drift too far from that temperature then you're going to die if you drift too hard. So this is a kind of state of equilibrium your body, your homeostasis, the stable form of your body and all of life. I mean, what I'm saying is applicable to humans, but it's applicable in general to the whole of life on the planet. This homeostasis is a curious state of equilibrium because it's in what we call kinetic equilibrium. The temperature is maintained constant by a whole load of processes that are going on in your body, sensing and making sure that you're kept at a constant temperature. But the processes are way out of thermodynamic equilibrium. They're not, like, you know, a cup of coffee in the room gradually cooling to come into thermal equilibrium with the, with the room, your body, like when, when you're alive, you're away from thermal, thermodynamic equilibrium. But you have this thermal equilibrium, this kinetic equilibrium.

Speaker 2: 14:24

Your molecules are bouncing around because they have a temperature of 310 kelvins. So each of those molecules has a kinetic energy associated with it, a three halves KT in physics terms, associated with its thermal motion. Like the molecules in a gas, they all have three halves KT kinetic energy in them. Like the molecules in a gas, they all have three halves KT kinetic energy in them. So the molecules in your body, at your kinetic equilibrium, the way they interact with one another is determined. The rate at which they interact with one another is determined by the temperature. So all the biomolecules in your body are interacting with one another. All these redox reactions that you have in respiration, metabolism, they're all going on at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, and if you wanted them to go faster you could increase the temperature, but then your homeostasis would fall apart. So there's an issue there.

Speaker 2: 15:30

If you're sitting in the dark in a room, you're sitting in a red light, so you're not sitting in the dark. But if you're sitting in the dark in a room, your homeostasis will allow you to live, because you can produce energy through your mitochondria and so on, and you can you know, you can digest nutrients and you burn your food and make atp, all of those things. But if you were sitting in a dark room for months on end, you wouldn't be so happy. You wouldn't be so happy because life relies on the sunlight and your body relies on the sunlight. If you turn the sunlight off, you don't immediately die or fall asleep. You'll continue.

Speaker 2: 16:19

But if you turn the sunlight off for six months, you're going to be sick, and if you turn sunlight off for a year, you're probably going to be dead. So the point I want to make and this is probably the most important point I'm going to make is that the process of life, all of life on Earth anyway, the life that's based on photosynthesis in plants, all of that life is dependent on the flow of sunlight through the biological systems, whatever they are. Now you can say, well, some of them live in the dark and so on, and we can argue that point, and that's a good question to ask. But that can be answered. But we all have access to biological systems that are often in sunlight. I think that's a simple answer. You know, we eat food that's come from sunlight and so on, so we're in contact. Even when we're in the dark we're in contact with biological systems that have their energy because of sunlight.

Speaker 2: 17:28

So this concept of homeostasis, which biologists and medics are very familiar with and they're very familiar with the way it's maintained in terms of biological systems, that's fine. What happens if you walk out into sunlight? Now we've shown and Scott Zimmerman has talked about this on your podcast we've shown that the human body, and indeed life in general, is an incredibly efficient harvester of light and for three-dimensional bodies, unlike leaves, tree leaves, which are two-dimensional. For three-dimensional bodies, you have to get that light inside your body and we now understand how that happens. But the only light that gets deep into your body is the light in the near infrared, because in the visible light we have all these powerful pigments, these highly colored molecules called porphyrins, like chlorophyll and hemoglobin and so on, which absorb light very strongly. But as soon as we move into the infrared part of the spectrum, there are very few, if any. Well, there are no strong pigments in life in the infrared. They're all very weak. Chlorophyll is just transparent in the infrared. So when we move from the visible, where all the photosynthesis happens with thin leaves, they don't need leaves, don't need the light to penetrate deep into them, because they have everything on the surface. But if you're a human when you move into the infrared. The only light that you get deep into your body is in the near infrared and that peaks at around 800 nanometers, and it's the gap between the strong absorption of haemoglobin in the visible spectrum and if you move further into the infrared spectrum, beyond about 1200 nanometers, you get the water absorption. Now we think these, these absorptions close to the surface of the body are probably very important as well for for life. That's not really what we're going to be talking about today, but I think, in the visible, the interactions of light with the skin producing vitamin D and so on and probably protecting us from bacterial infections and so on, and similarly, a lot further in the infrared, the interaction of light with water is probably very important. There are very complex physical interactions of infrared light with water, which can do all kinds of things. These are very related problems, but we'll be focusing today on the near-infrared part, where the light gets deep into the body.

Speaker 2: 20:21

So you have to look. Not only it's obvious that the trees are antennas. You go outside and you look at the trees. You see the canopy of the trees in the forest, you see the grass on the ground, you see all the plants growing, all of their structures are an antenna sticking up into the sky. So you know, certainly, in photosynthesis, life is an antenna, collecting sunlight, harvesting it and making the sugars, making carbohydrates, through this process of photosynthesis, which is very complex and quantum, mechanical, and so on. Also, your body, when you walk outside, is an antenna. It's an antenna that happens to work in the infrared. So you know, I have a phrase which I invented quite recently, but the more and more I think about it, the more personate I think it is, and that's that life on Earth and Earth I mean the whole biosphere is an antenna with its receivers tuned to sunlight. So life on Earth is an antenna with the receivers tuned to sunlight, and that's what it is. That is what life is, and it's the tuning to sunlight which is so critical here. So let's get OK. So, having said that I hope that's clear We'll go back to the history of the problem.

Speaker 2: 21:54

Well, the history of the problem stretches from about three and a half billion years ago to 1939, when history was broken, and 1939 was when fluorescent tubes were introduced as light sources in factories and, eventually, homes and so on. Now, fluorescent tubes were developed because they were very efficient in emitting visible light and they didn't waste a lot of energy producing light outside of the visible spectrum. They did produce a little bit of infrared light, but not very much, and you know people don't like living under fluorescent lights. People feel uncomfortable. There's a long history of people being very uncomfortable living under fluorescent tubes. I'm sure that's partly due to the fact that they flicker, but basically they're very poor in the infrared and if you don't get this infrared light for long periods of time, you get sick. Now, most people living under office lighting go out in the evening and they get sunlight. They wake up in the morning, they get sunlight, so they don't suffer too much. But if you're a factory worker and uh, especially if you work shifts at night, you're always under fluorescent tubes and you very rarely see daylight, and those are the people who tend to suffer problems medical problems, okay, so then that developed until the beginning of the 21st century and in uh, I think and I think it was 1996 where the first commercial white LED was introduced and since then LEDs have become the dominant source of lighting in the built environments.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Now, leds benefited enormously from the invention of the blue LED. It got the Nobel Prize for physics in 2014,. I think it was because the blue LED was able to produce blue light itself, but it was able to use its energy to excite phosphors in the lamp, which emitted the other colors. So your white LED has a strong blue driving diode in it and the other colors come from phosphors which are chosen to emit in the visible part of the spectrum. So the end product is this wonderful light source which is very efficient, using electrical energy to produce just visible light and because it's so efficient at doing that, it doesn't produce anything outside the visible spectrum. So it's just visible light and it's great for lighting rooms.

Speaker 2: 24:34

But I now have a quote that I make from an unknown because I didn't write his name down at the time an unknown announcer on the BBC Today programme, the Morning Today programme, about this time last year, where it was a senior medic in the National Health Service and he was saying we have this problem with the you know, the gradual decay in public health and life expectancy and we, you know, we strongly suspect that it has a lot to do with ultra-processed foods and the lifestyle choices and so on.

Speaker 2: 25:12

And he said he actually said this. I remember it very clearly and Glenn Jeffrey heard it as well. Separately. He was listening to the radio at the same time and it hit him in exactly the same way. He said there's a problem. And of course, both of us said to ourselves well, we do understand what this problem is. Why don't you listen to what we say? And this problem is that people are living under pure visible illumination in the built environment, and this is a complete break with the evolutionary history of life on the planet. This is the first time that life forms on the planet have been consistently irradiated by just visible light, and frankly it doesn't work.

Speaker 2: 26:06

Life doesn't work like that. And so the fundamental problem is we've moved from a time when we were always illuminated by what we call, in physics, we call a thermal light source. I mean, the sun is close to being a blackbody radiator. It's not exactly, of course, but it's close to being a blackbody radiator. So it radiates of a broad spectrum and, of course, the life that's evolved under the sunlight has evolved to exploit all the light that reaches the surface of the planet. So you know, there are some parts of the spectrum of the sun that doesn't reach. You know, the far ultraviolet doesn't reach the surface, fortunately, because it would kill us, and quite a lot of the infrared radiation doesn't directly reach us. But the visible region, the extended visible region, from about 300 nanometers, where the light is cut off by ozone, and about two and a half microns or two microns where the light is cut off, largely cut off by water vapor in the atmosphere and water absorption in the oceans, by water vapor in the atmosphere and water absorption in the oceans. We have this window of sunlight on the ground which extends from, say, 300 nanometers to well. The cutoff in the infrared is a gradual cutoff, but let's say one and a half microns roughly. I mean there is light beyond that, but we have this range of sunlight which life has adapted to using Now very cleverly we're very clever humans.

Speaker 2: 27:38

We worked out what was happening with visible light. It was going into photosynthesis and since photosynthesis was first discovered, it took about nearly two and a half centuries to figure out how photosynthesis worked. It's not a simple process, but I don't think anyone's really thought carefully about what happens to all the other light that well, some people have thought about this I'm exaggerating, but in general it's not in the public consciousness. What's happening to the light outside the visible range where photosynthesis occurs, and that's the issue we're dealing with. Photosynthesis occurs, and that's the issue we're dealing with, and we're beginning to understand some of the details about how this works.

Speaker 2: 28:19

And there are two areas there perhaps we can discuss separately. One is the way the light gets deeply into three-dimensional life bodies and other systems, and the other is when the light gets into the body, what does it actually do? And I think we're we're beginning to understand both of those problems, but we at the current time you can't expect us to have the complete answer because it's going to be very complicated to figure out all the interactions of infrared light with biological systems. There are probably many, many of them, hundreds, maybe thousands of interactions of light with biological systems. We're beginning to see the first smattering of those, but it'll take a while, many PhD theses later, to figure out what's going on.

Speaker 2: 29:11

But I think the general concept of withdrawing the full spectrum of sunlight from our surroundings in the built environment fortunately not in the natural environment, but in the built environment this is the problem we're facing and you know, in my opinion, the gradual decay in public health that we're seeing now, and it's quite rapid and it's growing in seriousness. The fundamental problem behind this is the fact that we're starving people of the full spectrum of sunlight, the full spectrum of ground-based sunlight, the light that reaches the ground, and we have to make people aware of the fact that, while one has to be careful going out and exposing oneself to too much sunlight, it's very easy to expose yourselves to the beneficial effects of sunlight without suffering these dangers. And we can talk about that.

Speaker 1: 30:25

Great summary, bob. I think that this topic of light and the problem that you've laid out is just hyper emblematic of a reductionist mindset and medicine is notorious for having a reductionist mindset, but engineering and life in other facets of society obviously is too. And this idea that we could strip away more than 50% strip away more than 50%, probably strip away 90% of the light diet, the light nutrients that this sun has provided life for 3.4 billion years, that we could strip that away and then expect there to be the same biological outcome. I don't even think whoever invented fluorescent bulbs and LED lighting had even thought about this problem. So it's not in any way a malicious one. I don't believe.

Speaker 1: 31:18

I think it's driven purely by interest to improve lumens per watt, energy efficiency and simply disregarding or in ignorance of the fact that more than 50% of the photons hitting Earth that we're talking about infrared here are non-visible. And just because we can't see them doesn't mean they're not doing anything. And I believe that's really the crux of the issue and how we can continue to walk so far away from our biological niche is because this vital white nutrient is not even obvious to people, because our ocular system, our visual system, doesn't allow us to really see in the near infrared, which obviously you can if you use special camera technology. But talk before we, and I really want to hear your two explanations of how light is getting in and then interacting with biology, but maybe as an angle or perspective on those two questions is why do you think proportionally this light problem is more significant perhaps than the ultra-processed food problem?

Speaker 2: 32:40

And however you want to answer that, go ahead. I'm not sure I really want to answer that in a quantitative sense, because the rise of ultra-processed foods has been very rapid and I think the nutritionists understand this problem. It's the way we digest, it's the way the food actually passes through the digestive tract and so on, and I'm certainly not an expert in that area, but I'm thinking in terms of the fundamental nature of the working of life and the working of the human digestive system. Metabolism and so on means that if you feed the human with the wrong food, you're going to have problems, because it's not necessarily that you don't have all the right nutrients. It's the fact from my, my understanding anyway, listening to what the nutritionists say it's the fact that the, uh, the, the nutrients are in, ingested in a way which the gut is not able to process properly, ie you, you get raw chemicals coming into your body rather than packaged, complex chemical bundles that have to go through your digestive tract to be unpicked, piecemeal. So I think it's a. That's the way I see the, the, the ultra process food problem. You know that you, you can, you can list all in all the nutrients you have in your food, but if it's not packaged properly, it doesn't get digested properly, and so on.

Speaker 2: 34:19

So I don't think I have much more to say about that particular problem and I certainly don't want to make a strong statement that the light is the worst problem and the ultra-fertilized food is a supplementary problem.

Speaker 2: 34:32

It depends what you do, it depends you know what you do, it depends on your lifestyle. If you're a farmer and you work outside all the time, you're going to get plenty of light, so you're not going to have any problem with the light problem that we're dealing with. But if you're a nurse on night shift or if you're a doctor in an intensive care unit, um, you're only given white leds and you get sick. And if you look I mean I'm sure it's not come out of the covid inquiry yet, but I'm sure roger roger schrell would agree with with me that you know, if people during the covid pandemic had had had had more exposure to the sun before they caught COVID or before they started working in intensive care units, they would have survived better. I think there's very strong evidence for that past history of sunlight which makes you very subject to infections like COVID.

Speaker 1: 35:43

Yes, I didn't mean to ambush you with that one, only to quickly convey my perspective, which is from and we're going to get into exactly what is happening.

Speaker 1: 35:50

But I really think that the light environment is setting the stage for the mitochondrial dysfunction which the ultra processed food is exacerbating.

Speaker 1: 35:58

That is kind of my perspective as it stands now. And the insulin resistance and these inability to deal with the food, excess nutrients, excess energy, deuterium, et cetera is fundamentally exacerbating this dysfunction, this mitochondrial dysfunction that's a product of this infrared, deficient, blue, toxic lighting environment. So only to really frame that as, yeah, and to emphasize that these are complementary, co-exacerbating processes, and that's why I commonly tell people that you need to clean up your light diet and your food diet and both are very important and, depending on the individual, as you mentioned, they'll be in differing importance proportionally. So talk about these light interactions, talk about how the light is getting into the body. And again, just a quick reminder for those who listened to the Scott Zimmerman episodes his great, groundbreaking paper essentially analyzed this gyri and the sulci of the brain and inferred from an optics point of view that these structures are optimized to essentially concentrate near infrared photons, uh, deep, deep within those, those, uh, brain structures.

Speaker 2: 37:18

So so, so, let's, let's explore this um topic, about interactions of these photons with biology yes, I have to admit that scott and I talk not every day but almost every day. So we've discussed this very closely over the last months and again, I think it's a very beautiful concept and process and the physical understanding is, on one hand extremely complex but on the other hand, quite simple. And I'll try and give you the simple view and you know I'm talking with Scott here, I'm not you know, we've done this together. I've already hinted it to you a little bit earlier in our talk today the fact that light behaves very differently in the near infrared from the way it does in the visible, and that's a product of that's physics. Basically it's that the ability of photons from sun, the visible photons of light, can excite pigments in the visible spectrum. And all the paint pigments that you use are pigments, because you can excite electrons in the pigment to an excited level and the energy that you you use to excite that molecule or atom or whatever the pigment is, um takes light away from the visible spectrum, so it makes the visible light coloured. So the pigments, the domain of the pigments, is the visible and the ultraviolet spectrum as you move from the visible to the near-infrared. The molecules do have low-lying energy levels, but they're generally very weak absorbers at low levels which can be excited by near-infrared photons. But basically you run out of the possibility of exciting atoms and molecules to a higher energy state using photons. So basically the simplest way of putting it is that in the near-infrared there are no pigments. There are pigments but they're very weak and some of these pigments in the infrared are weaker by factors of thousands or tens or even hundreds of thousands. They're much, much weaker than the absorbers in the visible. So you move into this different domain where you don't have any absorbers around. You have very few absorbers and they're very, very weak. But you still have all the cellular structures and so on associated with life. In plants you have the cellular structures in the leaf, and in bodies you have the lipid structures of cell walls and mitochondrial walls about membranes and so on. You still have lots of structures, but these structures don't absorb in general. When they do, but not often, they're're very, very weak. And so you hear from a visible spectrum where the light transport is dominated by absorption.

Speaker 2: 40:39

You get a photon coming into your hand. It'll penetrate a millimeter, say, in the visible, or even less in the visible. The first thing it comes across will probably absorb it. The first thing it comes across will probably absorb it. So you only really illuminate the surface layers with a short wavelength light. This is why leaves are thin. A leaf is generally less than a millimetre thick.

Speaker 2: 41:03

The first thing that a photon does is to find an absorber, even in plants. That's not true. I think the photons were probably scattered several times before they actually reach a chloroplast and get absorbed by chlorophyll, because the plants are very efficient at scattering light. And then we can talk about that as a separate topic. But that's a very important topic.

Speaker 2: 41:26

But in the body, the photon of infrared light coming into my hand will actually penetrate several millimeters. In fact we reckon it penetrates at 800 nanometers. It penetrates about five millimeters on average before it hits something. But it doesn't hit an absorber. It's very unlikely to hit an absorber. It will hit something that scatters it, a cell wall or some structure, refractive index, structure refractive index difference.

Speaker 2: 41:55

Scott's talked about this. I'm sure you know. You. You have variations in refractive index between the lipid and the water and various structures within the within the body that can scatter light. So what the light does? It gets five millimeters into the body, it bounces in some direction and it will go probably for another roughly five, five millimeters before it hits something else and scatters again. So your photons basically get fed into the body by the scattering process. You're fairly unlikely to be scattered directly out of the body. Directly. The first photon that gets in is rather unlikely to be scattered out again. Reflected back, basically, it's more likely to go into the body and as you get deeper and deeper into the body the less likely you are to lose photons from the surface.

Speaker 2: 42:51

So you do this random walk and it's a kind of random walk. There are details here in the way that scatters, sometimes in the atmosphere. A photon that scatters off a molecule of nitrogen in the air will really scatter to make the blue sky and that scattering process is roughly isotropic. It's not actually isotropic, it's slightly forward dominated and backward dominated in the direction of the incoming photon. But it's a fairly isotropic process. So you can be scattered more or less in any direction to make the blue sky. A photon coming into the body is probably more strongly forward scattered than it is in other directions. But I mean, I don't know in detail and it's possible to experiment and work this out and somebody probably does know, but I don't know exactly, but it's probably forward scattered, which means that on average it moves further into the body. So what you have is you have all these photons entering into the body, bouncing around off these scattering structures, cellular structures, and just carrying out this random walk. And if we assume it's a random walk, then the distance that the photon travels after, the distance that the photon travels after, say, 10 scatterings on average, is the square root of 10, which is roughly three times the five millimeters which we call the photon mean free path. It's the mean distance the photon travels between scatterings. So the simple picture of the scattering is you have photons getting into the body, they're bouncing around many times and after scattering n times they've reached a distance of roughly, on average, square root of n times. The photon mean free path into the body, and so that gives us a scale length that we can deal with for modelling light going into the body.

Speaker 2: 44:58

Now what happens to a photon that gets deep into the body? What's its fate? It can do one of two things. It can either escape through the surface and once it's deep into the body it's very hard for it to do that. So the only other fate it has is to be absorbed by one of these weak absorbers. And it gets many chances of being absorbed by one of these weak absorbers because it's scattering around many times. So it's traveling a long distance inside the body, much further than just the thickness of my hand, for instance. It's traveling, probably, you know, several times the thickness of my hand in distance just by scattering around.

Speaker 2: 45:44

And so what this does, this process does it couples. It couples these very weak absorbers deep into your body with the atmosphere of the sun. So you're establishing a direct connection between the photons coming from the sun all the way down through the atmosphere, entering your body, bouncing around many times and eventually being absorbed by one of these very weak absorbers in your tissue. And that's establishing the equilibrium with our star that I mentioned right at the beginning of this talk today, talking about the star and the interstellar nebula. In exactly the same way that the nebula is coming into radiative equilibrium with the star. That's exciting it the biomolecules in my body, deep in my body, are coming into equilibrium with our star, the sun, with the R star, the sun.

Speaker 2: 46:59

So this is an entirely different component of the homeostasis we were talking about the homeostasis in the dark. You're maintaining your body temperature by burning your food in your mitochondria, making ATP. You're using nutrients, you're breathing oxygen. You're doing all the things that establish your homeostasis in the dark. When you move into sunlight, you're using nutrients, you're breathing oxygen. You're doing all the things that establish your homeostasis in the dark. When you move into sunlight, you have an additional component of homeostasis, which is these photons coming into your body from the sun directly.

Speaker 2: 47:30

And I wish to tell you first there are two things I need to tell you. The first thing I'll tell you is there's something very special about these photons. The energy you have available to your body in the dark is the kinetic energy of the molecules bouncing around at a temperature of 37 degrees centigrade. That's the three halves kT that we talked about. The energy of an infrared photon, I mean, although it's an infrared photon and you think of infrared photons of having low energy the energy carried by an infrared photon is something 40 times larger than the kinetic energy associated with the molecular vibrations in your body. Fortunately, these photons are rare and you're not heating up to the 6000 kelvins of the surface of the sun, so you're not in thermodynamic equilibrium with the sun. You're in a radiative equilibrium with the sun, but the radiative equilibrium is driven by a much lower density of photons than you get in the atmosphere of the sun, obviously because of the large distance you have to travel. So we have a dilute but high energy radiation field inside the body. It's very dilute, but the individual packets of energy are quite large. Now what happens when one of these weak absorbers absorbs one of these photons in the infrared? This is critical. Okay, this is a critical part of this talk.

Speaker 2: 49:02

You excite a molecule to a state which is nearly two electron volts above the ground state. That's a huge amount of energy compared to the energy that your normal homeostasis had, the thermal energy that your normal homeostasis has. Now, while that molecule is excited, it's no hotter, but it contains a lot of energy. It's not thermal energy it contains, it's an energy of excitation of energy. It's not thermal energy it contains, it's an energy of excitation. It can use that energy to make that molecule much more reactive with surrounding molecules, because it's like having it much hotter than you would survive. But it enables the chemical reactions to happen more quickly. So you're enabling all of these chemical reactions that you have to have to drive your homeostasis, all of these redox reactions, all the reactions in the electron transport chain of the mitochondrion have an energy source available to them which they would never get from the temperature of your body. They get from the radiation, and it's a low density radiation, so it doesn't immediately, you know, heat everything up and kill everything. It can even generate reactive oxygen species, but it probably some of those reactive oxygens are generated in places in the mitochondrial chain of pushing electrons up a voltage gradient where they can be very beneficial. The fact that the oxygen is much more reactive the excited oxygen is much more reactive can actually have a beneficial effect.

Speaker 2: 50:48

So I think, as an astrophysicist, what I'm saying to the biologists is that you have this incredible source of energy deep in the body which is very selective. It's a very special sort of energy. It's a low entropy sort of energy. It derives from the sunlight. Sunlight photons coming from the sun are very low entropy sources of energy and you can excite atoms to relatively lower-lying levels than all the pigments in the visible.

Speaker 2: 51:26

We tend to call them ground state configurations in the energy level diagrams of molecules. They're ground states, you know, just an electron volt or so above the ground state. But they have effects and they have many effects. It's not just, we're not talking about a single mechanism here. All of these molecules are capable of absorbing infrared photons in some way or another. They're all being given this high quality source of energy which they can use in various ways. It opens their possibilities of the way they interact with one another because they have this high quality source of energy. So it's enormous value. These infrared photons getting deep into the body. They're a sprinkling of very high quality packets of energy penetrating deep into the body that can do all kinds of things, and we can, you know later on we can talk about one or two things that I think these things might do, but the fundamental physics is that you're establishing a new component of homeostasis.

Speaker 2: 52:36

when you're in sunlight, it's quite different. You suddenly, the range of possibilities that your metabolic processes have available to them, have suddenly increased in many, many different ways.

Speaker 1: 52:52

Well, that is quite a fascinating implication, and I might just summarise for the listeners what we've talked about up till now, just so everyone is on the same page. So we have sunlight, and sunlight is being emitted from our star, the sun. It's coming in flavours of visible and non-visible light. Ultraviolet and infrared are non-visible and obviously visible is visible and infrared is more than 50% of the photons that is actually hitting terrestrial earth. And what Bob has explained is that over the course of the evolution of life on earth, we have evolved to make use of that abundant source of energy.

Speaker 1: 53:37

And, just like plants have made use of it to photosynthesize and produce essentially carbon structures, we have also made use of that free energy or our mitochondria have. And the process of using that energy is the passage of these near-infrared photons into the body, where they're not absorbed cutaneously, they're not absorbed superficially, but they're actually bouncing around like pinballs in a pinball machine for multiple times in a random fashion until they are finally absorbed by weak absorbers in up to 10 centimeters or more in the body. And those weak absorbers, what you're suggesting, are compounds or components in their mitochondrial electron transport chain. So these photons are essentially a form of exogenous energy. They're a way for the body to operate and to derive energy without eating food. It's a light derived energy and that light is, as you mentioned, forming this homeostasis between the solar, the sun and life on Earth. Is that a reasonably accurate summary? A good?

Speaker 2: 54:58

analogy with the effect of these photons on the electron transport chain is the analogy with an engine, where you need to lubricate the engine to get it to work efficiently. And I think these photons are in effect lubricating the electron transport chain. It's making them work more efficiently. And just for a moment, we think what happens if we don't lubricate the electron transport chain in this way. It will work, it will digest food for you in a way, but it won't do it as efficiently as it could. It'll be working more like a Trabant than a Ferrari in darkness.

Speaker 2: 55:45

And instead of using the energy coming from oxidizing the food, instead of using that to make ATP the energy currency in your cell that drives your cellular processes, you'll divert that energy to some way. You'll store it. You'll store it as fat, for instance. So the energy flow into your mitochondria cannot all be processed efficiently into ATP. It'll get diverted and stored in your body. The biologists will tell you how that happens. I don't know. So you know. You can see the connection with what you said previously. If you're not working properly, your body's not working properly. You suffer things like type 2, diabetes and obesity and all the other diseases of aging because you're not using your nutrients properly to generate the cellular energy. You're inefficient and you're diverting the energy somewhere else.

Speaker 1: 56:50

Yes, and that is exactly what I was referring to earlier when we were talking about the effect of a processed food diet and this idea that a light diet or a poor light diet, an infrared deficient light diet, a blue toxic light diet, is essentially disabling or fundamentally harming the ability of the mitochondrion to operate efficiently. And to use a car analogy if you're not servicing the car, if you're not lubricating or cooling the engine, you can put 98 octane fuel in the tank and, yes, it will continue to work well for the first maybe year. But if you continue to not lubricate and do those fundamental energy engine caretaking tasks, the engine will break and then therefore, you can keep putting in 98 octane, but if the pistons are all seized up because of a lack of lubrication, then it's not going to be producing energy very well. So I think that really is my point about the food exacerbating fundamentally a light deficiency and a blue toxic kind of light environment.

Speaker 1: 58:03

On the point of the absorption of near-infrared light and its biological effects, the listeners to this podcast and from previous episodes will be familiar with two biological effects, one that Scott Hasimoman has talked about and one that a water researcher called Gerald Pollack and Dr Jack Cruz separately have talked about. So obviously you're familiar with Scott's work, melatonin and the optics of the human body that it's the infrared light that is stimulating melatonin production at the level of the mitochondrion. But the other effect that I'll mention and maybe you have an input on this or maybe you don't is that the absorption by water is changing the biophysical properties of that water, perhaps around the ATPase, but also in the cell itself, such that it's adopting an exclusion zone it's adopting, it's making coherent domains in a way that is fundamentally altering the biophysical properties and therefore the biological interaction of water in the body. So do you have any, I guess, thoughts to share about those two effects of biological effects of infrared light?

Speaker 2: 59:16

Yeah, I'd like to comment on those. I mean, I haven't studied the effects on water myself, but I know something about what's been done, I think, coming back to my previous point, I'm saying these photons that get into the body can perform many, many functions, and I think that's the point I'm making. I'm not focusing on any one at the moment. I'm not focusing on any one of those particular functions. I think we're looking at the moment at the direct interactions, the process of exciting the molecules to electronic states. That's what I'm thinking about.

Speaker 2: 1:00:03

I think it's very possible that the direct effect of light on water is changing its characteristics and I've read about this and I think it's an extremely interesting topic and it probably has an effect on viscosity and the ability of water to move around.

Speaker 2: 1:00:20

So I'm certainly not rejecting that as an idea. I think this is one of the many effects that infrared light is having going on much longer infrared wavelengths than we're talking about at the moment, because the water will absorb at various depths depending on how absorbent the water is at any particular wavelength over a whole range of depths and it can change the properties of the water. So that can have many effects in the body. Absolutely, I'm not saying that's not important at all, it is important. It's just I don't have the bandwidth to work on that at the moment, but I think that's true. So, yes, there are many kinds of interactions of those photons with the biochemistry, with the biophysics of the whole life system, and this is the reason I said we're not going to give you a complete solution at the moment, because these are so numerous, these possibilities of interactions, that it's going to take a long time to tease them all out and see exactly the effect of these different functions.

Speaker 1: 1:01:33

The other point I was just going to raise and maybe this is relevant to the melatonin piece, but it sounds more relevant to what you mentioned originally, which is the fact of the interaction of light with biology and the fact that photons are interacting with electrons, and it was the photoelectric effect by Albert Einstein who initially described, I believe, that fundamental law, and he described it in terms of metals. But not only Dr Jack Cruz, but also Dr Alexander Wunsch has obviously spent a lot of time describing the photoelectric effect as it applies to biology. So how does that fit in in terms of what you're researching and how you conceptualize this?

Speaker 2: 1:02:27

Well, let's talk about electrons for a moment. I think this is one thing we have looked at. But first of all I'd like to mention discussions over Zoom I've had with Professor Wayne Frash, who's a person who works in the University of Arizona in the US on the function of ATPase, the enzyme, the rotating turbine in the membrane of the mitochondrion which shepherds the protons down from above the membrane into the mitochondrion and drives the turbine that mints the ATP. That mints the ATP, and he gave a talk at the Guy Foundation series in the spring about the rotation of the ATPase, where he showed that it's water molecules that shepherd the proton down through the turbine to turn it through particular angles at particular times in the rotation. And this is, I think, a very interesting example of the way that the properties of the water molecule may play a very important role in the ATP synthase. I found that a very exciting idea. So that's one of the kinds of interactions I think.

Speaker 2: 1:04:04

Talking about the electrons, I'd like to talk a little bit about the effect of the oxygen as the final receiver of the electron coming up the electron transport chain in the mitochondrion. Now, as you know, the electron starts off and goes up through there are four complexes in the electron transport chain. Well, I think effectively three in the chain itself, I think effectively three in the chain itself, and the electron ends up in cytochrome C in complex four, and it's waiting to be absorbed by the oxygen. The oxygen is sitting there waiting to absorb the electron coming out of the electron transport chain. Now you know, oxygen likes to interact with electrons, it likes to grab electrons, as we know. But the normal state of oxygen, the normal ground state of oxygen, is, unusually in molecules like this, is a triplet state in quantum mechanics, that is, it has paired electrons in its outer orbital and so it's in what's called a triplet state. Many similar atoms and molecules have singlet ground states where the electrons are paired.

Speaker 2: 1:05:40

So the normal oxygen, although it's highly reactive and it can grab electrons, if you had a singlet oxygen sitting at that point it wouldn't be much more electron hungry and it would grasp the electron being spat out of the electron transport chain much more avidly. And I did have a discussion with Wayne Frasch about this in his video talk and he was quite interested in the possibility that if you could excite a triplid oxygen to a singlet oxygen while it was in this position waiting to grab the electron, that might have a profoundly positive effect on driving the electron transport chain. So there are cases I think whether this works or not, I don't know, it's just an idea, but we do know that we can excite triplid oxygen to singlet oxygen with photons in the body.

Speaker 2: 1:06:41

Now, this was an idea that was entirely rejected by biologists because this absorption is so weak that they couldn't imagine how you would ever have enough photons to be able to excite a triplet oxygen to a singlet oxygen to make it into a highly reactive version of the molecule. But now we know we have this amplifier in terms of the long time that the photon spends in the body bouncing around. And also something I've discussed with Scott is that there are clearly regular nanostructures associated with the mitochondria and the surrounding cellular structures and these nanostructures are extremely efficient light traps. This is very well known in animals and plants All the ideas about structural coloration in animals and plants. These are nanostructures which trap light so they retain the light for longer periods of time. They make that light available to the absorbers for longer periods of time.

Speaker 2: 1:07:49

Wonderful examples in plants where plants in the forest understory, where they're very poor in direct sunlight their leaves have these beautiful nanostructures which set up standing waves in the structure and enable the photons to actually perform photosynthesis much more efficiently in the forest understory, because the and I think if you start looking at the structures in animal bodies, you'll find that the mitochondrial region is surrounded by these nanostructures which are reasonably regular and are regularly spaced by orders of 100 nanometers or so, where you can set up these photonic crystals that trap light.

Speaker 2: 1:08:41

So the possibility of absorbing a photon and exciting an oxygen from its triplet to its singlet state, I think is very real inside the body and in fact I've done experiments shining light through my hand where I can actually see the absorption of these photons. In fact, curiously again, there's an astronomical connection because the way you excite a singlet oxygen is using lines in the infrared part of the near infrared part of the spectrum which are visible in the spectrum of sunlight reaching the Earth. The two Fraunhofer lines, the two strong Fraunhofer lines in the near-infrared, the A and the B bands, are the wavelengths which will excite triplet to singlet oxygen. This happens in the atmosphere and this can happen in the body as well, and I say I've actually seen them in the spectra that I've taken here in my study, uh with the, uh with my spectrometer well, so so if I'm if I'm getting this correctly, just correct me if I'm wrong.

Speaker 1: 1:09:48

So so, the fraunhofer lines are gaps in terrestrial light that we don't receive because of absorption in the atmosphere. So it's sunlight that doesn't get through because of absorption by various compound molecules and gases in the atmosphere. So what you're saying?

Speaker 2: 1:10:05

is… no, no, no, no, I'm not saying it, sorry to interrupt, but actually I'm not saying that at all. In the sunlight coming through the Earth's atmosphere we see these bands reasonably strongly. But when you look at these bands at very high spectral resolution, they are lots and lots of very narrow absorption bands. They're rotational structures in the water molecule, in the sorry in the oxygen molecule, and they have very, very fine lines which have huge gaps in them. So the lines are very deep and they absorb very strongly at fine lines which have huge gaps in them.

Speaker 2: 1:10:37

So the lines are very deep and they absorb very strongly at very particular wavelengths within the band. But there's still plenty of photons that get through the gaps. So although you see this absorption in the atmosphere, it doesn't mean that the light is not getting through. A lot of the light is getting through into the body. I have to be very careful when I do my experiments that I don't let any sun, any daylight in at all, because I know there will be absorption bands there. So I have to do this at nighttime when I know there are no absorption bands due to oxygen in the stray light in my study.

Speaker 2: 1:11:12

But we do see the same bands in the body and there is a literature on this. Now there's quite a small but powerful literature about the direct excitation of reactive oxygens by photons. All the photodynamic therapists use these auxiliary photosensitizing molecules to absorb the light and then they transfer that excitation energy to oxygen to make singlet oxygen. So they make singlet oxygen indirectly via a photosensitizing molecule, usually a porphyrin-like molecule. But we can in life excite a reactive oxygen, a singlet oxygen, with a direct photon coming from the sun.

Speaker 1: 1:12:01

Okay, that was going to be my follow-up question, which was was this photon that is having this effect on oxygen? Was that endogenously generated, like perhaps from the mitochondrion, or was it a solar photon that was having?

Speaker 2: 1:12:14

Coming from the sun. Yeah, I think I say that with great certainty. I mean, I know there's a generation of bio photons in the body, but the number of photons coming in the sun is very, very large, even though only a small fraction will get through. But the availability of the possibility to excite this particular triplet-singlet transition in oxygen I think will come from predominantly from sunlight.

Speaker 1: 1:12:43

Interesting, very interesting. So I think we've done, we've delved pretty deeply into the mechanics, the nitty gritty of what's happening. I really want for this last bit to take it to zoom back out, keep it really nice and broad and really spell out this problem for people. And I'm going to summarize quickly and then, bob, maybe you can offer we can kind of riff on that. So, essentially, humans have created diabetic lighting and we've done that by stripping out 90% of the terrestrial sunlight from our indoor environments, basically creating hermetically sealed chambers illuminated by visible only predominantly blue wavelength light, deficient in ultraviolet, deficient in this more than 50% of sunlight spectrum, which is infrared, which infrared is providing essentially an exogenous energy source that's aiding in mitochondrial function, mitochondrial efficiency and, essentially, mitochondrial regeneration through things like melatonin.

Speaker 1: 1:13:47

The consequence is that when we live in these environments for six months, 12 months, three years, then we are chronically depriving ourselves of a critical light nutrient that is involved in mitochondrial health.

Speaker 1: 1:14:02

And mitochondrial health underlies chronic disease because, as Dr Doug Wallace has initially said, initially posited and it's been very framed very elegantly is that chronic disease is essentially bioenergetic failure of your mitochondrial colony and whether you develop heart failure or you develop Alzheimer's disease or you develop type 2 diabetes and in what order, essentially depends on your genetic predisposition.

Speaker 1: 1:14:26

It depends on your organ specific manifestation of this mitochondrial dysfunction. So the chronic disease epidemic that we're experiencing can really be framed as the fire can be fanned enormously by this light deficiency, this infrared light deficiency, which is profound and is only accelerating as more and more indoor environments are essentially kitted out with visible only LEDs, as thermal artificial but thermal lighting sources like halogen and incandescent get thrown in the bin in the name of climate change or energy efficiency, completely failing to realize that these are essential light nutrients. So that's, I think, where we're at and that's my perspective as a medical doctor, treating people and striving to prevent cases of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes and cancer and all those neurodegenerational diseases. So we're at this point now and you've come up with an analogy and I really like it and I really want you to talk about this analogy to help people understand the concept of a light-deficient environment that they're finding themselves in. So feel free to add anything to that summary and talk about this analogy that you've come up with.

Speaker 2: 1:15:48

Yeah, I think it's a very good summary. First of all, Well done for doing that.

Speaker 1: 1:15:51

Yes.

Speaker 2: 1:15:52

I think the phrase we're beginning to use about this is one which I think people will understand, and actually I think the analogy is quite good. I call it 21st century scurvy. Now we know about scurvy, we know how easy it is to cure now, but for centuries scurvy was a scourge of exploration. I mean, in the days of sail, you sent off these sailors to sail around the world in sailing ships. It took them, you know, months to reach the Cape Horn and sail around it, and most of the crews would or many of the crew, a large fraction of the crew would die of scurvy. And it was realised a long time ago that this was a deficiency disease. It was the deficiency of vitamin C and if you supplemented vitamin C the scurvy went away. It was a curable disease, although you may have lost all your teeth or whatever, but you could be cured when you had a supply of vitamin C. So the development of that disease was not immediate. When you set out from the first port, you wake up the next day. You didn't suffer from scurvy. It took months to develop in a crew and we've had these. We're going through a process at the moment which is very like this. You know.

Speaker 2: 1:17:26

We know the astronauts that come back from the space station come back in a state of pre-diabetes and mitochondrial dysfunction. They've been locked up in a tin can. Ironically, if you're in the space station, I doubt if you see the sun. And if you do see the sun, you see it through so many filters that you won't get any usable infrared radiation from it. They live under so-called circadian LED lighting, which is basically infrared dark lighting, completely infrared dark lighting that varies a bit in color temperature throughout the Seganian cycle, for whatever good that does, and they come back starved of infrared. And as soon as they get back on Earth, they seem to recover very quickly when they get out in sunlight again. But they have aged more rapidly than they would have done if they hadn't been locked up. And okay, that's an extreme example of locking up people in a tin can for six months or so.

Speaker 2: 1:18:31

But there are many examples of people in the built environment. If you're living in a Middle Eastern country with skyscrapers I mean, many of the Arab states have skyscrapers and they live in skyscrapers and they walk to their air conditioned, dark windowed cars, probably out of sunlight. Some of those people probably never go into sunlight at all, even though they're living in an incredibly sun rich environment, and those are the people who are suffering severely from type two diabetes. So there's a huge amount of evidence out there that your mitochondrial health is very strongly determined by your light diet, your exposure to sunlight. Roger Shrout has an example where he took one of his very, very sick patients out into sunlight onto the balcony and the person survived almost certainly because of the exposure to sunlight. Person survived almost certainly because of the exposure to sunlight.

Speaker 2: 1:19:41

So I think the analogy with scurvy is the 21st century scurvy. The analogy with the deficiency of vitamin C is not an exact analogy. Of course the disease develops along different pathways, but it's not so dissimilar. I mean, vitamin C has function as an electron donor in biochemistry and you know we are talking about electron transport and electron donors. So I think that the disease I'm talking about in 21st century scurvy is an analogy. It's a slowly developing disease and the symptoms are all the diseases of aging which are associated with mitochondrial function.

Speaker 2: 1:20:32

And I fear that it's really going to get worse. I mean, it's been going on for a couple of decades now. It's going downhill, our life expectancy is going down and I think if that person on the radio, on the BBC Today programme a year ago, had been told what I've just told you, he might begin to understand what's wrong with the built environment. And I have to say that you know, glenn and I nowadays are talking more to architects and lighting designers than we are to medics and biologists, because the architects are very, very concerned by this problem and we are making them aware of what the problem is. And there's an even worse problem than just the LED lighting and there's an even worse problem than just the LED lighting.

Speaker 2: 1:21:17

All of these skyscrapers are now being fitted with glass that only transmits visible light. So the windows are obscuring. We know windows for a long time have obscured the ultraviolet, the dangerous ultraviolet light, the light that gives you vitamin D. But now the best-selling glasses are blocking all the infrared, so the transmission of the window glass mimics the white LED. So we're exacerbating this problem and, quite frankly, it's going to be a disaster.

Speaker 1: 1:21:54

It's going to be a disaster.

Speaker 1: 1:21:56

Yeah, it is, and the trajectory is only in the wrong direction. And that point that you raised is fascinating because what it implies with this filtration of the natural sun spectrum is that we can generate blue light toxicity and near infrared deficiency not only by putting an LED in the room and then emitting that blue light from the ceiling, but we can generate a blue toxic, profoundly unaccessually appropriate light environment by plastering these filtration, whatever the 3M film on the windows and therefore, by filtration of the solar and, dare I say, abomination of the solar spectrum, that we're also creating a blue toxic, visible only lighting environment inside these office rooms. So there's multiple facets of the problem, but it just seems that, wherever way we look at it, the myopic attempt at saving energy and again to use the under the umbrella term of climate change, it's really having this unintended consequence of profoundly harming human health. And if the goal is to save humanity by averting climate change through climactic and I know this is a completely different topic climactic change in 10, 20, 30, 50 years, to me it's baffling because there's a much more pressing, much more proximate threat, which is the actual unintended consequences of all these bureaucrats who are self-importantly making these and mandating these profound changes to our environment that are detrimentally affecting not only human biology but all kinds of other animals and life on the planet.

Speaker 1: 1:23:50

The point I'll quickly make about your discussions and who is hearing this message is that medical doctors, because we are, our orthodoxy, our training background is organ-specific pathology. We have missed the conventional doctor has missed this reality about bioenergetics and mitochondrial function. And if they understood the human body from a mitochondrial energy point of view, then it would be clear, by simple reverse engineering, by first principles, thinking that what we need to do is optimize mitochondrial function by any means possible. And, as you've described so eloquently, bob, solar photons are a critical input into optimal mitochondrial function. So you can just make the simple logical steps from those first principles and then you will find out that if you sit in a blue lit room with no infrared, then you're going to get sick and diabetes is going to manifest. But unfortunately we don't have that intellectual framework taught to us in medical school and we have to learn it ourselves and talk to people like yourself, like to Scott Zimmerman, and you know doctors like Roger Swell, other doctors and Jack Cruz, other people and Alexander Wansh who are talking about this, but it's a very, very few number and hopefully that's going to change.

Speaker 1: 1:25:11

The other point I'll quickly make about architects and the built environment. Is traditional architecture solved for this problem over 3,000 years? If you travel to any old city, the outdoor areas have tall windows, they have casement windows, they have big balconies, they have internal courtyards, they have all these functions that allow the penetration of full-spectrum sunlight. So it's really modern architecture that has itself exploded in the past 50 years. That is doubly exacerbating the problems that we've described.

Speaker 2: 1:25:51

Yeah, your summary is good. You said it. I think it's very good. I'm an optimist here. I think I see the way the architects are reacting when we talk to them. I think there are many ways this can be addressed.

Speaker 2: 1:26:08

I think the problem of excluding infrared radiation from the built environment is a thermal balance problem. Radiation from the built environment is a thermal balance problem. You can't build a skyscraper and make it into a greenhouse and just it would overheat. So they face a difficult problem. They do face a difficult problem. It's not just a matter of changing the window glass. They have to think much more carefully about this and there are many subtleties here. I mean they could put glass on the north face, in the northern hemisphere, on the north face or the south face in your hemisphere. They could put non-infrared rejecting glass, ie infrared transmitting glass, on the sides of the buildings that don't get direct sunlight. They can also put around low buildings. Anyway, they can put lots of trees. Trees are wonderful. In fact, the best place you can sit for mitochondrial health is under a tree in the sunlight, because you're protected from the short wavelengths by the canopy of the tree and all of the infrared will be bounced down to you Almost all of the infrared will.

Speaker 2: 1:27:14

Tree leaves are incredibly efficient infrared scatterers and as you see in infrared photographs, the tree canopy is brilliantly white in the infrared. So you know, architects can be clever. They can think about where they put the different kinds of glass, they can think about the environment of the building and how many trees you have. And also there's been a huge amount of work done on the nanostructures that people are finding in plants and animals All the structural coloration, fantastic structures you see in birds' feathers and butterfly wings and snake skins and all kinds of things. A lot of that work is being funded by engineers now because they're thinking of ways of controlling the radiation environment of of buildings using nanostructures to reflect light, which is damaging, and to transmit light, which is beneficial. I can imagine in the future having windows, skyscrapers with windows that perform many functions, that is, they generate electricity with solar panels. They can be visible, transparent solar panels. They can be visible, transparent solar panels. They can let in specific, biologically beneficial wavelengths. They can be much more highly tuned to make the building more healthy and a healthier environment. And you know, these structures can be injected into buildings at critical places and so on. The lifestyle merged with the property of the building can be much more beneficial.

Speaker 2: 1:29:09

So I do feel optimistic about this, but I do feel, like you, that if we follow the path that we're following at the moment, we're losing our healthy environment. We're losing our healthy people who can contribute to solving the other major problems we have, like you know, the thermal climate change problems that we have. So I remain an optimist. But I think, coming back to the beginning of our conversation, the interdisciplinarity I mean I'm unusual, being an astrophysicist working in this field. Okay, I can see enormous benefits in having these two cultures working together.

Speaker 2: 1:29:49

You know, the conversations I have with architects are very close and gritty. You know gritty conversations about what we can actually do to make things better and it's not difficult. And the other thing that I would say is we're wasting huge amounts of energy, illuminating our planet in totally unnecessarily ways. So if you were thinking that it's going to be expensive to make these changes to make better environments, turn the lights off, use less energy lighting unnecessarily and just think about what we're doing. The cost of type 2 diabetes in the National Health Service in the UK is huge. When I talk to doctors in hospitals and I say which disease would it be most beneficial for you to get rid of, they say type 2 diabetes. I see nurses going around, you know, spending all their time testing people for diabetes all the time, rather than you know doing other things. So there are huge amounts of money to be saved by increasing the health of the population yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1: 1:31:00

And yes, it's not only testing. I mean, when someone has end-stage type 2 diabetes, they're they're a customer, they're a client of an, of a kidney disease, of a kidney specialist, because they're on dialysis, they've um, they've had a heart attack, they've had a stroke, they've got peripheral neuathy, they need to see the podiatrist, et cetera, and on and on and on. So, yes, it's a profound problem. A couple of quick points and I'll emphasize quickly, because I'm mindful of your time, bob, and I don't want to use it up.

Speaker 1: 1:31:31

But the fact that those leaves are reflecting infrared is fascinating, or reflecting infrared is fascinating. And it goes to this idea of the benefit of just simply being in nature and having all these amazingly elegant ways of benefiting from nature. And it's just simply how we were designed. And a lot of people can get this far into the interview and think, okay, I'm going to go outside, but a lot of people just know that they feel good when they're outside under a tree. And the other point is the value of the short wavelengths. Yes, in high doses, especially if we're mismatched to our UV environment, they can be in excess. But obviously the shorter wavelengths the visible and UV are essential in their own way for optimal health. So I think that that point is emphasized. And then, turning off the lights at night that is an easy thing for people to do. It's something I teach people in my circadian reset course just simply minimizing artificial light at night, of any color, because essentially, from a circadian point of view, that's not what your body wants or needs.

Speaker 1: 1:32:33

Again, just maybe before we wrap up, um, again, just maybe um before we, before we wrap up, like talking about interdisciplinary uh, you're an astrophysicist. Scott zerman is a junior. Uh, glenn glenn jeffrey is a neuroscientist. Dr roger schwelt is a intensive care physician. Uh, you know, I'm a gp registrar. Camera borg is a is a nutritionist. It's a. It's a somewhat disparate and maybe motley crew of people who are talking about this topic, but I think it's benefited from all these different people's perspectives and I think it actually will take even more people with even more unique perspectives to really deliver this incredibly important message to a wider audience. Yes, I agree. Maybe the final thing to say sorry, go on.

Speaker 2: 1:33:29

I would just say just one thing about the trees, one thing I didn't mention we don't have time to mention everything but one thing I've realized, and I have talked to a friend of mine who's an ex-science director of Kew Gardens about this. We discovered that mushrooms that grow in the forest understory are beautifully adapted to absorb the infrared light, to produce spores. To absorb the infrared light to produce spores. They grow up in the forest understory. The infrared light is very efficiently transported by the mushroom matrix, by the flesh of the mushroom, down into the spore-producing bodies. And also I observe with my spectrometer that nuts and seeds are also incredibly efficient harvesters of infrared light. And I think biology needs this infrared light to reproduce. It's a very energy demanding process in life to reproduce and it seems that all the natural reproductive structures that we see greatly benefit from infrared light. There was a paper published recently about the motility of human sperm being greatly increased by infrared light.

Speaker 1: 1:34:47

Wow. That immediately made me think of Scott's paper where he looked at the refractive properties of human amniotic fluid and described the optimal essentially optimal transmission of infrared photons to bathe the baby in a, in a, basically a cocoon of infrared light, and that that means that what you've just described in the plant kingdom is holding in in humans, in mammals too, and it makes complete sense to me. One, one further idea is you know, dr Jack Cruz has talked about blue light as being, and this blue light environment driving this autism epidemic and basically a problem of neuronal migration. To me, the other facet of that, the corollary or the implication of that, is a neuro-infrared deficiency. So whether near-infrared deficiency is greatly exacerbating the autism epidemic and we know Doug Wallace's work is, he's replicated autistic behaviors in mouse models through mitochondrial dysfunction. So there's lots of separate mechanistic pathways that could lead us to the same conclusion.

Speaker 1: 1:35:51

But absolutely fascinating, bob, absolutely fascinating. I think this is such a deep and amazing rabbit hole and one that I think needs this is what needs the scientific funding, and instead there's all kinds of other things being funded and it's up to citizen scientists and people such as yourself to do this very important work. Maybe the final point that I really want you to convey to people is how they can benefit from infrared in their environment and put it back in and say that they need to cook dinner up till 6pm. They want to have some infrared and perhaps they can't have access to halogen or incandescent in the way that they previously were. I know Scott Zimmerman's Naira bulb company uses a visible LED with a very small filament bulb run at low voltage to provide both a visible and non-visible component. Can you explain to me your workaround or your solution to this problem of putting infrared back in to our indoor environments?

Speaker 2: 1:36:55

Yes, I think there are two answers to our indoor environments. Yes, there are two. I think there are two answers, and the answers are extremely cheap or cost-free. One is get outside. Be aware that if you get out into strong sunlight, your clothes will protect you from damaging ultraviolet radiation. Your clothes will also be effectively transparent to near-infrared, so you don't have to strip off to benefit from near-infrared sunlight. You just walk out in your ordinary clothes and it gets perfectly well through your clothes. I've demonstrated this pictures in my articles about this, showing that clothes are perfectly transparent, showing that clothes are perfectly transparent, almost perfectly transparent. So get outside, sit under a tree. I mean, my quote about Newton has been used a number of times, but Newton was sitting under a tree, an apple tree, when he thought of the idea of gravity. I don't think that was an accident, although it's probably anecdotal. Anyway, it's not an accident. The best environment for mitochondrial health is sitting outside, drinking a glass of whatever under a tree, in sunlight, grounded, absolutely perfect for mitochondrial health, and you won't suffer any harm from that in terms of sunburn or whatever, because you'll be well shaded. I mean, please get out in the sunlight as well to pick up your vitamin D.

Speaker 2: 1:38:26

I noticed that Scandinavians do much better for vitamin D than Spaniards or Italians and I think that's because Scandinavians spend a lot of time outdoors, both in the summer and the winter.

Speaker 2: 1:38:37

And there's a point I'd make about the ultraviolet and the vitamin D synthesis. It's always said that when the sun's below whatever the angle is, 45 degrees, you get precious little ultraviolet getting through. But the sunlight that's reaching the atmosphere above the ozone layer can really scatter down onto you from above through the thinnest the vertical path through the ozone layer. So the Scandinavians out on the sea ice skating for five hours a day, like one of my friends does they get plenty of ultraviolet radiation even with the sun. On the sea ice skating for five hours a day, like one of my friends does they get plenty of ultraviolet radiation even with the sun on the horizon because of scattering of sunlight down through the ozone layer. So there is a path for ultraviolet vitamin D generating ultraviolet down through the sky, even in the winter with a low sun, if you're outside and you have at least part of your body uncovered.

Speaker 1: 1:39:42

Interesting and I'll hammer home the point that has been made by your countryman, professor Richard Weller, who is a dermatologist investigating the systemic benefit of sunlight exposure, and he has said multiple times that there is there is no evidence um linking, uh you, greater uv exposure with greater all-cause death. And, and it just seems, no matter which study we look at, the more um sunlight people get, the more uv light people get, the the greater their longevity, the lower their all-cause mortality, um in a range of cardiovascular mortality, cancer mortality, uh, so, in a range of studies, so, and yeah, it's a well, the point is well taken, I mean, I I think this podcast in many ways has become a different, an exposition of different reasons why we should be outside and not inside.

Speaker 2: 1:40:33

one more thing I would add. You're talking about about lighting. I have here a 60-watt tungsten filament lamp which I bought from Amazon in plain packaging. They're getting difficult to get. I ran this on a cheap dimmer, also from Amazon, and it has a slightly lower voltage, so the filament will last forever. These are designed at normal voltage to last about a year. That's what the factories do. They make them to last a year. Turn the voltage down a couple of notches and it'll last for the age of the universe. It'll last forever. So this whole setup cost me 10 pounds. I have one of these in my study. I have here plenty of light for working by.

Speaker 1: 1:41:18

I run it at a lower voltage, so it doesn't get hot.

Speaker 2: 1:41:21

I can hold the. I can hold it. It's warm but it's not hot. It's not using very much energy. It has a color temperature of about 2400 kelvins and it's 200 lux on the on on the table, which is adequate for me to work with. I have one in my bedroom I use for reading at night and I have one in my sitting room for reading, and they cost nothing.

Speaker 2: 1:41:46

Essentially, you don't have to buy fancy infrared LEDs. These are as bright as sunlight, at one and a half microns. They're very, very bright in the infrared and you don't need to rely on these for bright lighting. I also have an LED on the other side here which gives me white light, which gives me allow me to do fine work and so on. But using tungsten filaments, I'm afraid. I mean they're frowned upon by climate change activists, they're frowned upon by the Department of Energy in the US. They're frowned upon by the Department of Energy in the US. They're frowned upon by the European Union. They're frowned upon by everybody. But they play a role and Scott with his NARA bulbs using a low voltage tungsten filament is an extremely effective, efficient, low energy solution to the problem.

Speaker 2: 1:42:36

But we need a thermal light source anything that has a temperature above the out of a candle flame. A white candle flame will give you plenty of near infrared wood. Wood burning stoves in in tromso in norway. Keep those people alive in in the winter because they they have wood burning stoves. They get plenty of near infrared radiation. There are many ways of getting this near infrared radiation without burning huge amounts of energy yes, and that that's.

Speaker 1: 1:43:02

That's a very good point. Maybe, bob, you could. I know it sounds even simplistic, but to put together just a really brief pdf of exactly how you've done that and because people are, um, at various stages of of understanding and even some like a resource, is really simple as what exactly you bought and how exactly to put it together, I think could be immensely helpful, especially for a lot of my YouTube and podcast following who simply want the TLDR or the actionable steps. So maybe if you could do that, that would be a step in the right direction.

Speaker 2: 1:43:37

I've done that with my friends. I can easily yeah, yeah, yeah, and but I I do. I I do worry about getting these, these bulbs, these tungsten filaments. I mean, they're becoming increasingly difficult to get, they're becoming illegal in some countries and, uh, you know, it's a problem. We need to, we need to change the language. We need to make it possible for us to utilize, uh, thermal light sources in in intelligent ways, yeah, where they're necessary, but we don't use them.

Speaker 1: 1:44:07

We don't have to use them for for everything, but we can use them for special, certain healthy health benefiting circumstances yes, and I know for a for a fact, or it's been suggested that the El Salvador administration is actively looking at restarting or generating incandescent factory in their country, and that is amongst a host of other exciting things along with adopting Bitcoin and throwing gang members in jail that that country is doing. So really looking forward to hearing more about that. But if anyone is listening has got this far in the interview, I think a really actionable thing that can also be done in addition to getting outside, putting infrared back into your environment through a thermal lighting source and maybe through Bob's guide that he's going to give us. But it'd also be to just talk to your member, talk to your member of parliament and say that hey, there's a problem here. Your energy saving rules by your bureaucratic department are causing diabetes and they're worsening diabetic metabolic syndrome. They're worsening polycystic ovary syndrome. They're worsening diabetic metabolic syndrome. They're worsening polycystic ovary syndrome. They're worsening fatty liver disease. They're worsening obesity and this needs to change, and to change it we need to reverse course on this non-thermal lighting and in your recent interview with Scott Zimmerman and Cameron, Scott made the point that at the moment, the Department of Energy in the US US is moving to 160, I believe, lumens per watt minimum in terms of efficiency for their bulbs, to a lighting source that has such energy efficiency, because it will necessarily imply that it is only visible in these blue wavelengths and be deficient in infrared.

Speaker 1: 1:46:07

Yeah, I agree, Fantastic. Well, Bob, thank you so much for your time. It was an enlightening conversation. I think people really will like this and really appreciate the depth and knowledge that you've conveyed. So, yeah, thanks again and yeah, hopefully we'll be in touch and maybe we can talk again soon, and I know you're doing very exciting stuff with the Guy Foundation and other collaborators, so maybe we can touch base in the future to hear what you're up to. Okay, well, thanks very much, Max. It was a pleasure to collaborators, so maybe we can touch base in the future um, to hear what you're up to, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:46:37

Well, thanks very much, max. It was a pleasure to do this and it was a pleasure to shape the talk in this way. That's the first time I've given this talk in this particular way, which covered, I think, the very important points that are perhaps not covered elsewhere. So it's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1: 1:46:50

Thanks very much indeed, thank you.