Editing the Sun — How Indoor Light Lost Touch With Biology

In this fascinating and deeply thought-provoking episode of Sunlight Matters, Dave Wallace sits down with four leading thinkers from radically different disciplines to explore a provocative new scientific theory.

The discussion centres on a groundbreaking new paper, Editing the Sun: How Indoor Light Lost Touch with Biology, which explores how changes in modern lighting — particularly the shift away from sunlight and infrared-rich light — may be influencing metabolism, mitochondrial function, ageing and chronic disease.

Joining Dave are:

• Bob Fosbury
• Glenn Jeffrey
• Roger Seheult
• Scott Zimmerman

Together, they explore an extraordinary idea: that sunlight may play a direct role in supporting mitochondrial function — not by providing energy in the same way plants use photosynthesis, but by acting more like a “lubricant” for metabolism.

The conversation ranges from mitochondrial biology and quantum chemistry to hospital design, chronic disease, sunlight deficiency, LEDs, evolution and why our bodies may be far more tuned to the Sun than we realise.

Could modern lighting be contributing to rising metabolic disease? Why do patients recover better with sunlight? And have we accidentally designed environments that are biologically mismatched to human health?

This episode explores the science, the implications and why this emerging field could fundamentally reshape how we think about buildings, health and public policy.

In this episode we discuss:

• The theory behind Editing the Sun and what “photometabolism” means
• Why mitochondria may be biologically tuned to sunlight
• How infrared light could influence energy production in cells
• Why sunlight may help reduce metabolic damage over time
• The relationship between light, diabetes, obesity and chronic disease
• What astronauts can teach us about life without sunlight
• The unintended health consequences of modern LED lighting
• Why hospitals are beginning to rethink sunlight access for patients
• The concept of biological “Goldilocks zones” for human health
• Why interdisciplinary science may unlock major future breakthroughs

Key Takeaway

The panel argues that sunlight is not merely something we see or feel — it may be a deeply embedded biological requirement, woven into the evolution of life on Earth. While more research is needed, the implications for health, architecture, medicine and everyday life could be profound.

Is sunlight one of the missing foundations of modern health?

Sunlight Matters is a podcast exploring the role of the Sun in human health, architecture, cities, and everyday life.

Through conversations with scientists, architects, and technologists, the series examines how natural light shapes our bodies, our buildings, and the way we live indoors.

Hosted by Dave Wallace, Sunlight Matters asks a simple but overlooked question: what happens when we disconnect from the Sun?

Because sunlight isn’t optional. It matters.

Please do not forget to Like and Subscribe. 

Transcript

Dave Wallace (01:32)
Welcome to Sunlight Matters. This is a very special episode. We've been through some technical difficulties, but I think we've kind of made it out the other side. And I'm delighted about that because we're here to talk about a new paper So, Bob, Glenn...

Roger, Scott, thank you so much for joining. I'm really looking forward to this getting into the detail. But Bob, I thought if we could maybe start with you giving us a high level view of what the paper's all about. And, you know, then we can get into a conversation.

Bob Fosbury (02:07)
Okay, well I'm happy to start. First of all, I should say that, you know, the science in this paper is really rather new to me. So, you know, and I've learnt a lot in this process and we've had a lot of help in the process, but it's not my home science and ⁓ it's been, I think it's very relevant to what we observe.

Anyway, let me talk a bit about the paper. The current title is Editing the Sun, How Indoor Light Lost Touch with Biology. And there's a subtitle which says, Photon-assisted modulation of mitochondrial electron transfer kinetics in spectrally altered lighting environments. That's why I want to use it in an analogy.

Dave Wallace (02:55)
If you could, that would be fantastic.

Bob Fosbury (02:58)
Okay, well, the main content of the paper is first of all, an introduction and ⁓ really a presentation by Glenn and Roger of the experimental and clinical evidence of which there's a huge amount in this field now. So we're really writing this paper as an attempt to understand the kind of mechanism which could explain the empirical

data. And so there's quite a long introduction with basically written by Glenn and Roger talking about this. And then we move on to a more theoretical view of how the light gets into bodies and how it interacts with life and ⁓ how we think it produces the kind of results that we observe.

I have to stress that this is an introduction to a theory which is very well known and very well explored. We're not writing new theory at all. The Marcus formulation for electron transport in chemistry goes back a long way. Rudi Marcus won the Nobel Prize in 1992 for this and he's still going strong at 102 in Caltech.

Glen Jeffery (04:22)
And Roger and I

Bob Fosbury (04:25)
some months ago. We're still in touch with him. So it's not a new theory, but the application of the theory is new. And I think that's why it's ⁓ easier for me to use an analogy. And what I'll do is I say, let's talk about humans. It's really to do with all of life in the biosphere. But let's focus on humans because that's what we're all worried about at the moment.

If you're a human who's reached the age of about 20, you will have more or less completed your physical growth. And from then on, it's more or less all downhill. you're using an increasing fraction of your metabolic input energy in order to maintain the structure in your body. And it was pointed out by Erwin Schrodinger in his book, his wonderful little book.

What is life in 1944? But the reason we eat is not so much to make energy. The reason we eat is to maintain the order inside our body. It's to maintain our homeostasis. Because our body, like the sun in fact, is not in any kind of thermodynamic equilibrium. It's very far from equilibrium. And you need a lot of work to do a lot of work to maintain it in this state of what we call a meta-stable.

equilibrium. And, you know, while you're in this metastable equilibrium, you're hopefully alive. But if you fall out of this metastable equilibrium and move into thermodynamic equilibrium, you're a blob of jelly dead on the floor. So the important thing is we have to maintain the order in our bodies. That's the most important thing that we do ⁓ with our metabolism. And we get

energy out of that as well which we can use to run around and think and do all those things. And there's a very good analogy I think with say a car. Say you're a 20 year old and your dad is rich enough to buy you ⁓ a Rolls Royce and he says to you you're going to get this Rolls Royce now but you're going to have to make it last for your lifetime so you better look after it. So you buy a Rolls Royce and you fill it with petrol

and you tootle off into the countryside and you use it for what you want to do. And you'll probably be able to drive around this Rolls Royce as long as you fill it up with petrol occasionally, you're probably able to use it for few years without doing anything else, without taking it in for a service, changing the oil and things like that. But after a little while longer, it will start slowing down, breaking, squeaking and falling apart.

So you need to maintain your Rolls-Royce. And I think we have a very similar situation with a life form. You start growing your life form, you reach a state of being fully grown, and then you work through the rest of your life trying to maintain your body in the best state you can by eating the right kinds of foods and living in the right...

kind of environment. you know, the parallel with the Rolls-Royce, I think is quite good. And what we're actually arguing is that instead of a service station for a Rolls-Royce and a supply of oil to change, we use sunlight to service our bodies and we use sunlight to provide the oil which ⁓ lubricates our engine and makes it work properly.

And it sounds slightly ⁓ ridiculous, but the analogy is very close because in the theory that we have, not using, we as humans and animals are not using sunlight ⁓ to make energy directly. Plants do that. Plants use sunlight through photosynthesis to make carbohydrates, which we use as food. We have to metabolize the food.

and our metabolic engine needs servicing and lubrication. And so the idea is that the occasional access to daylight is essential for providing these maintenance services and providing the lubricant ⁓ that we need to keep our metabolic engine running. There's another

close parallel, which I think is rather nice. The engine in our bodies is basically the mitochondrion of which we have many in all of our cells. And it's the mitochondria that do the processing of the food, which is provided to it in the form of electrons to ⁓ produce the cellular energy that we can actually use to do things. And, you know, the Rolls-Royce has

maybe a six cylinder engine. It doesn't have a one cylinder engine because a one cylinder engine would probably not work very smoothly. It would be rather inefficient. And it's been shown that if you have more than one cylinder in a car, it tends to operate better. It's a compromise between the number of moving parts you have and the smoothness of operation when you have multiple cylinders. And the idea is to produce your energy

without doing too much damage. A one-cylinder Rolls-Royce would probably do a lot of damage as this huge cylinder was pumping up and down, but a six-cylinder one ⁓ operates much more smoothly. Again, in the mitochondrion, we don't extract the energy from the electron coming from the food in one go. We do it in a number of steps, a number of smaller steps. And by doing it in smaller steps, you avoid

producing too much cellular damage. And I won't talk about the details of a mitochondrion, but basically the mitochondrion consists of ⁓ a series of complexes ⁓ through which electrons travel one from the other, and they have to pass many potential barriers in that passage. It's a bit like ⁓ a narrowboat going down a series of locks. The electron is running downhill.

While it's running downhill, you're extracting energy from it running downhill and you're using that energy to pump protons across the barrier of the membrane in the mitochondrion. And it's those protons that travel through the barrier again, the membrane again, through an enzyme called ATP synthase, which converts the protons into, or the proton energy into

adenosine triphosphate. It's the energy currency that's used by all the cells. So you really have this, you have the electrons going through the mitochondrion in a series of small steps and they drive the protons through the barrier and the protons are used to make the ATP. It's a beautifully complicated system, but it's designed, it's evolved in that way ⁓ to be relatively

undamaging to the surrounding structure, to the infrastructure. If you, instead of having a series of locks in a canal, if you just had a sluice and a chute running down from the top of the flight to the bottom of the flight, and you tried to get the narrowboat to go all the way down in one go, you'd probably end up with a crumpled mass at the end. Much better to go down through a series of locks where you can do it very gently and not do too much damage in the process.

So there are the analogies.

What I mentioned in the beginning was that the body is, know, life forms are working far from thermodynamic equilibrium. And that means that if you let energy loose in a body, unless you have a means of controlling that energy, ⁓ it would, these electrons would just run through the body, you run all your chemical reactions simultaneously, and it would be a big mess. So,

The point of having these barriers, which are a bit like lock gates, the point of having these barriers ⁓ in the mitochondrion is to enable the control system of the body to control the way the electrons travel across these barriers in a very precisely controlled manner. So you end up with a coordinated ⁓ supply of electrons going through the mitochondrion and producing the ATP.

Now, one of the remarkable, I call them coincidences. They're not coincidences because this is the way life has evolved. But if you look at the way we look at sunlight, Scott and I have discussed this many times and we've been through all this. We don't use the same expression of sunlight on our plots. Instead of using the normal,

watts per square meter per nanometer, which is used in, usually used in radiometry. This is a quite inappropriate units for biology. Biology knows about photons and it knows about photon energy and that's what it uses. So we transform the stellar spectrum into the form of the photon flux, that's the rate of photons coming from the Sun per square meter per unit energy.

And that transformation actually makes the spectrum look quite different. Instead of the peak spectrum of energy coming in the visible, the peak photon flux comes in the near-infrared. And so this spectral representation looks quite different. And in the infrared, the temperature of the sun corresponds to a peak of about 1600 nanometers in wavelength.

So that's in the near infrared. Now, there's a remarkable property of the sun's atmosphere, ⁓ which controls the mistiness of the atmosphere. In other words, it controls how deep the photons are emerging from the sun towards the earth. And there's a minimum in this mistiness, we call it the minimum of opacity in the sun.

at 1600 nanometers. And that's the result of the opacity being due to ⁓ something called the H minus iron, which is responsible for the mistiness of the the solar atmosphere. And this is true for all stars, which are rather like the sun in temperatures either side of the sun, slightly hotter, slightly cooler. And it means that we're getting

more than our fair share of photons coming out at around 1600 nanometers, a broadband around 1600 nanometers. And it turns out that if you look at this barrier in the mitochondrion, which is controlling the energy production from the mitochondrion, this has been measured in all life forms across the, you know, many, many life forms, plants, fungi, animals.

And the mean value of this barrier in electron volts is 0.7, 0.7 electron volts. And 1600 nanometers is 0.75 electron volts. So there's a very close coincidence between the photon flux coming from the solar atmosphere and the peak barrier in the mitochondrion. So this, in our view, is clearly a result of evolution over four billion years of life on Earth.

to produce this resonance between the properties of our sun and the requirements for life to work the way it does. Now that coincidence is not only a coincidence in wavelength or energy, you know, the 0.7 electron volt mean barrier in the mitochondrion and the 0.75 maximum in the solar atmosphere. It's also a

quantitative ⁓ coincidence because it seems that the amount of energy coming from the Sun in the infrared that would hit your body is comparable to your basal metabolic rate. So you're getting around about 100 watts coming from the Sun reaching your being intercepted by the cross-sectional area of your body.

which is about the same value as your mean metabolic rate, which implies, in fact, it's somewhat higher than your mean metabolic rate by a factor of five or 10. That means there's plenty of energy coming from the sun to have an influence on your metabolism. And what we're doing is showing the kind of influence that energy may have on our metabolism in order to give the control system of the body plenty of scope.

for putting its foot on the accelerator, increasing the ATP production rate to give us more energy, but also to provide a pool of energy in the body, which can be used to repair proteins, form new proteins, synthesize new proteins and so on. So there are functions of, I call lubrication. It's the lubrication that allows the ATP production rate to increase. And because of that lubrication, you can increase the

ATP production rate more than you might otherwise do. And it also gives you that works on a sort of instantaneous time scale, but there are longer time scale effects for meaning when you repair proteins, when you repair proteins in your mitochondrion, when you synthesize new proteins to build new mitochondria, that produces advantages over much longer time scales. So we see these different time scales in the experimental data. We see an almost instantaneous

effect on ATP production of shining infrared light on the body, but we also see that effect lasting over periods of days, weeks and possibly even months. So, energetically, it's quite feasible that the sunlight, even for relatively short exposures on the body, ⁓ can have an effect on ATP production rate, but also on conditioning of the mitochondria and to make it work more smoothly.

And I remember, this is another anecdote, I remember when I was a kid, I was given a Meccano steam engine to play with by my grandfather. I must have been about eight or nine years old, I can't remember. But I used to play with this steam engine and I'd boil the water and so on, but often the steam engine wouldn't start. And then my dad said, well, why don't you put a drop of oil on the piston and see what happens? And I put a drop of oil on the piston.

and suddenly it started and it was off. So when we talk about the sunlight acting as a lubricant, the sunlight is making it possible for the electrons to get over these barriers somewhat more easily. It's just like a lubricant. So that energy that we're providing from sunlight doesn't go into our metabolism at all. That all comes from the food that we eat, but it does act as a lubricant and it enables the

mitochondrial engine to work much more effectively than it does.

And the net result of that, I think, is something it doesn't allow us to produce more energy because that comes from the amount of food we eat. But what it does do, and this is probably the most important part of the story, what it does do, it does it by producing less damage. You make your energy and you maintain the quality and structure of your metabolic process.

And so it will now allow you to maintain your high rate of energy usage throughout a longer life or keep you generating energy at a higher rate for longer than you would without the... So it's maintaining, it's helping you to maintain the order of your body, your homeostatic quality for longer, your mitochondria.

age more slowly because of the care that you're giving to the mitochondria. So the way we're doing this, I won't go into any detail, but ⁓ the way we think this happens is that the electron is sitting in the mitochondria and waiting to get over one of these barriers.

The energy coming from the sun is providing us an environment for this electron, which is buzzing with low-level energy. And this buzzing environment is a bit like a mild earthquake. The environment is sort of oscillating up and down. And if you're an electron, it's like a cork floating in a pond. The cork bobs up and down as waves go through your local environment.

If you're sitting, if you're an electron going up and down in the waves, this barrier is fixed and you occasionally the wave will lift you much higher than average and the barrier looks much lower and you can go over it much more easily. So it's a statistical possibility of going over the barrier more, more rapidly that is provided by this energy.

energy provided to the surroundings. And we think the mediator between the sunlight and the barrier oscillation and the effect of that is the water molecule and other hydrated molecules in the surroundings. Your exciting vibrations in the water molecule and for your audience who haven't thought about vibrating water molecules, if my head is an oxygen

atom and my fists are hydrogen atoms. This angle between my two fists is 107 degrees and I can waggle these hydrogen atoms like this and vibrate them which absorbs energy. I can also punch my fists this way, moving the hydrogen atoms closer and further from the oxygen atom which is my head.

And I can do it either one by one, or I can do it in phase. And these are all vibrational modes of the hydrogen molecule, of the oxygen molecule, sorry, the water molecule. I'll get there in the end, of the water molecule. And so it's those vibrations that are absorbing the energy from sunlight. And what we think is the result of getting these oxygen

molecules vibrating in this way will produce the oscillating environment and will have a low-level weak influence but a permanently present influence while sunlight is shining on the lubrication state and the ability of electrons to cross barriers in the mitochondria. So that's the application of so-called Marcus theory to the idea of influencing the effective barrier height

and allowing energy to be generated more effectively. Now, we're not sure quantitatively that this theory works. It's quite a complex computation, but the work we have put into trying to understand how it might work looks numerically ⁓ promising, I would say.

And the very fact that we know there's plenty of energy in sunlight to pump into the body to do this is a kind of low level sort of fallback situation. We think there's plenty of energy there. The detailed quantum mechanical calculations of the environment of these barriers in the mitochondrion is complex. There are people capable of doing that and I'm not one of them. so, you know, the

The paper is designed not to solve this problem, but to propose what we think is a feasible explanation of the effectiveness of sunlight in both improving the possibilities of putting your foot on the accelerator and producing lots of energy instantaneously in the body, but also maintaining the infrastructure of the body much more effectively over long periods of time.

And we know that without this, you the astronauts in the space station are a good example. They don't have any sunlight for six months or more, and they come back pretty sick from the space station. As soon as they get into sunlight, they improve, but they will have aged more than they would have done without that period on the space station. So ⁓ I think that's probably enough for me to introduce the paper. I mean, there's lots of detail in the paper about Marcus theory and so on, but ⁓

The bottom line is that the whole series of apparent coincidences between the nature and quantity of sunlight and the nature of the metabolic process and its quantitative requirements that seem to match very well.

Dave Wallace (27:34)
I mean, it's incredibly elegant in terms of how you're bringing it together. I guess, I mean, Glenn, from your perspective, you've been doing research around infrared light and its impact on metabolism. And do you sort of see this, the logic of this as a way of sort of starting to bring some of the research that you've done together? And I mean, obviously it sounds, Bob, like this is a sort of starting point in terms of

you know, putting a theory together and there's a lot more work that needs to be done. But it's sort of feeding into the work that you've done already, Glenn, isn't it?

Bob Fosbury (28:11)
Bye.

Glen Jeffery (28:14)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, if we if we take Bob's sort of fundamental point that, you know, the sunlight provides ⁓ you know, a a certain form of energy for for ⁓ mitochondria and mitochondria are a key focus for metabolism, general health and particularly for aging, ⁓ then you know, ⁓ we started doing research and actually being very proud of some great results that we got by introducing long wavelength light and improving mitochondria.

but I think the big mistake we made ⁓

was our naivety in initially doing this research because we were getting results from people who fundament or from animals or people who fundamentally were not experiencing sunlight because our subjects were people who were living and working in the built environment. Animals were animals that were in animal houses. And these these animals and these people got no sunlight. So the the the transition that we make in the built environment

Is from we go from sunlight into the built environment with incandescent light bulbs, but incandescent light bulbs are very much like sunlight. ⁓ But then we transition at the start of the century into LEDs which are incredibly unlike sunlight. They have no of these long wavelengths who are coincident with the improvement in mitochondrial performance.

So in fact, you know, if I'd done gone back and repeated all my experiments on ⁓ on Sudanese farmers who were getting loads of ⁓ sunlight near the equator, I wouldn't I wouldn't be publishing very much. So you know the great results that we have found have been based on the fact that human beings are in the wrong place and their mitochondria respond to being in the wrong place by underperforming. ⁓ and we're

Bob Fosbury (30:03)
Thank

Glen Jeffery (30:19)
Slowly learning that as we add infrared, we we get a great effect, we get improvements in metabolism, we get improvements in general health in animals and humans. ⁓ but then actually, as we get closer to sunlight and we put them in incandescent light bulbs, ⁓ we get even better effects and more long-lasting effects. So it is sunlight, and I've tried to reproduce sunlight in the lab, and I can't do it. I just can't do it. Squeeze LEDs altogether to try and produce this broad spectrum of.

Light just doesn't happen. So mitochondria are very, very tuned to daylight, and you you can't really fool them. And when you take that sunlight away from them, metabolism just gets goes

it it starts to underperform. So your blood sugars ⁓ tend to increase because mitochondria are not drawing ⁓ glucose out of your serum. You don't live animals don't live as long. If you if you start putting animals, short-lived animals under ⁓ incandescent lights or LEDs, you find really a very, very significant difference in lifespan. And you know, lifespan's the big picture frame. How long are we living and are we living a healthy life?

You introduce near infrared or even better incandescent light bulbs into an environment, and you find suddenly people have got better control of their blood sugars, ⁓ and generally there are improvements, there are improvements in health. The key problem for us is we're living in the wrong part of world because really all of our metabolism and our immunity and other things were set during evolution when we were closer to the closer to the equator, and now we're live

living in northern Europe. We shouldn't really be there because we're not we're not acclimatized to many of the factors that ⁓ that that occur when you have reduced sunlight. For ninety-nine point nine nine percent of our evolution we've been under a very very different solar pattern. So

Moving out of ⁓ moving out of Africa, moving into the built environment, moving into Northern Europe with lousy weather for a lot of the year, ⁓ really, really isn't where we should be and it has an effect on on public health. But Roger will tell you, I'm sure that in actual fact that not only goes to public health and whether you've got a snotty nose or whether your blood sugars are doing this, it actually tips over into disease as well. So ⁓ there's the public health issue.

But then there's also the direct clinical issue.

Dave Wallace (32:56)
Well, I know, so there is one thing, know, and Roger, it'd great to kind of hear that perspective, but, you know, I loved the way Bob described light as a lubricant and, you know, the chain which is kind of going on. And I guess if you don't have that light, what then happens, you know, and I guess what you're talking about, Glenn, at a research level is some of the implications of

know, metabolism sort of slowing down. And Roger, you know, I guess from your perspective in medicine, you know, what are some of the implications that would come out of that lubrication just not being there?

Roger Seheult (33:39)
Yeah, it's it's big. ⁓ it's not like we're talking about, you know, a little biohack here or biohack there to get a little bit more. This is this is major. So if you look at the Western world's chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, at the heart of all of these conditions that are are plaguing our healthcare systems is is the mitochondria. So metabolism is central.

It's in all of our cells. Glenn Jeffrey's work ⁓ is is is just incredible how he's gotten to this. Of course, ⁓ some of the work looked into the retina, which is the tissue in the body that has the highest concentration of mitochondria, but realized that whatever's going on in the retina is just simply part and parcel of what's going on everywhere else in the human body. So we we currently have evidence at multiple levels, at the cellular physiological level, but also at the epidemiological level.

That sunlight matters. So there was a study that was done at Oxford and in Leiden in the Netherlands looking at blood draws. And literally by the hour in the previous seven days before that blood draw, the more sunlight there was in the weather forecast, ⁓ the the lower the triglyceride levels and the higher the insulin sensitivity was in those in those subjects that was published. we look at the Sweden ⁓ study where we have ⁓ thirty thousand Swedish women.

Who basically, in a dose response manner, shows that sun avoidance increases all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and cancer mortality. That paper was basically that type of study was reproduced just a couple of years ago by Richard Weller's group, looking at UK Biobank in 10 times the amount of subjects, 300,000 in both men and women, both looking at their ⁓ their environment and also looking at the sunlight and the weather ⁓ in that.

In that type of study, show again the same thing. SUT avoidance is associated in a dose response curve to cardiovascular disease, cancer, all of these types of things. ⁓ Physiologically, we've got ⁓ studies that look at ⁓ individuals in randomized placebo-controlled trials. We've got the Brazilian COVID study in 30 patients where every endpoint was statistically significant and it reduced ⁓ hospitalization by 30%.

cut four days off of a 12-day stay. we've got a study that was just released last year, 60 subjects. again, infrared light. ⁓ not only were the ICU patients discharged 30% faster from the intensive care unit, they also came out much stronger. And they didn't need as the the rehab that they would normally have. So we're we're not only just seeing that this is like you know fun physiological, biochemical

data on a page, we're actually seeing real world improvements that are not small. ⁓ to the point that, you know, it's actually catching the eye of healthcare policymakers and ⁓ people who have a stakehold in in healthcare. So there's just a few hosp just a couple of hospitals this week in the UK that ⁓ that are now instituting bright sunlight in their intensive care patients.

So this is King's College and also St. George Hospital that are taking their ICU patients outside into the sun. This is on the backdrop, by the way, of a brand new $1.5 billion construction just west of Melbourne, Australia, Foot Scray Hospital, which essentially built their hospital to do the very same thing. So what we're seeing here is something that I don't think is a new discovery. If you look back at history, it's something that ⁓ we knew about a hundred years ago. We there's actually a tradition.

Of using heliotherapy or sunlight in getting patients better. ⁓ before we had all of these scientific accoutrements of ways of measuring, ⁓ we had Florence Nightingale, who could see very easily when she was taking care of patients during the Crimean War that patients that were housed outside because their hospitals were too filled, ⁓ actually improved faster. I think what we're what we're seeing now is we're actually getting down to ⁓

to the to the science because we have the ability to do it. But the other thing that that Glenn touched on that I think is really important to understand is that the reason why we're seeing this now so much so is because of what Bob calls the the scurvy of the 21st century, which is the lack of infrared natural biological spectrum light. And I think it's a a very apt ⁓ comparison because

I try to compare this this infrared red light therapy to sunlight. And the way I do it is is is a ⁓ an analogy that we all know very well. The British sailor 300 years ago, the way they used to preserve the food on these ships that they would be on for months, depleted all of the food of vitamin C. So they'd be eating this food without any vitamin C at all, and they would come down with scurvy. The the the lime juice that they figured out was the ration that that cured scurvy is like the red light therapy. Lime juice

Given to someone who has a normal balanced diet isn't gonna do anything. But to someone who's on a ship eating food that's completely devoid of vitamin C, it's literally a miracle drug. But here's here's where I think the analogy continues, and that is that what is sunlight in this? Sunlight is actually getting food on board the ship that is a balanced diet that is rich with vitamin C. That's actually the best solution.

the lime juice was something that they had to deal with because they didn't know how to preserve food without depleting vitamin C. And that's similar to what's going on now. We we live inside. We live in in houses and in spaces, the built environment, as it's called, that is ⁓ you know, almost unintentionally, maybe intentionally, who knows? It depends on the point that you come from. ⁓ we have windows that block infrared light. We have bulbs that on purpose don't produce it because it's not energy efficient.

And so we've created a deficiency that now we're seeing a stark improvement when we're using this type of red light therapy. So I would just say in summary that what we're discussing here is not a a biohack that'll buy you an extra couple hundredths of a second in a hundred meter dash that gets you where you want to be. This is a major fundamental health issue. And it has ish it has an import not only in terms of preventive medicine.

But also in people who present to the hospital with acute disease and and can be treated with this type of of therapy.

Dave Wallace (40:16)
And just to be clear, I mean, and going back to what Bob was saying, if the energy isn't lubricated as part of that process, it's got to go somewhere else, then that may be causing these metabolic diseases. Is that sort of what's underpinning this theory?

Roger Seheult (40:37)
Absolutely. Absolutely. So when the mitochondria don't work, I mean, ⁓ Glenn puts this gr great. I've heard him talk about this before. Imagine, you know, running running any appliance on fifty percent less power. I mean, what would happen to your house? Would you be able to run your microwave? your your batteries just don't work. If the batteries of the cells don't work, the cells don't work. And we see that over a period of time, one of the major theories of aging is simply mitochondrial de energi de energization.

And and that's I think what's going on.

Dave Wallace (41:09)
It's really interesting. I mean, you kind of touch on the implications of this, but I guess we live in a world where policies are in place around lighting, which are kind of moving people away from having ⁓ infrared light inside. Societally, we're not going outside enough, are we? ⁓

know, Scott, I was just kind of keen to kind of get your view from a lighting perspective on, you know, what's going on and perhaps some of the things that we really need to think about around it.

Scott Zimmerman (41:50)
Well, I I think that, you know, as Bob explained, I think that there has been ⁓ an underestimation. You know, what happened was is that the the rule was back when way back when I started, all you cared about was four hundred nanometers to seven hundred nanometers. Then we've gone through a process where we're slowly expanding out and looking what sunlight really is, because sunlight is two hundred and eighty nanometers out to beyond thirty five thousand nanometers.

And it cross that entire spectrum, the body has the ability to extract work. The assumption was, way back when, made by me and by everybody, is all that mattered was l all the only thing that mattered was what our eyes do. Unfortunately, the eyes are the least of it when you really get to looking at it. I mean look what's gone on just in and part of it's been driven mainly by the fact that we didn't have emitters.

that could handle or could go into the longer wavelengths. We still don't really, other than incandescent. And, you know, so what you go, if you look at it, there has been this progression from 400 to 700 nanometers. We're just worried about visible. Then we started adding in a little bit of near infrared, maybe out to 900 nanometers. And then you hit incandescent, which has goes clear out to beyond 6,000 nanometers.

And now we're doing hybrids where we're mixing some LEDs because incandescents actually don't match very well to sunlight in the visible reach, and they're inefficient. So the compromises kinda like your car. You know, you can have an electric car, you can have a gas car, you can have a hybrid. And that's what we do. And you know, the reality is it's the closest match to sunlight you can get. And then you have sunlight. And then I think what's really starting to happen is that because we're able to measure

out into the longer wavelengths and and start measuring having biosensors, even what you're doing with redfin, where you're assigning value to light, the people are starting to look at it and then ⁓ hey, wait a minute. There's something going on here that we didn't have a clue about. You know, I I've been told that the you know what we're doing ⁓ with the change of unit of measure is you know just just hand waving. No

It is absolutely true that unless you change over to these units of measure, you cannot compile actually make the bridge between lighting and biology. Biology thinks in terms of photons per second or meter squared per EV, which is nothing more than just an energy measure. When you start doing that, all of a sudden you see that there's these amazing what makes the sunlight special is that.

Bob Fosbury (44:44)
Thanks.

Scott Zimmerman (44:47)
It has been pre-filtered. Not only is it my as Bob said, matched up with the H minus peak, it's also as it goes through the atmosphere, it's being filtered by the water vapor and the oxy ⁓ atmospheric gases and basically creating this highly structured s set of windows that only allow those wave those energy bands to go through all the way down to our skin and into the the thing.

The fact that if you look at it and you look at what Marcus did way back when, the energies l necessary for us to actually do metabolic processes almost perfectly align with some of those windows, not in but from the standpoint of the energy range is the same that that the biology needs and it's the same that lighting used to provide in some ways.

So it to me it's just it what's fascinating is we're going through this process. And like any change, we don't have really good you know, as far as I know, we're the only ones that measured out to three microns, three thousand nanometers. And what you find is is that when you do, every time you move out and have the ability to s measure things further and further out, there's something biologically going on that we've been ignoring. And so I would make the argument that

You know, we are fundamentally created in a in what Glenn's data shows to be created an environment that is harmful. And I'll just say it up front. I believe that that what we're doing now should not be children shouldn't be exposed to it long term. You can use it for whatever, but a chronic exposure. What are we having? We're having kids looking at ⁓ LED tablets all day. So there's a difference. There are biohacks and therapeutics like

Roger was talking about, where we try and fix something that's broken. But we're breaking things, is what I believe is going on, because we have ignored the fact that sunlight is this huge spectrum and the whole thing's being thinked. That's a problem for the lighting industry. I understand that. They have made choices to try and get the lumens per watt up way up to 120. As soon as they do that, right now it's a it's 45 is ⁓ is kind of like the mandate.

But soon it'll be 120. It will become narrower and narrower and narrow. There will be less. You will not have the ability to bring things in. And you know, I like I say, I think we need to separate out the two things: the therapeutic, the biohacks, the PBM, and all that. That's great. It's doing something. We see it. But what about the chronic? You know, what are we suffering from? We're struggling for chronic metabolic diseases.

That means that over the course of the lifetime, you're being degraded by the environment you're in. And that's what I believe is going on in the in the visible spectrum. And you know

It's it's always been the same, you know, from the standpoint of until you can measure something, you can't really understand what's going on. And now that's changing with the biosensors and the lighting industry I think is going to need to change the way they're doing things. I mean, Glenn, you probably have a better comment on that than I do, but you know, that's what up my point for lighting is.

Dave Wallace (48:18)
Fantastic. I mean, one thing I do reflect on is there is an intuition in all of us around sunlight, which if we kind of let it come to the surface means that, you know, we'll go on holiday to a nice spot in the sun. You you mentioned Redfin. I mean, they did some really interesting research, which is something like 44 % of people in the US.

⁓ they will choose a smaller house with better sunlight. So, you know, that's quite an impressive stat. So somewhere along the line, kind of almost consciously, but sort of subconsciously know this, but it's not being kind of pushed as a kind of idea and a theory before. And, you know, think having, for me, what's brilliant about

you know, the paper and the theory is it's starting to draw all of this stuff together in a way that that makes sense. You know, and I know there's a huge amount of work to be done in terms of sort of proving some of the things or doing more research around these things, but it's starting to answer the why is light so important? You know, and I think that's that's kind of almost been missing until this moment. Like, you know, I

I say to my family, right, we're going out for a walk and, you know, there's lots of tutting, but they kind of do it. I'm saying, like, because light is important, but until this moment, you know, there hasn't been the kind of way of explaining it, which I think is, is really good. And I think this is a fantastic first start.

Scott Zimmerman (50:03)
I I ⁓ can I just real quickly say, you know, that's one of the beautiful things about Glenn's experiment is is that he he basically is showing that you can look at it two ways. Either the incandescent is helping or the LED is hurting. And I think that there's a fundamental need, there's enough data out there to make a claim that we need to rethink and maybe re

Do what we're doing. You know, yeah, you can go outside. People don't. We the they, as you say, there's they would like to be in sun more, but they don't. Or they're in a hospital environment where they can't. And that's what's so amazing about what's going on. When I first started working in this area seven years ago, you know, we were still debating about whether or not light penetrated a millimeter into the skin. Now

you know, with Bob's pictures and the stuff we do, it it's very clear that that ⁓ light is interacting with a high percentage of the body, especially in children. And the fact that we've taken it away, I agree totally with PBM to do things and biohack, whatever, but fundamentally we need an environment that is supportive of our kids growing up. And virtually every disease you want to come up with, testosterone crisis,

Whether you want to talk about the ⁓ you know, the cognitive learning. Those are all in the hands of metabolic issues. And if we've screwed that up, then I think we're getting some of the getting paid back for doing that, is my opinion.

Glen Jeffery (51:49)
Briefly. ⁓ you know, one of the things that I think about okay, you've got these four people in the room on this podcast, they've all come, we've all come from radically different backgrounds. We didn't know one another X number of years ago. We were all sitting in completely different silos. But what we've done is we've crept to the top of our silo and we've looked over the top into one another's silos.

We're all radically different, we've got radically different backgrounds, but we've all come together. We found common ground on this one particular issue. And for the outsider who's potentially watching this podcast, I think that's something that they should pay attention to. We are not a bunch of electrical engineers, we're not a bunch of doctors, you know, we're not a bunch of people who've been trained to see the world in a certain way. We've all changed the way

We see the world because of our interactions together, and we've all put our hands up and said there's a problem over lighting. And I think that's something that people should pay attention to. The diversity of us, the where we've come from, and how we've all ended up at the same party. I think that's I I I personally look at the my other three colleagues here and I think this is great, because every time I've had a conversation with you, you've thrown something new on the table, and I can fit it into the gym.

That I'm playing with. most people who offer opinions offer opinions from communities where that are homogeneous and not heterogeneous. And ⁓ I've thoroughly enjoyed this interaction. I've thoroughly enjoyed putting this paper together, I've thoroughly enjoyed the disagreements, but I hope that it dents for public health.

Scott Zimmerman (53:41)
Then

Bob Fosbury (53:41)
Thanks

Roger Seheult (53:45)
Yeah, and and to I was just saying to Glenn's point, ⁓ it's there are even more silos that are becoming involved. We've had the four of us have had discussions with ⁓ architects, and now we see, you know, in the media that it seems to be resonating with hospitals and people who are in financial control of those institutions. So I think as more and more people ⁓ wake up to this, more and more silos will be opened to this ⁓ to this very important issue.

Dave Wallace (54:14)
I mean, we're actually, we're lucky here in the UK because, I mean, it seems like people are really listening to this. And Glenn, I know you've talked a bit about sort of policy in the UK around lighting, but, you know, those examples of those ICU gardens on the top of, on the rooftops of hospitals in the UK, you just have to listen to some of what the patients say to kind of really understand that this is really

something which is so important. you know, I think you're right, Glenn, it's sort of like having the silos coming together and it's impressive how it kind of all joins together. And, you know, how you're making sense of it all. Because I think it then helps us in terms of like people like us in terms of the job we're doing, it gives us a foundation for saying, yeah, this is why we're doing what we're doing as well. This is the right thing to be doing. You know, and I

I really think just like Roger just you know the videos you've done of kind of the infrared light of showing what happens in under trees you know I now spend a lot more time under trees for instance so you know ⁓ my god I posted a video of me up at 4 30 in the morning because I heard Glenn say that you're out you're

Bob Fosbury (55:30)
to you.

Scott Zimmerman (55:31)
Okay.

Dave Wallace (55:40)
Your mitochondria likes the sort of morning light. kind of gets... ⁓

Roger Seheult (55:45)
You you wouldn't you wouldn't be the first Englishman to sit under a tree and come up with a bright idea.

Glen Jeffery (55:49)
Yeah.

Bob Fosbury (55:51)
Thank you, Roger.

Dave Wallace (55:52)
There you go, who knows, maybe that was it, a rush of infrared light to his brain. But it is really, I mean, you know, and I don't like, I've been following a kind of an outside light, you know, I work with windows open and things like that. And I think in a year I haven't had a cold and that's extraordinary for me. And it could be coincidental, I don't know, but I sort of feel like things are running better.

So, I mean, and that does bring me to a...

question around this, like is this prevented, like if we sort of start having more time outside and better hygiene or light regimes, is it curative or is it preventative do you think or is that just one of the questions that you need to sort of think about going forward? mean Roger, based on what you were saying it's sort of probably both isn't it?

Roger Seheult (56:54)
Well, you know, I go back to the well documented series of Auguste Rollier. he was a a Swiss physician and he was absolutely ⁓ convinced of the ability of sunlight to cure tuberculosis. if you look at that series that he's done and and of course he he got a lot of his work from the Nobel Prize winner, I think Fin Finzel.

⁓ who used ⁓ light to cure lupus ⁓ back in the at the turn of the century. ⁓ here's here was a disease, tuberculosis, which still to this day is one of the most deadly infectious diseases in the world. And if you look at his cases, he had about an eighty percent cure rate of tuberculosis simply by taking people up into the Swiss Alps.

And treating them for months with the ultraviolet light that was that was plentiful at that ⁓ altitude and and sunlight in general, not to mention the fact that at those high altitudes there's less oxygen, and that's also beneficial for getting over ⁓ tuberculosis. But this this work that he that he pioneered was was amazing. This is before penicillin, this is before antibiotics, and we're talking about an 80% cure rate in terms of tuberculosis. So

Yeah, I I believe that ⁓ that sunlight is not only a preventative, but it's also ⁓ it also can treat ⁓ severe infections. Look, we've got the COVID series there in Brazil that sped up the the the the length of stay. It wasn't powered to look at survival. ⁓ but ⁓ I've actually published with Margaret Scutch, she's out of a university there in in Mexico, where we looked across the globe.

And ⁓ the COVID-19 mortality was associated with latitude in countries that had obesity rates over 50%. ⁓ and and and this type of work is not ⁓ is not unique. ⁓ Zechhauser at the Harvard Kennedy School did similar research on influenza and found that sunlight was strongly protective against getting influenza in that study. So ⁓ this this is something that we see over and over and over again. It's it's protective.

It's it's it's good from an epidemiological and public health standpoint, but we can point to specific diseases and cases where sunlight in abundance can actually be cured of.

Bob Fosbury (59:20)
I think what I learned from a lot of this, Dave, is that there are so many coincidences along this path to understanding the sunlight and the way biology works. And we've had a recent series at the Guy Foundation about ⁓ plants and the effect of the quantum biology of plants. And what we're realizing is that we're to the idea of a Goldilocks zone.

I for a planet as an astrobiologist, one would say, you know, the earth is in the Goldilocks zone. That is what they actually mean is there's liquid water, the coexistence of liquid and vapor on the planet Earth. But we're realizing now there's a whole series of Goldilocks zones to which life on Earth has adapted, but we haven't noticed sunlight. We're noticing now there seems to be this Goldilocks zone for the

evolved properties of Earth-born life in the biosphere. It's congruent with the properties of the Sun. We're also learning that if you change the magnetic field too much of the Earth, the Earth has a relatively weak magnetic field, but if you take that down to zero, the plants go crazy. They can't grow properly. They do all sorts of crazy things.

So there seems to be a Goldilocks zone for the magnetic field strength on the Earth, which is about, ⁓ you know, between 20 or so up to 50 microtesla, which sounds like a very low field. It is quite a low field. But if you take all that away, it does a lot of damage, it seems. So, you know, we're building up this ⁓ list of Goldilocks zones to which life has adapted. And I know that

know the space agencies are getting very worried about these long-term exposure of astronauts who are out of space going to the moon going to mars it looks at the moment to me as if it's going to be very very hard to do this because you cannot adapt to all of these goldilocks zones the light in a way is the easiest of all these things you can change the lighting on the spacecraft and give them incandescent bulbs and you're fine you know it costs almost nothing

You can't change the magnetic field and you can't change the gravity. Well, you can change the gravity. You can have a spinning spacecraft as you've seen in all the movies. So you can recreate the gravity in some ways. I think there's a whole list of these Godilocks zones now, which we should put together in a table and say, which ones of these can we actually change and make it possible for human spaceflight?

I'm not a great fan of human spaceflight, must say, but although I greatly admire the Hubble astronauts who went up all those times. But I think it's I watched a short lecture by or talk by Richard Feynman on YouTube the other day, and he argued that it was not physically possible to get people to Mars and back. Actually, I think he's right. I don't think they will get people to Mars and back. It's too hard to exist.

on a planet like Mars because our bodies are just not adapted enough to do that. And it's much more serious than people originally thought, know, Charles Verne and all the people who thought you could just put a helmet on and go into space. It's much more complicated than that. And the space agencies are now very worried because many of these things are very hard to control. And the magnetic field is one which...

And there's some evidence, I don't think it's very well established, but when the magnetic poles on the Earth flipped from one to the other, which has happened a number of times in the history of the Earth, the magnetic field eventually actually had to go through zero on the way. And there's some evidence that this coincides with mass extinctions on the Earth.

Dave Wallace (1:03:32)
I think you'd be pleased to know that there's a few people out there saying it's about to happen again.

Bob Fosbury (1:03:38)
Well, you know, think listening to these people who are doing studies on plants and animals in magnetic fields, it's extremely interesting. But the way it struck me was we have this now table of Goldilocks zones, all of which are critical, some of which we can adjust and others of which we can't. And it's going to be very hard in the future. But I'd like to emphasize what Glenn said about the diversity. think, you know, we're bringing

different fields of science into contact with one another and they all have different characteristics. And physics is very simple in some sense because you can design very focused experiments. You can do reductionist science in physics very easily. You build an experiment and you have one variable and you look at what's going on. Biology is not like that at all.

And so when you bring these two sciences together, you get this incredible mismatch between the complexity, the intrinsic complexity of biology and the intrinsic simplicity. use the simplicity in a special term here, but you know, the reductionist simplicity of physics. And curiously enough, I never class myself as an astrobiologist because I retired too early for that. But I do have one paper in the Journal of Astrobiology.

Astrobiology has advanced enormously fast because astronomers, although they're physicists, astrophysicists, they can't do reductionist science because you can't, you look at a galaxy and it's a mixture of all the physics you've ever thought of and you can't tease it apart. So you've got to look at it all at once. So the ways in which these sciences come together is very interesting. The pure science is hard to mix.

They're really siloed. The mixed sciences, they're finding a way in. I think the astrobiology is very interesting. And I think the future in impactful science is going to be in bringing physics into biology or vice versa and allowing people to really start understanding what's going on inside biology.

using physics methods of physics ⁓ with the complexity of biology. This is going to be where the big advances happen. And in a small way, this is what we're actually doing, I think, in this study.

Dave Wallace (1:06:17)
It's a very nice byproduct of what you're doing in terms of research. I think I really interested in that point of the kind of Goldilocks sort of zone. I mean, it sort of just describes the intricacies of life and all of these interconnected bits and pieces that maybe we haven't thought about at all. And now, although, you know, they have been thought about, kind of not.

pulled together into some overarching principle or theory. I think it's, we just need more of that. you know, it's the sort of quantum biology stuff, I think is really interesting in terms of how that sort of playing out. So, you know, I think this is a great time. I mean, it's a great time to be looking at kind of what's going on from a scientific perspective.

Scott Zimmerman (1:07:14)
You know, one could I put in one quick thing? Yeah. One of the things that I think that's underestimated in this whole thing is Roger showed some all cause mortality rates as a function of seasonality. And it is absolutely amazing to me that it isn't taught in every hospital in the world or a school in the world. We because we we don't take into account that sunlight is much more than just sunlight.

It also creates different environments we're in. If you look at what happens during the day, there is an increase in the amount of hydrogen peroxide and ozone in the atmosphere that occurs, you know, a daily basis generated by sunlight. And those levels are sufficient. We did some models way back in COVID showing that yes, sunlight does attenuate the or does deactivate ⁓ the COVID.

But even more, the f the literally the movement of the particle through the atmosphere containing the ROS or the hydrogen peroxide in general was sufficient, was the faster approach to actually preventing the transfer of disease from one person to another. So I mean, when we say that there's more need to bring in more silos, you know, the fresh air that goes into hospitals needs to actually be sunlight driven fresh air.

not just re filtered fresh air. We tend to always think that the best solution is to take something away rather than actually putting allowing it the nature to do what it's designed to do and use it all. And that's where I think that that there's a lot of cross fertilization that could go on that we haven't gotten to yet. So

Dave Wallace (1:09:06)
I mean, it sounds like just based on that, we need to, ⁓ you need to get this paper out and the thinking out before they start spraying aerosols into the air above the UK to stop global warming happening, because it sounds like that might be problematic. ⁓

Bob Fosbury (1:09:24)
Ha ha!

Dave Wallace (1:09:26)
So I was kind of keen, we've gone on for a long time. just sort of thought I'd leave it to you all just to kind of give any last thoughts around this. ⁓ When will the paper be published? you think ⁓ when will people be able to get access to it? And I guess any thoughts that you've got in terms of

where next as well. what's the sort of research that you'd like to do on the back of this? ⁓ So yeah, just any last thoughts would be fantastic.

Maybe Bob if we start with you.

Bob Fosbury (1:10:07)
I'm going to start my retirement at some time. ⁓

Glen Jeffery (1:10:14)
Not if I can help it.

Bob Fosbury (1:10:16)
Go back to looking at my spectroscopy of gemstones and leaves. No, I think...

know, one of the things I've learned in my relatively long scientific life is we have to look around us. We have to be aware of what's going on. We have to look at our environment. We can't just sit in a room and think about it. We have to look and examine things. I, you know, the amazing properties of vegetation and the beneficial effects of vegetation on

the way we're lit and the way we metabolize, I think is amazing. I think the last point I'd like to make is just to bring together the idea of photosynthesis, which we've known about for 250 years. We only started understanding in the middle of the last century when, basically when physicists started producing radioactive isotopes that could be used to figure out, you know, where the oxygen came from and so on in photosynthesis and then all the high

high-speed laser studies to figure out how efficiently you could get energy into the photosynthetic ⁓ systems. So photosynthesis is now, I'd say, relatively well understood. It's very complicated and it's not understood in intimate detail, I don't think, yet, but it has been understood for quite a long time. What we're talking about with the metabolism,

is such a close partner to photosynthesis. It's a less flashy, somewhat quieter partner to photosynthesis. But of course, in a way, it's doing the inverse of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is making the food, we're eating the food, and then we're metabolising it. So in metabolising the food, we're a partner in photosynthesis. We're working back the other way towards a

an energy which actually can be used by living things. We can't actually use carbohydrates directly for doing anything. We have to metabolize it into ATP in order for ourselves to use it and so on. So we have this partnership between what we now call photometabolism. I mean, there is a word called photometabolism. It's not closely defined in the dictionary. We're kind of pinching that and using that as a ⁓ name for

mechanism that we're talking about, whether this mechanism turns out to be exactly right or even exactly wrong, in a way doesn't matter. But I think we've clearly established that there is some process which uses light to improve metabolism and they're partners. ⁓ at the moment, photometabolism is invisible. Photosynthesis is very well known, it's in all the textbooks, photometabolism is invisible, but hopefully it will become

visible and recognised as a natural partner of photosynthesis, which works on the same global process.

Dave Wallace (1:13:27)
Fantastic. Glenn.

Glen Jeffery (1:13:30)
I think I want to back up Bob here because I think that the interdependence of different life forms under sunlight is just incredibly interesting. You know, and and certainly we're turning over some of our research and outer plants. You know, my outer office is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon at the moment, which is really going to annoy members of my my administration. So I think that interdependence of different forms of life of i and their relationship with sunlight is critical. But I want to

Also go back to something else, which is about the four of us. It's getting the right people in the room. But that you very rarely find a thinker who crosses barriers. And we talked about Feynman and that fantastic little video that he did about why we can't get to Mars. His mind flowed over different problems. He wasn't restricted necessarily just to physics. We need the right people in the room that bring different conversations. Very few people are.

like that. I mean the UK we've got a few people like ⁓ Jim Al Khalili who's a physicist who's prepared to think about lots of different things. When I was an undergraduate there was an art science scheme where art students had to do a bit of science and science students had to do a bit of arts and it was great. The British education system is a nightmare because it specialises you really from sixteen years onwards. We need to have the right people in the room not to bring in a solution but the key thing

is to ask the right question. Everything is about asking the right question. I can't ask the right question yet about plants, but I'm trying very hard at it. So breaking down silos, asking the right question and getting the right people in the room.

Dave Wallace (1:15:18)
Amazing. Roger.

Roger Seheult (1:15:21)
Yeah, it's just I ⁓ I'm just so blessed to be in the in the room with these with these great thinkers. ⁓ look, what we're talking about here, I I can appreciate. I I was a chemistry and biology major in college, and so I appreciate the science of this. But I think what makes this so important is that this is not just science that's a pu that's a pure science. There's a heavily ⁓ aspect to this that is applied, and that is

It is it is the most it's the most ambitious type of science. It's the type of science that actually changes lives. So we can we can talk about molecules and we can talk about physics and waves. And we've we've got the whole spectrum here, literally. We've got Bob, who is the the expert on on outer space, on the atmosphere and and the light that comes in. We have Glenn, who is just absolute ⁓ pathfinder on all of the physiology.

I don't know where we would be without the the the work that Glenn has done in his lab in the last five years. ⁓ and then and then Scott, just the the aspect of the physics of light and light engineering. ⁓ it's it's like you've got you've got a a panel, a cabinet of experts. And all of this is leading to all of us looking outside of our silos. ⁓ Bob has been looking outside of his silo, Glenn has been looking outside of his silo.

I can tell you that at least when I was when I was growing up and looking to go into graduate school, and it's still to at least in the United States to a degree today, there's a big push to get science translated into medicine. So they're actually were pushing when I was applying to medical school MD PhDs. We wanted MDs who were into research who could understand

the translational approach of this of this medical research into actual human beings. And I think that's what we're seeing here is we're seeing the physics, the biology. You know, I I remember going through medical school and and people around me were like, why do we have to learn all this stuff in in college? Why do we have to learn about physics? How is it going to ever help me in medicine in the future? And and it's so funny that we're actually seeing potentially how that actually figures into all of this. We're seeing

How light is so important, how the physics of the pure sciences is so actually important in in human life. So that's one aspect. The other aspect that I'll end in is this is that I think one of the biggest enemies of what we're doing here is the idea of of of medical reductionism or medical reductionistic thinking, which ⁓ is simply the idea that ⁓ if you find something that works, that if you can isolate it down to its components.

And and see what it is that works, that's doing what it is, then you can somehow magnify that and ⁓ package it, patent it, and make a lot of money at it and make a therapeutic. I I think the underlying ⁓ understanding of that is flawed. ⁓ I look to things that are packaged in nature as being that way, as being the best way that it can be packaged. And that as we start to pull apart things and try to put them into their individual parts.

That's when we're actually losing the benefits of these things. So a sort of a gestalt type of biology where the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts. And that's what I see in the solar spectrum. I see that every single one of those wavelengths has a a purpose, has an impact in the human body, and that they work together to have the maximum impact. And what we've done in in society because of pressures of energy, independence and things of that nature.

is we've we've taken those things out. And when we do things like that, that's always going to lead to suboptimal activity. And and that's not ideal. So and all that to say is that I'm so glad to be working with these individuals and ⁓ I I see a lot of great things in the future.

Dave Wallace (1:19:26)
Fantastic and Scott, finally to you.

Bob Fosbury (1:19:30)
You

Scott Zimmerman (1:19:31)
Well, start off, all this is really being driven been driven in a great extent by Roger from the fact that he is one of the best I've ever seen, being able to translate a complex issue into terms that people can say and do the science as well. You know, we look at any of his event grams. So all of us really do always appreciate the fact that Roger has this innate ability and he I don't know when he sleeps.

I have no clue, but you know, he gets does everything under the sun. But under the

Bob Fosbury (1:20:05)
My wife pointed this out. She said, why don't you contact Roger?

Roger Seheult (1:20:13)
Bless your wife, Bob. Bless your wife.

Scott Zimmerman (1:20:16)
Yeah. But but I think the the biggest point I'd like to make is is that ⁓ as Roger stated, every one of the wavelengths in sunlight are capable of generating some level of work. And what we're finding is it's not nature that's being limited. We are limited because we can't you can't measure this, you can't measure that, don't have a light source that does this, things like that. Yet nature is simultaneously doing all these things

under the assumption that it is exposed to the complete solar spectrum. If you don't provide that, it's going to be suboptimal and in some cases harmful. Now, you know, we can debate until we're blue in the face, you know, which is the the how bad it is, but what we're seeing now and you know the advent of biosensor, this is a biosensor that measures metal melatonin and cortisol simultaneously.

We see that there's all kinds of stuff going on that we have no clue what it is and beyond our capability. But we do know that there is this problem and I think it is the lighting industry's irresponsibility to actually prove that what they're providing to the consumer is something that's safe because it doesn't look like it is. And how bad is it? I don't know. But at least, you know

I was there when they switched over to incandes from incandescent into LEDs. There was no study to see what the biological effect was. Never was. Well, we changed it, and now some way, some reason, this has now become the baseline because the government mandated it. When baseline should be sunlight. And you you if you look at it from that perspective, what we did made no sense whatsoever. Sorry, that's my my soapbox.

Dave Wallace (1:22:12)
I know that's fantastic. Well, thank you. mean, I just like to add that, you know, we're lucky as well, because all of you are brilliant at explaining what is going on. And I think, you know, this is this is a really important issue that, you know, we we sort of the Shadowmap team, myself, Gail, we're really keen to kind of support in terms of getting the message out there.

because this could be something fundamental to public health going forward. I think having you all from your different perspectives, but coming as one sort of voice around all of this, I think we're really lucky to have that. So thank you all, because I know this must be a labor of love for you all and must take a lot of time.

as well as all the other things that you're doing in your lives as well. So a massive thank you from all of us.

Bob Fosbury (1:23:21)
Thank you.

Roger Seheult (1:23:22)
Thank you so much.

Dave Wallace (1:23:24)
And happy anniversary! Roger!

Roger Seheult (1:23:28)
Thank you so much. Twenty six.

Dave Wallace (1:23:33)
26? 26. I can't even, I think.

Roger Seheult (1:23:36)
it's easy to remember it 'cause we got married in two thousand, so it's just

Dave Wallace (1:23:40)
Okay, I'm 28 then. That's how I'm going to remember it. was two years before Roger got married.

Glen Jeffery (1:23:50)
Ha ha ha.

Bob Fosbury (1:23:51)
I can beat you by a big margin.

Dave Wallace (1:23:55)
Well, listen, thank you. Thank you.

Dave Wallace (1:23:58)
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