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John Ott, light pioneer
Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1988 by Ramon Sender Barayon
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PHOTOBIOLOGY, THE STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT ON living things, is relatively new as a formal field of scientific inquiry. Only over the past ten years has it become acceptable to question the quality of artificial light we live by and to look more closely at how the human organism responds to sunlight. Recent articles in the popular press attest to exciting discoveries, for example the January 14, 1988 New Yorker, which reported a conference titled "The Medical and Biological Effects of Light." Curiously, the article never once mentioned John Ash Ott, who deserves much of the credit for awakening interest in this subject.
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During his career as a banker in Chicago, John Ott developed his hobby of time-lapse photography into a successful sideline. We have all seen his blossoming flowers in such Walt Disney films as Nature's Half Acre. It was while filming plants under various lighting conditions that Ott noticed how their reactions varied. A reprint of an article from Smithsonian Magazine in the September 22, 1987 San Francisco Chronicle's "This World" section described how Ott went on to study the responses of both flora and fauna to specific wavelengths. Filming through a microscope, he found that the pigment granules in both animal cells and chloroplasts exhibited behavior patterns to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Quoting from the article, by jack Fincher:
"Ott went looking for examples of humans whose health and well-being appeared directly affected by light, and he believed he found them. In one, a laboratory where contact lenses were made, the employees were remarkably free of flu. The lab had plastic windows which admitted ultraviolet light. This is screened out by ordinary glass; that is why you cannot get a suntan inside.
"Another was a seafood restaurant in a hotel. The restaurant had black light (ultraviolet) decor The health record of the restaurant employees was so outstanding that management could not believe it, especially when they compared the record with those of employees in other departments of the hotel.
"Ott concluded that by deliberately screening out supposedly harmful traces of atmospheric ultraviolet with tinted windows, sunglasses, suntan lotions and the like, we may be making ourselves more vulnerable to "malillumination" than we ever were to malnutrition caused by lack of trace minerals in our diets."
Ott's book Health and Light, first published in 1973 and now available in an updated Pocket Book edition, describes many of his early experiences and discoveries. One personal anecdote: Ott himselfwas suffering from severe arthritis of the hip which doctors said would ultimately require a plastic replacement. Although in the habit of wearing sunglasses because his eyes were sensitive to glare, on this particular day he had broken his best pair and went out without them. He was doing some chores with the aid of his cane when suddenly he didn't seem to need it. His hip had not felt so well in years, and he began walking up and down the driveway without his cane to test it.
Sensing that his improvement was related to the effect of unfiltered sunlight on his eyes, he made it a point to expose himself as little as possible to filtered sun. On a subsequent trip to Florida he gradually strengthened his eyes to the point where their sensitivity to glare was reduced. The results were so beneficial that within a week he was playing several rounds of golf and walking on the beach without a cane. Quoting from Ott:
"Theories may be interesting to think about . . . but this was affecting my own arthritis, a much more personal matter Maybe I was one of the lucky people who get better for no reason at all, but I felt strongly that there was a reason. I had taken off my glasses and let the full unfiltered natural sunlight into my eyes and had also made a point of being outdoors six hours or more a day whether it was sunny or cloudy. To me the results were convincing enough: that light received through the eyes must stimulate the pituitary or some other gland such as the pineal, about which not much was known."
At the time he wrote these words, the pineal gland was still described in textbooks as a vestigial remnant of our reptile ancestry. For example, in lizards and frogs, the "parietal eye," as the pineal was named, functioned as a register of solar radiation. Located just under the skin, it still contained a miniature cornea, lens and retina. Going up the evolutionary ladder, the pineal in birds was no longer a sensory organ but a gland.
In the mid-sixties, Dr Richard J. Wurtman of M.I.T.'s Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology discovered that the growth of the reproductive glands in some mammals was regulated by a pineal hormone named melatonin. Furthermore, the release of melatonin was controlled by neural linkages between the eyes and the gland itself. In a July 1975 scientific American article, Dr Wurtman delineated some segments of the specific pathway by which light stimulated the ovary of a rat. I quote:
