Here Comes The Sun: Sunshine and its Effects on Health, Sleep and Memory - Professor Steve Jones

so we are gonna get my back together here okay here we have it here comes the Sun not much sign of it today as you can see and that's what I'm going to be talking about the effect about about sunshine and why it's important you know whatever weather it's good for is bad for us neutral for us and what he was it basically what it's all about okay and of course the title comes from George Harrison song here comes the Sun which he he himself says in his writings he wrote it because he was feeling very depressed at the end of the winter and so you know if anybody's got a tune going through their minds at the moment it's time to write it down okay well so that there is a science of sunlight and the science in many ways the science of sunlight in fact in some ways the whole of biology is the science of sunlight because without something we wouldn't have life on earth and I'm interested in that because I'm concerned with a flow of energy through ecological systems but I'm not going to talk about that instead I'm gonna talk about I suppose you might call the science that there's something here comes the Sun the Sun newspaper that is and the Sun newspaper has worked out the most depressing day of the year using this rather baffling formula which I can't I can't make make any sense of whatever I try but anyway they put it to the sun's computers or at least their hand calculator and they work out that the most impressive day of the year his Jan was this year it was January the 15th was which was a week last Monday okay and that's based on how depressed you feel because you haven't kept you all resolutions how much you are in debt a little sunlight there is and so we've got a good solid day to feel really depressed so that's certainly true and they call it Blue Monday however this is the Met Office projection for today and I think it's bloody worse isn't it so it's it's deep blue Monday today but there is hope there is hope because at the other end of the planet if we go to the Daily Mail [Music] this is the Daily Mail's headline a couple of days ago in Sydney gets set for a scorcher record heat wave with temperatures soaring to 43 so how hot is it going to be near you and you can look it up on The Daily Mail's website and the answer is hot ok 43 is hot I've been in Sydney when it's been 43 and it's really quite oppressive but so the question is is that a good thing or a bad thing we like to think of course that having extremely hot weather in that we don't experience it very very much is generally speaking a good thing however the culture in in Sydney and indeed in many parts of the tropical world is exactly the opposite they're concerned about hot weather on the grounds of health particularly they're concerned about the effects of ultraviolet light on skin cancer which is certainly true and this is Sid the seagull okay and Sid the seagull says slip on a shirt slip on some sunscreen and slap on a hat right and in fact there have been cases in in Australia of children who have shortage of vitamins in their blood because they do that so often that they don't get any town at all if you put factor 20 all over yourself you're not going to get any sunlight into your skin now the reason of course that they're concerned about that has to do with skin cancer and it's certainly the case it's certainly the case that there is a fit between ultraviolet light and skin cancer and you see that in many ways one of the most telling bits of information perhaps is that if you live in a hot country and you drive around you tend to remember it well hang your arm out of the window when you're driving okay and because in Australia they drive on the left so they have right endroit cars and they stick their right arm out of the window and in America they drive on the right the left half of the window there is a highly significant difference in the incidence of skin cancers one left arms and right arms in Australia and the United States ok shows the inferential method in scientific discovery and it's certainly true it's certainly true and in fact all this fuss about skin cancer in Australia isn't doing all that much good here's the incidence of melanoma melanoma that's the dangerous skin cancer which can't certainly kill it's not particularly common but it can certainly kill and in spite of all the in spite of all the propaganda and all the information everybody in Australia knows about this the incidence is still going up okay so it's a dangerous it's a it's certainly a dangerous disease but you notice in Australia which is really quite a bit quite a populous country several tens of millions of people you'll see that the deaths per year are around 1,000 1,500 which is bad news if you're in Dorset istic s-- but is a rather low death rate and you'll see on the right this is a non malignant cancers which don't go who don't know get married they're simply related to well this effect of sunlight on skin cancer was in fact discovered in the 1930s by a huge survey done by the United States Navy and the United States Navy was current as a concerned about the health of its of its sailors in relation to the general population so they did this big of well-planned survey of life and death and disease incidence in the Navy personnel and they found indeed that there was an increase in skin cancer among sailors compared to people who worked on land and sailors of course generally much more exposed to the Sun than people who work in offices and so on on land and that became very well-established and is true denied okay however what was also established by that discovery was in fact that if you looked at other cancers in the United States sailors they had fewer cancers than average and that's was that's been forgotten don't be forgotten but certainly and it hasn't it hasn't reached the public the public mind so what's the public know about ultraviolet light is that it's bad for you and if you look at what the experts say Cancer Research UK said how the Sun and UV cause cancer also for the American Cancer Society writes about UV radiation the dangers of skin cancer skin cancer facts skin cancer oh okay that's all right and what they're basically telling us is that sunlight is dangerous while sunlight is dangerous in some ways but what they should be telling us they should on balance it's really good for you okay and where you get the student and this the story really comes to to a peak in when you look at the health and the weather in Scotland and I have to say that you soft southerners don't know how lucky you are I spent 10 years in Edinburgh I'll take it from me it's a wonderful place apart from the weather all right I sometimes used to say that part from the weather and the Scots but I stopped saying like I could say the weather or the Scottish nationalists maybe and so and it is a wonderful place apart from the weather billy connolly put it very well he said there are two seasons in Scotland June and winter and he and he was right okay well in fact somebody died long before somebody who died long ago even more well known and Billy Carney wrote about that and this is RLC Wilson and he wrote a piece about the weather in Edinburgh the weather is draw and boisterous in winter shifty and on genial in summer and a downright messy illogical purgatory in the spring happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh and have heard for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney tops and that brings back memories I can tell you know I can hear the cry of the east wind now and of course he left it he left out when he was a fairly young man and he moved first to California and then to Samoa where he died or she will kill OSIS okay and that will come back to that tuberculosis question a little bit later in the talk and Edinburgh has really quite a unique Edinburgh Scotland in general has really quite a unique set of climatic challenges for example Edinburgh this isn't a typical Edinburgh summer's day this is what we call the har har and when I first went there 962 a long time ago I kept waiting for spring to arrive and the only thing that happened a spring didn't arrive was that the days got longer and then after a while they started getting shorter again and that's because that's because it was no real change in temperature that's because very often Edinburgh you have this sea mist that comes in off the North Sea and condenses and gives you this often a day long or more than day long or thick thought thick fog which keeps the Sun out but Hembrough has also a very unique position because there are very few places in the world which have large populations as far north as that these are places with more than 25,000 people at the latitude of Scotland or higher and you will see Admiral as go there there are a few places stockholm for example more Manske but very few and in fact only about 2% of the world's population lives north of Edinburgh and Glasgow and in fact only about 1% of the world's population lives north of the Shetland Isles so you know they're really fairly unique in their position it's also the case that Edinburgh and Glasgow more than Edinburgh has has the joys of the Gulf Stream which brings in even more cloud okay well Edinburgh position means that it gets less sunshine because when the Sun comes in to a northern part of the world or a southern part of the world then it has to pass through more of the atmosphere so it's attenuated more as it comes through the Sun is never directly above you that far north but it is of course it is directly above in the in the equation and there's a us if you look at Europe you will see the effect again is very strong there's a member France I have as it happens I spent three months a year here and I'm going down in a couple of weeks it will be simply will be still be pretty cold on there so they're pretty exceptional places you can see it even on the scale of Britain okay this is the amount of ultraviolet that gets through the through the atmosphere in Edinburgh over the year in London over the year and in in Bordeaux over the year and they're really quite striking differences even on the scale of Britain you have a striking difference in the number of hours of bright sunshine from place to place now that's an interesting figure an interesting picture in scotland and northern scotland you have fewer than 1600 hours of bright sunshine most years in in southern South so it's fewer than 900 hours of bright sunshine in most years in southern England you have almost twice that and in southern Europe you have well over twice that okay now if you look if you fix that diagram in your mind and look at the next one these are male life expectancy at birth in in England Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland and you'll see a fairly striking fit I think but it with the number of hours of bright sunshine okay and that's been known for a long time now Scotland in fact has a famously low life expectancy particularly Western Scotland this blob is known as Glasgow all right and Glasgow has a uniquely low life expectancy both in Britain and indeed in most of in most of Europe okay but it's call that as a whole doesn't do all that well this is the male life expectancy at birth in different places on the left you see a place called Colton okay where life expectancy is but only on the average you're only about fifty four years and Colton is is in inner Glasgow and we'll go through we'll see we go to India Colton life expectancy on the average is lower than that of India man big all the way through to the average in UK for men 77 and then we've got to go to the right and there's a place called Lindsay and Lindsay is an outer Glasgow suburb five miles of Carlton Britain and Somalia have a 28 year difference in male life expectancy Lindsay and Carlton have a 28 year difference in life expectancy so over five months we've got 28 year difference in life expectancy now this has always historically been thought and they no doubt no doubt some subtracted this in Lindsay which is tremendously deprived people have a very poor diet there's quite a lot of violence huge amounts of heavy drinking very poor housing now this certainly plays a part there's no question but I think the answer that you ought to understand it understand it needs a lot more than those rather obvious threats to health Scotland is the sick man of Europe and is becoming increasingly so this is male life expectancy I'm sorry this is average male and female life expectancy from the 1950 to 2010 Scotland is the is is the red line and you'll see that Scotland has consistently been lagging behind there's the rest of Europe and is now has the lowest life expectancy in in Europe and in fact situation and it's rapidly been overtaken by being overtaken by Eastern Europe places like Romania Bulgaria and the like at the present rate they will overtake Scotland within the next three or four years and then life expectancy so the situation is not getting better it's actually getting worse here we have a life expectancy for at the age of 85 so it's elderly people in Scotland and you'll see that it's strangely enough about the time of the election in 2010 by remarkable coincidence the increase the the improvement in life expectancy in in elderly Scots came to acclaim complete stop as indeed it has throughout England England Wales and Scotland but it's actually got much it's got considerably worse the gap has got bigger from 2010 to 2015 so things are not looking particularly good and I remember I went to a conference a few weeks ago in and we're about inflammatory bowel disease not something I know anything about the apparently I had to talk about it and the Glasgow doctor quoted some differences he'd noticed in the attitude towards mortality in in different parts of the world he says well he said well he said in San Francisco death is avoidable in London death is inevitable I think Glasgow death is imminent he said that we're real relish is a Glasgow doctor and as you can see from those figures that's certainly true and if you look at the some of the petit causes of death Scotland is worse than England ms cancer heart disease rickets infectious disease birth defects depression suicide and more and the effects aren't small the effects are really quite big for example if you look at the suicide rates in Scotland and England let's look at men who are more likely to commit suicide you will see that the that the Scottish rate the pale blue line is almost twice the English rate okay whoops whoops whoops I see a slight there what happened there okay all right and the same is true for things like heart disease so the effects are big so one needs to ask why is that well we have a fairly very fairly it is it has to do with vitamin deficiency it has to do in particular with vitamin D deficiency and I'll talk at some length about that in a moment but vitamin D isn't really a vitamin at all vitamin D is in fact a hormone it's made in the skin made in large amounts in the skin when sunlight strikes a relative of cholesterol and it makes a precursor which then moves to the kidneys and the liver and is to the stuff vitamin D okay and you could get it from your food you can get it from fresh fish yeah you can get it from a pill if you want to you get it from from from fortified foods which we don't have many of in Britain they do in the United States but overwhelmingly you get it from sunlight if you expose your whole body for 20 minutes to bright sunlight you'll get 10,000 units of vitamin D which would involve eating about about 25 helpings of fresh salmon which you probably wouldn't particularly succeed in holding down I don't think so son so sunlight is an extraordinarily powerful source of vitamin D so we need to ask what are the patterns of sunlight across the world or what are the patterns of vitamin D presence and what if anything do these do to human health well this is a map that shows the ability of white people to synthesize vitamin D in different parts of the world in relation to latitude and you'll see in the yellow zone which basically is the tropics or a bit outside the tropics people can synthesize vitamin D all year round okay in the pale yellows own you can there's at least one month a year not more than one month a year where you cannot synthesize vitamin D fair enough and if you draw a line through Birmingham and many people that wish to draw a line through bone [Music] north of that line you can never synthesize enough enough vitamin D to stay healthy okay the the amount that the the the the black marks are just population density so the people who live north of Birmingham let alone north of Glasgow can find it it would find that extremely difficult or impossible to to synthesize enough vitamin D to to stay healthy now you can see that as we move down through Europe this is the amount of ultraviolet light you have and whether you could whether you can or cannot make vitamin D you'll see on the left there which is the arm the sky any any month which is dark blue or pale blue you can't make vitamin D in the sky and Edinborough you can't make vitamin D for something like eight months of the year and she goes out to to London that you gain you gain something from that but as you go further south to Marrakech things change completely so the effect is really quite big this is the patterns of vitamin D deficiency in different parts of Britain at different seasons of the year and of course in the winter there's almost no sunlight and you'll see if you the the the the proportion deficient is shown by the colors from pale brown of the left with very few deficient to dark green at the right with very many are deficient and you'll see consistently that Scotland has lower levels of vitamin D on average than the rest of the UK no doubt largely because of the weather okay so we need we need to take that on board so what I mean D levels are low in Scotland and have been for a long time now you notice I said I was talking about white people making vitamin D because people with dark skins either of Asian origin or Africa or of African origin are much less able to make vitamin D than people with light skins for obvious reasons they have melanin pigment in their skin which keeps the ultraviolet light out and indeed it is very much the case that some light related diseases are much more common in Britain for example among people who afro-caribbean origin or among people indian-origin than people of European origin so this is what - why did this happen well in fact the light skins of Europeans evolved in response to a shortage of sunlight because as we moved out of Africa something like 80 thousand years ago and began to move across Europe quite recently the move across Europe really didn't get to Western Europe in any numbers until about five or six thousand years ago we began individuals who had relatively light skin as they moved into the cloudy horrors of the North tended to survive rather better than individuals with dark skin so they reproduce more effectively and so the light skinned jeans became more common and this is rather a baffling story but I'll show it to you because it's a remarkable finding this is human fossil DNA and you can now of course get fossil DNA not just out of recent humans is that these are five thousand years old from the Ukraine and these are genes which tend to make your skin lighter and what we've got we won't bother with the boring names of them but five thousand years ago in in you know we can see if we look in Africa today none of these genes are present they're not only not only skin lightening variants present in African populations if we look in the modern Ukraine there are 65 percent of Ukrainians and nowadays have the light version of the first one ninety two percent of the second one and a thirty six percent of the third one but if we look at Ukraine 5,000 years ago we'll see that let's take for example the one that the third one ninety two percent now only half that less than half that five thousand years ago for the first one sixty five percent now so and only one in six five thousand years ago so the five thousand years ago people in the Ukraine were actually relatively dark-skinned they weren't as they weren't as as dark-skinned as Africans but there were certainly much darker skin than they are today and so this has happened very very quickly indeed in evolutionary terms well the Scots I have to say are the palest people in Britain okay in Europe rather here we see a typical Scott on a wonderful on a wonderful sunny Scottish day he's obviously feeling a bit overheated here you can see and he would notice that he has got he has got a very very pale skin there's one particular variant which is at the highest frequency higher frequency in Scotland and the West of Ireland than anywhere else in the world which is red hair this is the frequency of the variance which takes changes the melody in your hair to be a different form of melanin and takes dark pigment out of your out of your skin altogether and the incidence of red hair is very very high in Scotland very high and I'll Island up fairly high in Wales - in most of the world it's unknown okay well here's an interesting gene because it makes you very pale skinned and it clearly evolved to allow you to soak up more ultraviolet even though you pay a price in terms of sunburn and skin cancer but it comes in from an unusual place it actually comes in from the Neanderthals I'm sure you most of you know that actually in about five years ago it was discovered that quite a lot of the European genome DNA is actually comes from hybridization with our extinct ancestors than the under tails who once filled the whole of Europe and the Europe was then much much colder they were talking ice ages here but Europe is much colder than it is today and if you look at the your the this gene it this this is one particular chromosome but you can see patches of red and there the Neanderthal genes are sections of DNA along that chromosome they're not no neanderthal stuff found in East Asia no Neanderthal first off found in Africa and it transpires that the red-haired gene is on Neanderthal piece of DNA so that red haired people are more Neanderthal than average I say nothing about the Scots in this context and here we have ginger the Neanderthal looking hairy and no doubt the reason that gene was favored both within the Neanderthals themselves and indeed when they'd have it as a modern humans was indeed its in a very very cloudy and unpleasant kind of climate so that's the that's the evolved variation in relation to variation in sunshine so as I say vitamin D is a is a hormone it's a hormone which is made best of all and bright sunlight on naked skin and take it from me both those commodities are rare in hitting bruh no so that's what happens if you don't have enough vitamin D well as you probably know you get rickets and rickets was once universally known as the English disease it was described in the 17th century by an English medical student our names doctor who submitted a PhD at the University of Leyden the PhD was five pages long oh my god as I say about modern PhDs well we don't read him but we sure as hell weigh them but his 35 pages were long but he gave a very precise description of rickets and he said that the people here call it the English disease and it was the English disease and the Scottish disease because it was much much rarer in southern Europe and rickets is a very nasty disease which was very common remarkably recently okay and the oldest case that we know of rickets is here it's strangely enough but not by coincidence it's in Ascot a Scottish woman whose bones were found on the island of Tyree in the West of Scotland and she had a severe case of rickets and there are certain is due to a very poor diet and the one of the strange things about a lot of Ireland people in Scotland historically indeed elsewhere is that they don't fish if you eat lots of lots of oily fish and you aren't going to be okay but it seems to be widespread that when farmers get to island communities making an island community they farm they don't fish and so she had a very poor intake from from her gaius and of course it was northern cold and so she got rickets and without question died of it that was true of many other groups at that page - so the attack on Ricketts began just after the Second World War okay we in the 1930s Ricketts was common because Ramos universal among children in inner London I mean I now live in Camden and I now live in Camden Town next door as I always say that is true next door to Amy Winehouse she lived and and Camden was there a slum even more of a slum than it is now or it really was a real slum and it was because Camden Town was close to the railway there was thick smoke and fog everywhere even worse than that was Finn's burying that under Meru Finsbury now full of yuppies and food shops and expensive restaurants but in Finsbury in the 1930s more than half the population lived more than two to aruch so the people were sharing rooms all the time so it was tremendously overcrowded and tremendously put and so at least a third of children showed signs of rickets well in the 1940s the war of course the war had started in 1939 and in 1940 to 1942 British British morale really had fallen to a low point a secret government survey felt the people people felt we were losing we might be better off surrendering Singapore had fallen Leningrad was under siege and in North Africa the British were in retreat to combat his kind of defeatism that the the government decided to commission a series of posters affect the five of them which showed handsome houses the beautiful countryside cathedrals new schools and that kind of stuff and a motto you all Britain fight for it now I said there were four said they were fine you only see four here and the reason you only see four is this one was censored by Winston Churchill this is the Finsbury Health Centre which is worth saying it's the most acute aful building modernist architecture which is in Luton Longaberger used to be the London borough of Finsbury behind the Town Hall and it sure was this beautiful Health Centre just opened 1938 it open by the Russian Arthur Q architect lubricant and behind it is a piece of filthy urban waste with a clearly Rickett inflicted child bent and suffering in there and the hope what he's making the point that by building these health centers this is worth fighting for Churchill was outraged this is a discredit this is a disgraceful libel on the conditions prevailing in Great Britain before the war he didn't believe there was any rickets because he threw probably every defensive in his life he'd probably never been outside Westminster in his life in London and but of course it was a huge problem so that was censored okay now of course 1945 there was a great upheaval and a new government was brought in I was actually in and the NHS was set up in 1947 okay and indeed the principal Health Centre is sometimes seen as the founding gesture of the NHS ironically enough five years ago the NHS tried to sell it off for luxury flats but there was a tremendous fuss and it was a beautiful building inside and it's also quite a remarkable beautiful thing outside they're also quite a remarkable building inside you can see the murals there the fresh air and Sun Room say get to live outdoors as much as you can get as much daylight as you can and which would be very difficult in Finsbury in the days of the smog and then there was a solarium where people could go and have ultraviolet treatment which would push up their vitamin D levels and it was a thing was a great effect and in fact I am i soft like if that's the word I experienced exactly that because I was born in 1944 and I got the full gamut of government based health advice and then I was forced much against my will to eat lots and lots of lots and lots of the cod liver oil my vivid memories of sitting in front okay there I am for it the funny thing is there that's exactly the way I dressed and I'm sure for many people of my age in this room that brings back memories shorts black black shoes and and your jumper okay and here we are taking our vitamin D I have vivid memories Freudian memories perhaps of sitting naked at the age of five with my young my female cousins being rather baffled of the at the what was on view and and soaking up lots and lots of vitamin D that was that was highly effective this is what happens if you have a child with vitamin D gave it half half half a dozen hours of ultraviolet and that the problem will be solved so it's powerful stuff and then of course there was the milk the mood by what was the name mrs. Thatcher and now forgotten politician and that too had vitamin D in it as well and it worked remarkably well and we know that vitamin that rickets was beat was beaten back in fact it was defined in 1954 as having been defeated in Britain and that was quite remarkable that it got out it was never really defeated but it certainly got down to very low levels from 30% of what it hadn't been in children in the 1930s so that wasn't it that was a triumph of socialist planning but that couldn't be allowed to go on and really was kind of given up when the new Conservative government came in and not much has been done whatever by governments of any of any color since then but we all know about vitamin D and rickets but it's become more and more clear that vitamin D is important in all kinds of other parts of the body as I said it's a hormone and if you look at the cells of any part of the body every single part of the body has got receptor cells on to which this hormone can actually latch but in the brain there in the heart that in the liver and the kidney there in the muscles there everyone okay and you can see these are just some of the conditions we know are associated with low levels of vitamin D this is just a kind of a general statement without figures but you can see the vitamin D it really all pervasive throughout the body and if you have shortened no levels of it perhaps because you get no sunlight then you have you're a danger in many many different ways and there was a Sun cure was already widespread and the Sun cure came from the belief that the Sun for reasons then unknown could cure tuberculosis and in fact there are of seamen who died of tuberculosis in the 19th century quite young 40 I think he was he took the Sun cure in California and said but it was too late for him the evidence that he cured tuberculosis was then rather weak but it was known had it cleaned it was discovered that he discovered it cured another infectious disease called lupus okay now lupus tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium that's called Michael back to Michael back to time to boogie low calm Sun and tuberculosis is once thought to be lots and lots of different diseases there were things called it was the Kings evil there was TB itself there was this thing lupus vulgaris which is but it's the same bacterium except it's attacking the skin okay and indeed in 1907 one of the very first Nobel prizes in Physiology or medicine was given to a to a scientist who discovered that ultraviolet lights would cure this just cure it it wouldn't just improve it it would cure it and in the beginning of the 20th century something like 2 or 3 percent of the population were afflicted with this really really ugly awful disease which often showed they had TB as well but teeth it keep this ultraviolet cure it it cures it because it kills bacteria ultraviolet is as you know if you sterilize one of the ways you sterilize them lamp bottles and the like and sterilized water when you drink it is to use ultraviolet light and it's very very powerful bacteria find it hard to withstand ultraviolet and so they die well what's gone however that disease is basically gone however there are other infectious conditions these are the incidence of various respiratory infections including flu and mainly viral infections at different times of year in people with different levels of vitamin D in the blood and that they don't the darker the level of the the shading in the histogram here the the lower level the lower the level of vitamin D they have and you will see a striking fit between vitamin D levels and the incidence of respiratory infections okay so that too was clearly fairly unexpected but it's certainly true it goes further than that here's cancer this is the incidence of of colorectal cancer in relation to your vitamin D that was very low at lower than 25 units very high at a more than a hundred units and there's a difference of about forty percent in that cancer true lots of other cancers one of the ways in which you can see that that's the case is not by measuring vitamin D no that's all that's actually quite easy to do but simply asking what is the incidence of particular conditions counsels included in different parts of the world in relation to the amount of sunlight that they get well here's the incidence of breast cancer in relation to latitude and you'll see that breast cancer Uganda Haiti Swaziland zombie in Mozambique very very low in the tropics the capitals the far north can Canada and Sweden and the far south New Zealand and Argentina okay so a really striking effect that's breast cancer here's that's that's breast cancer just shown incidence in relation to latitude but lazier near the equator Iceland near the poles difference in sunshine here's the male equivalent prostate cancer exactly the same pattern okay we can go further than cancer we talk about diabetes type one diabetes which is often thought of being a childhood disease but it's not adults sometimes it's quite often it comes on in adulthood get exactly the same thing if we look down in the tropics Barbados and so on Brazil Dominica Sudan almost none Sweden Aberdeen in the arcade Finland up at forty sod in Euro surprisingly very high but down Canterbury New Zealand the southern tip of Argentina exactly the same pattern again high sunlight low disease for a totally different disease which is beauty's multiple sclerosis the effect is absolutely striking here we have the incidence of multiple sclerosis across the world the the redder it is the more there is it sometimes describing Canada now as the Canadian disease because Canada has a highest rate of MS in the world Scotland has a 50% higher rate of multiple sclerosis than England does Tennison look at at Australia because Australia is kind of you know it's fairly sunny but what's what is interesting is of course nearly all Australians historically came from Western Europe mainly from Britain and you'll see when they moved to a sunny climate even though they've got genes that might predispose them to multiple sclerosis and there certainly are such genes the Sun saves them to some degree and they get much less MS than they do from people to their ancestor did in their native content continent but you can do more than that what you can do is you can what has been done and in Scandinavia in particular some very very large surveys have been carried out on ultraviolet in relation to health on cohorts of women women brought into this cohort they were brought into this court when they were 55 and they were followed for 15 years and asked when the 55 or older and fall over 15 years and asked about their about about their health and the hope was to investigate the effects of ultraviolet and skin cancer and they divided these women into three groups one group of which really liked sunlight I think what they took they took they had tanning salons in the winter they had holidays in the Murray in the Mediterranean during the summer they went outside a lot one light was kind of neutral they just didn't really bother very much one group was positively aunty sunlight they had desk jobs inside they lived in the far north they made no effort at all to get me some I think there was quite a striking difference in the Pens of of survival um the you can see that the proportion of people who died when they of in those who avoid the sun exposure was much higher than those who had lots of lots of sun explosion oops oops and the biggest effect that it affects both in cancer but on both in cardiovascular disease and in other diseases too so the effect is strong in fact the thing is remarkable is that the difference in death rates between high ultraviolet women and low ultraviolet women was greater than the difference in deaths rates of smokers and non-smokers so that's not a small that's not a small difference that's a big big difference okay so it's important to think then to you know be well aware of the importance of ultraviolet light and sunlight ultraviolet light and health so what's happening nowadays well I have to tell you things are not looking particularly good the incidence of vitamin D from 2,000 deficiency UK children has gone up in the past 15 years by by 15 times it still quite low but it's going up and going up fast and British children now those teenagers now go outside for an hour and a half day less a day than they did only ten years ago and that was of course ten years ago they didn't have their mobile phones now 70% of British tell 10 ages I've got a television in their room in their bedroom and so they just spend more and more time out inside so the proportion of Scottish children who don't go outside is even higher and across the world only the children are chilly go outside less than British children do so we stay in our vivid memories of my school days are being kicked out of little grammar school little pools left bank of the Whittle Peninsula even when it was icy we were kicked out for a good hour a day and we thought that was just to allow teachers to smoke their pipes when in fact it was behind it was exactly this feeling that you had to be out in the sunlight which is good for you so we've moved away from from sunlight we've moved away from eating oily fish so understandably the incidence of vitamin D deficiency is going up it's going up much more it's going up more quickly and in some groups than others particularly particularly in people of Asian and African origin which means in turn that the incidents in rickets rickets is going up I could only get a diagram for England I look at the red line which is the best set of data you see it's shooting up it was it was almost none in in the 1990 or so it's now going up and going up fast and it's going up even faster than this it's gone up a child this now so the effect is real so obviously there's a lot of interest in this and one of the interests is trying to find out how much sunlight people actually get I hope you excuse me for a moment if I talk about some of my own boring research I will leap over it that's why the book I hoped I felt was only half as good as that as a double helix by listening correctly but I hoped it would sell half as many copies but he didn't okay and that's the snail I work on for many years I want boy with why I worked on it now one of the reasons is that it's highly variable these are genetic variants and I was interested in the effects of the genetic variation or its behavior I wanted to know how much time is spent in sunshine because dark objects soak up more solar energy that alight objects do okay and I've spent more than that 20 years doing this and we tried to look at the way they behaved just by looking at them and all they ever did was regular white all that their tentacles of or fall off a branch of something as exciting as that so we needed a way to add up the amount of sunlight that people that the snails experienced over a period of some months and this is the technique I used I was walking along a coast coastal path in Cornwall it was in 1968 the year of miracles the year after the Abbey Road the year after Sergeant Pepper I should say really and and I noticed some something odd which is lots of colored wires attached to a board facing south I was in the pub that night I happened to be talking to a local and I said what's the white about and they said oh they want to know how much from colored wires fade in sunlight so I thought oh that's interesting I'm putting it back of my mind and then 10 years later it popped up again and I thought you see me why don't we take a die why do we take something that fades in sunlight and attach it to these snails and of course the first thing I thought of in those days are 30 days of molecular biology was gene manipulation which involved taking a pair of jeans of cutting out of squares of denim and sticking them onto snail shells okay because it was very trendy to wear faded jeans that didn't work okay but I did find out what the name of the blue dye in the denim was it's called Coomassie blue I took blue dye mixed it with a stable yellow paint to make a green paint I make a green paint there's the blue and the yellow make a green spotted it onto snails and you can see the one on the left has spent far fewer hours in the Sun than the one on the right just fade it more so we had a method of measuring snail shells a measuring says sunlight sunlight exposure and in fact I worked for a while in Botswana and in southern Africa there are lots are quite a lot and also West Africa nobody knows why quite a lot of albinos people who have no skin pigment and it is a very very damaging skate state for them to be in because effectively all Albano's unless they take the greatest precautions of dying of skin cancer at the age of 40 okay things are getting better with improved medical care but I was working about smaller I was talking to a colleague of items a doctor and he was saying oh we have terrible trouble with these children we tell their parents they must must not go outside in the Sun they must cover themselves with with the Sun cream but the kids just run off and they don't put the Sun cream on we don't know what to do about it so I know a little light came on I say here's an idea why don't we make them caps made of made of yellow cloth and so Kurt in the blue in the blue dye and then when they go outside with their caps on it'll fade and we can tell how long they've been in maybe tell how long they've been in the Sun and we thought that's Croatian so we'd have to check with the ethics committee that's what it's all right I think that's so be it and we're under the Ethics Committee and that's a committee oh we can't do that because you'll be treating them without them knowing you have to tell them why they why are you doing it and of course we knew only too well that if we told them the first thing they'd do would be to take their caps off and put them in her pockets so they didn't faint so that didn't work however since then there has been this was 20 years ago did this there has developed already quite almost a field of its own that asks how long 2 people on the average Spey stay in the Sun there are there are sensors you could use this one a little plastic got poly cell phone which you can make badges of and pin it on and if you go out in the Sun then it deeds is to break down and you can work out how long how long studying have spent it in the Sun and the work was initially done in Manchester which is a good place not to have any Sun very cloudy there and in Manchester in June the Sun of course is at its highest around noon but even in summer each of the subjects are the hundreds of them who have these things pinned out on film went out in that at that time around noon for no more than 9 minutes on weekdays and no more than 18 minutes at the weekend so even on the sunniest days then they spend 9 minutes a day on Monday to Friday in the Sun in in you can still make vitamin D from 10:00 to 10:00 in the morning till 3:00 in the afternoon but even that wasn't much better because they was 20 minutes in the Sun on weekdays and 40 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays and only one in four had safe levels of vitamin D by the end of the summer and three and four were deficient that they by the beginning of the next spring okay and many of the younger people had thin bones it if not rickets but they definitely had thin bones things were much worse for people British citizens of Asian ancestry effectively none of them had safe levels of vitamin D and effectively all the women in that group had very unsafe of vitamin D levels of vitamin D and many had signs of the rickets because of course they can often cover themselves with various clothes which keep the Sun at bay well that's dangerous ok so I think we can have I think we can say quite clearly that actually here comes the Sun we need more something I have to say I never thought I would do this but when I started looking into this a couple of years ago I've never been a great man for before food supplements apart from red wine there is a man but but but I have now somewhat to my surprise started taking vitamin D tablets and in Scotland there's been an endless pallava with the government about they're going to give vitamin D tablets to everybody no it's too expensive we're going to give or two indeed tablets to pregnant women which they're now doing in England they gave vitamin D tablets to pay women but only if their own benefits will classic piece of thing of Tory meanness there and I have to say or if they have other children under four now vitamin D tablets cost almost nothing to go to Sainsbury's I don't know how much it cost but you can buy 200 for about five pounds so I strongly recommend and I don't know that he seems to be shares that you actually do that it's very very hard to overdose one of the arguments that was used for getting rid of school milk was the people overdosing on vitamin E that's nonsensical you'd have to take heroic amounts to overdose and you know you really would you I take 25 micrograms plenty of people take a hundred ok so that's what I do so ivory I really believe what I'm kind of saying okay so what's what's what's going to happen to the vitamin D problem in the future it's certainly there and it's certainly getting work work worse worldwide the World Health Organization has called it an international epidemic of frightening proportions and that's it's happening everywhere mainly because people are moving indoors we no longer have the outdoor life we used to have the artificial life light is everywhere so it's certainly there but some things perhaps they'll have helped mitigate the the effects Pangea the plate things just changed in Edinburgh well that's the time people spend outdoors um this is a new club in princess street magnificent little Victorian building in 1963 it's the year I went to the University of Edinburgh in age 62 and I'm out walking up and down princess Street without really realized that he was surrounded by some of the finest architecture in Europe but that was the 1963 then came 60s and 70s and if great improvement was made to the new club that's the new club in 2017 vile excrescence so that's changed other things have changed in my life because since I went in high 63 that was me when I was a student uh-huh I still have I still have the mustache somewhere you know in an envelope I haven't looked at it for some time I wish I still had the melanin pigment of my hair but I don't but I also the weather in Edinburgh has changed okay this is the reduction in the Scottish snow and frost which reflects the amount of sunlight in over over over the year in 50 40 years from 1970 and you can see a dramatic amount of reduction 30 days less in lots of Scotland of frost and snow and that of course is part of global warming okay so if that carries on Scotland will actually get to be possibly a rather nice place okay in terms of climate it's a nice place anyway but it because of climate and these are various projected projections for what might happen to the climate of Scotland the temperature will probably go up between 3 & 5 degrees in the next about 2018 ok we should be more than the world average because it started from the low level now that's going to improve the life in Scotland people somebody rather well-known a European or other well-known European so once saw some pictures of Edinburgh in the 1930s and he came out with a telling phrase there's a picture of a sunny day in 1930s Edinburgh a picture was seen by a gentleman who's lost to history of Joseph Goebbels in 1938 he wrote Edinburgh will make a delightful summer capital when we invade Britain well they're no longer going to invade Britain they wait long enough it will indeed make us a delightful summer chemical capital thank you all stop there

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 17,016

Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, professor steve jones, steve jones, Biology, Evolution, genetics, Sun, the sun, skin cancer, Australia, melanoma, keratinocyte cancers, Cancer Research UK, Ultraviolet radiation, uv, American Cancer Society, sun exposure, sunlight, RL Stevenson, Scotland, edinburgh

Id: qZMR4l9lFYI

Length: 52min 13sec (3133 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018