For over 40 years, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede has been a leading world expert on circadian clocks and the health problems caused by electric light at night. As a professor at Harvard Medical School (1975 – 1998), he led the team that located the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the biological clock in the human brain that controls the timing of sleep and wake, and showed how it is synchronized by light. Since 2010, he has been the Director of the Circadian Lighting Research Center, which identified the key blue signal that synchronizes circadian clocks and developed patented LED lights, which provide health-optimized light across day and night based on comprehensive medical research. He has published over 180 scientific articles and authored ten books. His latest book, THE LIGHT DOCTOR: Using Light to Boost Health, Improve Sleep and Live Longer,has just been released. 

3:15 Story. My whole life has been focused on the trajectory of light and the human body - particularly as a medical intern working 36 hours on and 12 hours off – when couldn’t make sense of things that I had written the next day and that got me interested in the  circadian rhythm. So did a detour out of surgery and went to  Harvard Medical School to study the effect of light on the human body. At the time it was a new field – about 3 papers published a year on this. The papers  on circadian clocks are now in the thousands. I was invited to Harvard faculty and to open a lab. Here we discovered   the human brain SCN that regulates the body’s cycles and rhythms. 

4:17  rhythms of our body eg some things peak just before dawn ,  in the middle of the night like melatonin, late afternoon like  body temp,  and that light was a key signal that kept our biological clocks in sync with the outside world was not known at the time. 

5:07 There began to be a recognition of the huge medical problem of those exposed to light at night like shift workers or sleeping with the lights on or just having artificial lights at night . And it is very much related to the colors of the light spectrum. 

5:37 It is very much connected to white light is made of all the colors of the rainbow plus invisible ultraviolet and  infrared.  

 transcript verlafortier.substack.com 

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