Genie In A Bottle (eBook)

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN Do you know what happens to orphaned baby elephants in Kenya? Their ears, which normally look like huge flat fans, lose their rigidity and the tips fold over. This happens because the proteins that form the molecular framework of the ears are degraded by the sun. Normally, baby elephants walk underneath adult elephants and are shaded from the sun, but the orphans have to fend for themselves. So in elephant orphanages - and, yes, there are such things in Kenya - workers applylarge amounts of sunscreen to the babies' ears. If you would like to picture an even more bizarre scene, imagine those workers spreading blankets over the backs of the little pachyderms to protect them from sunburn. Is there a message for us here somewhere? Yes, there is: even if we don't have big floppy ears or make a habit of wandering around the Kenyan countryside we still need sun protection. Just ask any dermatologist. Or, better yet, watch one. I did just that when an old high school friend came to town. We had arranged to meet for lunch on the McGill University campus. My friend the dermatologist was waiting for me when I appeared. He was sitting on a bench, in the shade, sporting a wide-brimmed hat. A tube of sunblock was sticking out of his shirt pocket. That's because he knows firsthand what the sun can do. He now sees ten times as many patients with skin cancer as he did when he first started practicing in the 1970s. The girls we went to school with, at least the ones who celebrated the arrival of spring by sliding sun reflectors under their chins, are now his patients. The lucky ones exhibit the classic signs of 'photoaging' and are hounding him for the latest antiwrinkle concoction or liver-spot eraser. The less fortunate ones are having basal cell or squamous cell cancers removed. The sun reflector has, mercifully, gone the way of the leisure suit. But its effects linger. Skin cancer, like most other cancers,has a long latency period. Many people have yet to pay the price for their youthful follies. Who would have guessed? The sun was supposed to be good for us. In 1903 Icelander Niels Finsen won the Nobel Prize for medicine, he had developed a sunlight therapy to combat infectious diseases. Sunbathing became a popular treatment for tuberculosis, Hodgkin's disease, syphilis, and festering wounds. Then we discovered that jaundiced babies respond to sun exposure. But we were really sold on the sun when we learned that it triggered the formation of vitamin D in the skin. Scientists told us that all those cases of childhood rickets that occurred during the European Industrial Revolution were attributable to the clouds of smoke that