Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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While he supports the idea that variations in artificial light affect our health, Wurtman never once mentions television light, which by now is a primary artificial light for most Americans.

Frustrated, I decided upon one more interview, with Dr. Kendric C. Smith, professor of radiobiology in the Department of Radiology, Stanford University Medical School, and former president of the American Society for Photobiology. I had read a paper by Smith in BioScience (January 1974) which seemed promising.

He said, "Sunlight is probably the most important single element of our environment, yet it has been largely ignored by the scientific community...

"Visible light has the ability to exert measurable biological effects. Medical uses of the visible spectrum have been virtually ignored by physicians for the past ninety years ...

"Light intensity as well as wavelength specificity may alter productivity and mood. In the infant, sensory overload by prolonged exposure to highly intense illumination may produce undesirable effects on development. Indeed the manipulation of the light-environment of adults as well as of infants can have consequences of which we may be quite unaware."

(One wonders, for example, about the effects on a newborn child of emerging from darkness into the dazzling bright fluorescent light of delivery rooms. Most primitive cultures deliver infants in darkened environments.)

When I went to see Smith, I asked him what is known about the effects of television light.

His answer? Nobody knows.

"We know less about the effects of light on humans than almost any other thing. We know, however, that ultraviolet light is essential to man for the synthesis of Vitamin D, and visible light is essential for vision. We know that we need light to survive, but too much can be dangerous. Somewhere there's a balance."

I asked him where to start determining the balance.

"The first step has been to copy the sun, but we may not need all parts of the solar spectrum. For example, some plants use some parts, some plants use other parts of the spectrum. If we knew which wavelengths were best for each type of plant, we could design lamps that were optimal for each plant's growth and well-being.

"Except for vision and Vitamin D synthesis we have very little information on what part of the solar spectrum man uses and what part he doesn't."

Although he believes that you have to start with the characteristics of sunlight, Smith denounced what he called believers in "Godslight": people who believe that what is natural is automatically good.

.. since 'natural' was all we had for virtually the entire course of human evolution, that is what our bodies are attuned to. Any thing that intervenes in this arrangement is potentially dangerous.

I didn't tell Smith that I was one of those myself. In the end, I expect science to conclude that since "natural" was all we had for virtually the entire course of human evolution, that is what our bodies are attuned to. Anything that intervenes in this arrangement is potentially dangerous. Smith, on the other hand, has more faith in human intervention, believing that it will eventually be possible to find just which spectrum humans need for which growth characteristic, and that we can then plan our lighting environments accordingly. Visions of totally artificial underground environments and/or space stations, celebrated as offering everything humans need, flew through my mind. So many trees, so much light, so much recreation. Suburbs in the sky. I brought the subject back to television.

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