by Perry McCarney

Created on: July 14, 2008   Last Updated: February 19, 2011

In the long summers of my youth I considered a golden tan to be my natural coloration. It would fade some during the winter, but return rapidly with the budding flowers of spring. As the family had moved to the city by my teens, roaming through the forested hills and meadowed valleys of my first home was no longer to be, the golden tan now needed to be acquired rather than coming about automatically.

Pale skin was seen as a sickly pallor, a tan represented health and vitality. The only lotion applied to the body was suntan lotion; sunscreen might have been available as a medication to those poor unfortunates who burned rather than tanned. Sunblock was unheard of.

Now in my late 40s I no longer sunbath as such, but I'm outdoors in summer sufficient to develop quite a dark tan on face, arms and legs. Sitting out on the verandah with my feet up on the rail, a cold beer on the table beside me, a good book in my lap and the sun beaming down is a pleasure I savor. I think I may have applied sunscreen to my skin two or three times in my life, but always at someone else's insistence.

Admittedly, the sun can feel harsher these days, after all the ozone layer is thinner thanks to anthropogenic gases eating away at it. If I feel the start of a burn, I move into the shade. I don't see any reason to add to the profits of multinational pharmaceutical companies by purchasing and using a sunscreen. Stirring up fear and paranoia about anything and everything seems to be the primary focus of their advertising, "Profits Before People" their not very secret motto.

George Johnson's article in the St. Louis Beacon, " On Science: Tanning to death", elucidates the potential hazards from exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun or sunbeds well, vis-a-vis the development of melanomas, but is rather one-sided. There is no mention, for example, that sunlight on skin is necessary for the production of vitamin D. Far more people are likely to be suffering the effects of vitamin D deficiency from avoiding sunlight than developing melanomas from not. Nor does it mention that cellular mutations of the sort described are a perfectly normal occurrence that the immune system has counters for. Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) specifically attacks forming tumors, making them more vulnerable to natural killer cells (NKCs) in particular. We get cancers quite often, we just don't notice because our immune systems take care of them.

We, as societies, have a propensity for meddling, changing our environments rather than adapting to them. This is just another example. Our industrial waste products rise up to the ozone layer and reduce that essential protection from the sun's UV rays. Instead of trying to fix that, something it might be difficult to make a profit from, we mass produce creams and lotions with ludicrously high sun protection factors (SPFs), creating a high profit market. That may protect us, for now, but what about all the other life on the planet?

On a personal note, I have no desire to live to some great age, I consider that a rather selfish attitude that seems to predominate society these days. Why would I want to persist as some cranky old man or worse, a paranoid, aggressive Alzheimer's sufferer, swearing at the people trying to help me. I believe in an afterlife, I would rather get to it. A metastasizing melanoma is as good a way as any.

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