Dr. Glen Jeffery

So we've got our cones, which deal with color and deal with bright light.

Then as we turn the lights down,

we start to use our rods.

So loads and loads of rods, relatively few cones.

The key thing here is rods are very, very numerous.

Cones are not so.

So what happens then, for instance, if we take aging animals and we just expose them to red light every day, we give them a burst of red light, and then we count the number of rods they've got when they reach old age, and the result is super clear.

We have reduced the pace of cell death in the retina, okay?

So red light is affecting mitochondria.

mitochondria have the ability to signal cell death.

And we're drawing back the probability of that cell dying.

Now, we did that on mice.

We did it on a lot of mice.

It was a killer of an experiment to keep animals going forever.

And then I forced one of my graduate students basically to go one, two, three, four, and count photoreceptor out the segments.

She was a hero.

So we can use red light to reduce the pace of cell death.

So I am not too surprised that John Metrophanes would have reduced the pace of cell death in the substantia nigra, that nucleus that gives rise to Parkinson's disease.

I'm seeing that coming out of loads of different labs, things that are all consistent with that kind of story.

The other thing that I think you can start to address is if you've got bad mitochondria, say, very loose term, if you've got bad mitochondria, as you do have in Parkinson's disease, they're bad, they're not functioning very well on their way to death, are they influencing other parts of your body?