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AN INTERVIEW WITH RUSSELL REITER, Ph.D.
Janice Stensrude, Interviewer
24 September 1995

Where words are missing because they were not understood during transcription of the taped interview, *** appears.

JS: This all came about because everyone all the sudden wants to talk about melatonin.

RR: The whole world.

Oh yes. And so the magazine handed me the copy of the Newsweek article, and I bought The Melatonin Miracle, and I've read about half that. And I've read Billie Sahley's little book.

I see.

When I went into the health food store I looked to see if they didn't have something small on it that I could read. I saw her book and I saw San Antonio so I thought, probably a connection and there was, so—

But there's no connection between me and Billie Sahley. I've never actually met her.

Oh you haven't?

No. She started this clinic. I don't know if she knew who I was but I sure— but like I say to this day I don't know where the clinic is and I've never actually met her. I'm sure everybody links the two of us, but we have never worked together, talked— actually I talked to her once on the phone. Other than that, that's the only thing I know about her. And the reason I talked to her on the phone is I got the same pamphlet you did in reference to melatonin. So that's the only association. In reference, again, since we have a competitive book I don't want to say too much about the Melatonin Miracle. Pierpaoli and Regelson, the two co-authors of that, are friends of mine, and of course I've known them for a number of years.

Okay, and what's the name of your book?

Okay. Then do you have a black and white glossy of yourself?

A black and white glossy? I've got a lot of color.

Well, color is okay. They can use that, too. Because if we've got a new book then we usually put a photograph of the author in the article.

Right. Yeah I can get certainly a photograph to you.

Okay. Let me give you an address then (receive details from Dr. Reiter).

My wife, she is a businessperson and her manufacturing plant is in Houston, so she has a good friend in Houston so she goes back and forth to Houston.

Well this is interesting then that I ended up talking to you. And the reason I picked up your name from the Sahley book is because it said University of Texas, and at that time I didn't see San Antonio, and I thought, hmm, maybe it's the local Health Science Center and I can get a face-to-face interview. So I asked the newspaper to track it down and he called me back and gave me a San Antonio telephone number.

Well that's good.

Well it is good.

It's a very, very interesting molecule also. I think we're going to see more and more of it used and of course I guess used by hundreds of thousands of people now because of its potential for having positive effects.

So you don't see any harm with it just being, sitting out there on the shelf with people picking it up.

Well, that's a tough question to answer. In other words there's always potential harm. There's potential harm in driving your car. There's potential harm in opening a can of beans. You can get botulism. There's potential harm in— roughly 7,000 people die each year of food contamination in the United States. *** I don't think we're going to remove all the food, and cigarettes kill one person every 10 seconds. And we don't even outlaw those. So yes there's always some potential harm, and I think the industry has to exercise care in terms of what they sell. Melatonin is no different from any other vitamin or any other nonprescription drug that is sold—aspirin, ibuprofen. And of course we know some of those compounds have rather toxic effects. Aspirin is a good example. Ibuprofen is another example, in terms of gastrointestinal problems and liver disease. So, but melatonin, per se, pure melatonin is remarkable in its lack of toxicity. In fact one pharmaceutical industry advocate made the statement that it's extraordinarily nontoxic considering its potential beneficial effects. And that's a very high statement. There's virtually everything that we take—even vitamins in high concentrations—are relatively toxic. You know it can make us very sick. That's not the case with melatonin. Melatonin has never been shown either acutely or chronically to have any significant toxicity in any animal or human to whom it's been administered. So it's as safe a compound as there is around.

So you take it yourself, I take it?

Well I do take it myself. That doesn't mean I recommend it to everyone. The reason I take it is because of my age. As you age, you lose the ability to produce melatonin like you lose so many other functions. And we think this is very significant in terms of aging by virtue of the fact that melatonin is a very good free radical scavenger. And free radicals are highly toxic molecules that are produced in the body but do a lot of tissue damage and of course are a primary basis of aging and many age-related diseases. So I supplement myself with melatonin because of this fact that I'm now 59 and also I take a drug called a beta-agenurgic blocking agent which we know prevents melatonin formation. There are a number of drugs on the market that prevent melatonin formation, and as a consequence, I take it to supplement myself with melatonin.

So you would take more than you would take just because of aging?

Well what I want to maintain, Janice, is— see, melatonin is normally produced at night in the brain. And you see it in the blood. So blood levels are about 10 to 15 times higher in the night than during the day. As you age you lose that ability to produce it at night, and further drugs like beta-agenurgic agents as well as aspirin and ibuprofen ***, so what I want to do is maintain the melatonin rhythm equivalent to that which I had when I was 20 years old. And as a consequence, I take small amounts of melatonin at night, 1 mg or less.

Oh really?

Yes.

So that was considerably less than the Melatonin Miracle suggested.

Oh gosh. I did notice near the end of the book they're talking about supplemental melatonin and they say, I think, if you're over 65 you should take 5 or 6 mg. And they said that would restore your normal blood levels of melatonin. Believe me, that will give you blood levels of melatonin thousands of times higher than your normal levels.

Well I have a 90-year-old friend I was going to recommend this to. He has sleep pattern disturbances and he's just starting to have memory slips that are driving him crazy.

Well. I'm not saying those amounts are toxic, because they're not. All I'm saying is that their statement that says this will restore normal blood levels of melatonin— well, it will cause blood levels of melatonin that are much, much, much, much, much higher than normal.

And they're stating that those that they recommend are less than you're going to find in commercial supplements.

Right. Right. Now in reference— like I say, that doesn't mean they're toxic. Because we know they're not. In fact people have taken and for other reasons take 75 to 300 mg, which is even a much larger dose. So in reference, in specific reference to a 90-year-old individual who is having sleep deficiency and memory loss, I could imagine an individual like that taking 3 to 5 mg. But when you take melatonin, if you take melatonin, and again I'm not recommending that everybody does, but if you do take melatonin, then you always take it at bedtime because it's normally produced at night. It sets your circadian clock. It induces sleep. So if you take it during the day, it would be like you would be in jet lag all the time. Your clock would be not synchronized with your light/dark cycle. So you take melatonin at night. And memory loss comes typically from, in an elderly person, typically comes from taking combinations of drugs. We now find that many aged people that have memory deficits that it's related to the drugs they are taking, the prescription drugs they are taking, because they are taking usually several in combinations that weren't quite meant to be. Now the other thing that causes memory loss in the elderly of course is the loss of specific neurons related to these functions. And again these neurons are lost because of free radical damage, and melatonin potently protects against free radical damage and the loss of those neurons. So there's reason to believe that melatonin would be very helpful in those cases.

Well do you think his dizziness is related to the memory loss thing or is this a separate deal?

That's probably related— Do you know what drugs he's taking?

There's one he's taking that was given to him for his skin that is a new drug. And for the herpes simplex. And he said that when he takes it he doesn't have those dizzy spells. So he won't stop taking it. But it's real expensive because it's a new drug. And the doctor said he's never heard of anybody taking it for dizziness but it's a new drug and they don't know what it does.

Right. Right.

And as far as I know that's the only thing he takes. It's real hard to get him to take a multivitamin or anything like that. He'll start on something that he thinks will help and then just stops taking it.

Well there's nothing wrong with being very conservative about taking drugs. In other words I think there's nothing wrong with his attitude. He obviously lived to 90 years of age quite well, thank you. There's no reason he should, you know— but in reference to sleep deficit, that is always often associated with the elderly and that can often be rectified with melatonin because melatonin is such a good sleep aid.

Well it would also react, wouldn't it, just like any sleeping pill. It's the first time he uses it, he's going to benefit from it.

Exactly. But it's not like any other sleeping pill. The others are— we know a great deal about the way benzediazepenes act and so forth, and they work quite differently than melatonin. But you're right. He will benefit very shortly within— I just received a letter from an M.D. in Florida last Friday, who I don't know well—I met him once—and he's, too, in his mid sixties and having sleep problems. He wrote to me and said what do you think. And I said well melatonin won't hurt you. And he tried it and he wrote back this raving letter about how well he has slept and so on and so forth. It's a great testimonial. And he's a physician who is very generally skeptical of any new product on the market that touts itself to be something. So you know, I guess in reference to your friend, again I'm not recommending he take melatonin, but I think it would help his sleep inefficiency and furthermore it would protect his brain from neuron loss. Like I say, he's lived to 90 very well and how many people can say that. So if he just wants to get the benefits of melatonin, there's no reason he should not take it. I would recommend— have him try 3 mg at night and see what that does for him, I mean if he wants to. Obviously he doesn't have to. But if he's really having sleep problems, that is annoying.

Yeah, that's something that— The thing is he has to see an immediate result on anything before he'll bother with it.

I gotcha.

And that's why he doesn't take a bunch of drugs. Because if they don't work the minute he takes them, he's through with it.

Well he should try it at least a week.

Well I think I might be able to talk him into that. Well have you personally received benefits that you were able to notice immediately?

Well, certainly I never had any sleep problems, so I didn't notice any in terms of sleep. And of course with one individual it's hard to tell. I think I am more energetic and so forth, and that's what this physician from Florida said— he had a documentation, because he was a jogger, and over the last four years he had worked up to three miles slow jogging every morning. He said within 20 days of taking melatonin he was jogging four miles rapidly, and he was feeling so well at the end of the four miles that he now does calisthenics at the end of this four-mile run, which he's never done before, and never even ran four miles. And he said— and of course he has the exp— he understands why and I think he's absolutely right. What melatonin does is protect the part of the cell called the mitochondria, because that's where all the oxygen is used. You use a lot of oxygen when you're exercising, obviously. You breathe harder. And that produces free radicals, oxygen does, and it produces them especially in the part of the cell called the mitochondria. And of course with melatonin there, it protects the mitochondrias from damage produced by all those free radicals, and that allows for more energy production. So he immediately deduced what the potential mechanism was, and that's exactly what we think it is in our testing. So there's very good reason to believe he— I mean it— the fact that you sleep better will also give you probably more energy during the day and so forth. So there's, you know, there's going to be benefits. In reference to me, you see, I've always been very active and never had any sleep problems. I take it prophylactically, melatonin, so do I experience benefits? I don't in terms of sleep because I never had any sleep problems. Do I in terms of my energy? It's hard to tell because I've never had any difficulty with low energy. But I'm taking it prophylactically. So in a sense I haven't noticed any immediate benefits. What I'm looking at is the long-term potential benefits. In other words, neurodegenerative conditions. When I'm 80, will I be better off? Well like I say, I will never absolutely know, because had I not been taking melatonin, at 80 I may be very fine. You understand. So to test it, you have to do a large clinical study with people who are not on it and who are on it and so forth. Those studies—

Do you see that that's any time in the near future?

Absolutely. There's two studies already planned in reference to Alzheimer's Disease and neurodegenerative conditions. Melatonin in treatment of Alzheimer's Disease. And I think that's going to be a very important study. There's also one that's probably going to be undertaken in terms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's Disease. This is also a very high free radical related disease which will potentially benefit greatly from melatonin.

Oh, I see. So they find some serious diseases and they're able to get research funds.

Absolutely. But see that type of research takes, like I say, 15, 10, 15 years. You can only tell if you give a person these drugs over a very long period of time. But we know in animals, of course, we can prevent degeneration of the nervous system with melatonin. Free radical related degenerative changes of the nervous system. And these reactions of melatonin with free radicals, you know, chemically if they encounter each other, melatonin and a free radical, the reaction has to occur. It's not specific to a unique animal or a situation. It's a chemical reaction that does occur. So if it occurs in an experimental animal, it will occur in a human. So you know, the likelihood of success is very high for these clinical trials. I can describe this process to you very well. It's called oxidation where what melatonin does— free radicals have an unpaired electron. That makes them very toxic because electrons like to be paired. And of course what melatonin does is give the free radical an extra electron, so now it has a paired electron, so it's no longer toxic. You understand. So melatonin just says, Well you can have one of mine. It then becomes a radical, but the melatonin radical is very nontoxic. Because it gives up one, it has an unpaired electron, but it becomes a very nontoxic radical that is just metabolized. So it takes these very toxic— encounters these very toxic radicals, contributes an electron and neutralizes them. The same thing happens when you park your car in the sun for a couple of years, your paint deteriorates. This is oxidation. Exchange of radicals. I've gotten telephone calls from car wax companies. Should we put melatonin in our car wax? And of course it would be just as effective in preventing that oxidation as within cells.

Really?

Yeah. Of course. And of course the other industry that's very interested of course is cosmetic industry. Facial cream you'll notice has a lot of Vitamin E in it. Vitamin E is an antioxidant like melatonin but melatonin is much better as an antioxidant. Of course I think you'll see very soon facial creams and so forth containing melatonin, because it's better than vitamin E in preventing degeneration of the skin. Lines, age lines, are of course ultraviolet light causing degeneration of the skin. And the reason it does it is it produces or causes the formation of free radicals in the skin which then damage the skin, then they become wrinkled. So you put on things that will prevent that damage, that'll eat up those radicals. So melatonin has an incredible number of potential uses.

It does. I noticed in this little brochure she mentioned that you had gotten one patent. A use patent?

Well, not me personally. Like I say before, writing that pamphlet— you're talking about Billie Sahley?

Uh huh.

I do not have a patent on melatonin as a matter of fact. I wouldn't mind having a patent on melatonin, but I do not. But there are people who do have use patents. You can't patent melatonin per se. And this is unfor— because you cannot patent a molecule that occurs in nature. If anybody holds a patent, God holds a patent on this. And as a consequence, people take out what are called use patents. If they're going to advertise it for a specific use, they can hold a patent on it. And there are several use patents on melatonin, but I don't have one of them. One of them is for sleep. And, again, I know all the people personally who have patents on it— another one is for jet lag treatment for example. Another one is for ocular disease, glaucoma.

She said that you had the one on antioxidants. And you don't hold that?

No, unfortunately not. Like I say I wouldn't mind, but of course now it's not possible to get the patent because we've already published the material through the— and once the information is available to the general public you also cannot patent it. And of course when we made our discoveries we immediately published it in the scientific literature. But we don't have a patent on it. Is this the little gray-blue pamphlet?

Not gray-blue. This is a beige color one with a sienna print on the cover. And this one just came out in September. This says "An Updated Second Printing September 1995."

I guess I haven't seen that one. I bet I haven't. Well anyway, I don't have a patent on it. And I have no vested interest in any melatonin products either. In other words, it doesn't make any money for me if people take melatonin or if they don't. It doesn't— it's irrelevant to me whether they do because I have no vested interest in melatonin. I mean I have a vested interest from the standpoint I've worked on it all my life. But I don't make any money from melatonin.

Okay. She listed contraindications for use. And the implication— she said that people with autoimmune disorders should avoid it.

Well she's probably correct. That hasn't been thoroughly tested, but what autoimmune disease is, an overactivity of the immune system. The immune system starts to fight itself, fight against itself because it's overactive. And there is certainly some evidence that melatonin may in fact stimulate the immune system. And if it does, it stimulates an immune system that is already overstimulated, it could exacerbate or exaggerate autoimmune disease. We don't know if that's true, so I think the precaution that she introduces is warranted.

Okay, so that's just an educated guess from knowing how it works.

Precisely. And I would guess she said pregnant women shouldn't take it and children shouldn't take it, and these are all what typically is done conservatively. Obviously you don't want to hurt a fetus. You don't want to hurt anyone. But you take special precautions in terms of pregnancy, in terms of lactating women who are nursing, in terms of children the limitations are usually more strongly enforced.

You know the first thing that, when people see it helps the immune system, they immediately think of AIDS. But with this caution, this would not be a good thing for people with AIDS to take.

No, no. It definitely would be. Definitely would be. In fact in our book we outline all the reasons why an AIDS study should be done. AIDS patients have— their immune system is in fact destroyed, because what happens is the virus proliferates very rapidly and for a while the immune system can combat that virus. But eventually the virus just overwhelms the immune system and totally destroys it. So these people do not die of HIV. What they die from is infections that they get because they have no immune system. They get so many infections. The other thing AIDS patients have is they have very high free radical production. And of course melatonin is the best scavenger of these free radicals. And we think that melatonin in terms of AIDS would be a dynamite supplementary treatment. But again it hasn't been done, tested clinically, again for the simple reason it's going to take years to do that. Remember I said you couldn't hold a patent on it. This really hurts melatonin because to do these expensive long-term clinical trials in humans requires millions of dollars, and no pharmaceutical company is going to undertake a clinical study on a drug that they cannot patent. Because they say, We're going to spend all this money, we're going to discover that it benefits, and then we can't patent the drug which means everyone in the world is going to sell that drug for this reason and we won't corner the market, in other words. What the pharmaceutical industry wants to do is invent their own molecules. When they don't occur in nature, they can't— so they patent them. And then if they have beneficial effects, then for 17 years they have exclusive right on that molecule.

Well that's also an invitation to— like the difference between progesterone and progestin.

Yes.

Progestin is a far inferior molecule and it has horrible side effects. And the general public doesn't seem to know that and the doctors hesitate to prescribe anything that hasn't been endorsed by the drug industry.

Absolutely. There's a lot of inherent problems with this type of thing. So. You know melatonin is a remarkably good drug but not getting the testing by the pharmaceutical industry that it deserves. There are several that are very interested. But they don't know what to do in effect. You see what they have to do is find a use for melatonin that hasn't yet been described and then patent it. They can get a use patent but they cannot patent the molecule. So you know again it works against widespread testing of melatonin, other than by research scientists, because the pharmaceutical industry isn't going to do it.

You know I think one of the biggest things we need is other resources for research funds.

That's one of the major reasons I wrote this book, to point out the potential of melatonin and the difficulty with research funding, because it is not patentable, and to emphasize this part of it. We need additional research on melatonin and it'll have to come from governmental agencies rather than from the pharmaceutical industry. And this is very important for melatonin and drugs like it that cannot be patented. So this is the bottom line. You're absolutely correct.

Well how did you first become interested in melatonin? What's your—

All of my adult life I've been working with melatonin. In 19— I took my doctorate degree in 1964. And I had a two-year military obligation because I was in something referred to as Reserve Officers Training Corps. To support myself in college I belonged to the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and that committed me to two years in the military as an officer. So I was sent to the Army Chemical Center near Baltimore. And it was right after Sputnik. And what they were interested in at the time was, they were already planning on sending Astronauts to distant planets. And they said, if we send an Astronaut to Mars, there's going to be a six-month journey, and the amount of food resources, water and everything we'd have on board would be prohibitive in terms of weight. And also the human excrement that would be created by these individuals would be prohibitive. So what they said is— and it would be boring as the devil to spend six months just flying through space. So they said we have to isolate the factor that causes hibernation in animals because we will then put our Astronauts in suspended hibernation for six months, awaken them when they arrive on the scene. They will not have eaten for six months, they will not have excreted anything, they won't be bored and so forth and so on. So we were assigned, my colleague and myself, Dr. Roger Hoffman, were assigned to work on the hibernating factor to isolate it. Well we looked at animals that hibernated, we did certain manipulations with the light/dark environment. Remember I told you melatonin occurs during darkness. So we changed the length of the light/dark cycle and we noticed that certain things happened when we changed the lighting environment. And this led us very quickly to melatonin and the pineal gland. So where we never identified anything related to hibernation, we did discover that the pineal gland was regulated by light and darkness and the amount of melatonin produced was regulated by light and darkness. So this is interesting how— interestingly how we got started. It was the U.S. Army for slightly different reasons.

The space program.

It was the benefit of space research, because we were looking at the human aspect of space travel, not the machinery, obviously, like NASA would do, but we were looking at the human aspects of it. So there was a strong benefit —[part of sentence lost when tape was turned over]
—because a clinical study on melatonin is probably going to be undertaken in Houston.

Oh good.

And I'll probably be a consultant to that project. I'm coming down there to lecture. I haven't received a date yet, but I'll probably be going down pretty soon.

I just did a paper on breast cancer, and I read Kathy Read's excellent book out of Britain that's new, and I was just really concerned about these huge international clinical trials on tamoxifen.

Yeah. Tamoxifen is potentially a very good drug, except did she mention that melatonin increases the efficacy of tamoxifen about 5 to 10 times?

No, as a matter of fact melatonin was only mentioned in passing in a metabolic explanation. She didn't talk about it as a drug at all. And the tamoxifen, she's just not a fan of tamoxifen.

Well she should not be a fan of tamoxifen. There are some very negative side effects of tamoxifen. And if tamoxifen is going to be used I think it would be well considered to use it in conjunction with melatonin, because you could greatly reduce the dose of tamoxifen, but greatly increase its efficacy, because we know that melatonin does it. Melatonin is a remarkably strong inhibitor of human breast cancer cells, and again another clinical study that should be done that isn't being done. But a former student of mine, Dr. David Blask, he's an M.D., Ph.D. in New York now, he defined very well the inhibitory effects of melatonin on human breast cancer cells. If you take human breast cancer cells and grow them in a dish and add physiological levels of melatonin, it markedly inhibits their growth. Melatonin is a very good inhibitor of tumor cells derived from human breast cancer. And it's nontoxic to humans. And a clinical trial on human breast cancer, considering how common it is, and there's practically no treatment for it, should consider the possibility of giving melatonin. It's just crying out to be done.

The Melatonin Miracle mentioned what amounts to a very small trial. In Europe they're testing with several hundred women. And when I read that, I thought well I'm glad, but we're talking, I think, tens of thousands internationally with tamoxifen. And there's a tremendous backlash on that of medical professionals saying you know this is not called for. You're taking healthy women and giving them a very toxic substance.

You know this is a classic example again of the pharmaceutical industry ramrodding these experiments. The reason drugs are prescription is because they are toxic. That's why they're prescription drugs. Here you have a molecule, melatonin, that occurs naturally that is strongly oncosthetic, that is inhibitory of cancer, that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't touch. It's nontoxic, naturally occurring, potentially extremely to cancer patients, and they won't even look at it because they can't make money.

You know the vitamin companies are not yet powerful enough and strong enough to support this kind of research, but I remember that the Shaklee Corporation does research and they kind of had some tough years when they didn't have enough money to do their own original research. That's how they promoted their vitamins is that they published in academic journals research that was based on using their products. So they would write an article on vitamin C, but the vitamin C that was used was their vitamin C. So they knew that their vitamin C worked. Well they were recently, within the last three or four years, purchased by a very large Japanese pharmaceutical company. And I would think that that just pumped an awful lot of research money into them. And I would think that for something like melatonin that somebody like that could be approached.

If they could patent it they would spend the money, but they're not going to spend any money that they can't reclaim with sales.

Well but you see, they're doing research on vitamin C and they're spending the money on it because that's how they market their brand of vitamin C. And so I should think they would be able to do the same thing with melatonin. It's going to be a big supplement.

It already is. You know this is going to be covered on a program on 20/20. I think I told you that the other day.

No.

I've been interviewed for 20/20 and it's supposed to be aired in— well they keep changing the date. Either late October or November, 20/20 program. And I'm also going to be on the Today show in New York on the 19th of October I believe and I'm going to do a National Public Radio program tomorrow, Monday. That's going to be taped so I don't know when it'll be played. But this shows the national and international attention now that melatonin is getting. I mean it's— you can't look anywhere without seeing melatonin mentioned.

It's interesting that I pick up two stories like this in one month. They gave the melatonin story, but I proofread the articles that come in and some people don't write particularly well so I do the editing on those. And another story that came in was a young man who spent several months in China at a clinic there where it's all mind/body. And they've done 18 years of research on their own. And they're ready now to let the world know about it. And they have over 90% cure of chronic and fatal diseases, strictly mind/body, and what they did— Of course this in effect is volunteer labor. That's how that is hard for something like that to spread. Just dedicated people. But they have Western-trained physicians that do the testing when the people come in and do the diagnosis and test them throughout the course of their stay. So we've come up with a natural substance that aids us and at the same time someone is releasing 18 years of research that shows the true power of the mind/body thing with everything backed up, you know with a regular protocol and everything backed up with Western medicine. And I thought that was interesting that both of those came at the same time.

I do have another appointment a little bit after 11, so I guess we'd better finish any questions that you need answered.

Okay. Well we pretty much talked about the FDA problem or the problem of the drug companies. I was going to say that Dr. Whitaker had some strong words to say about the MIT researchers who were lobbying for FDA control.

Yeah. I think -- again I know Dick Wurtman, he's the MIT research scientist. Again I have no vested interest in that one way— I think it would be a mistake because it's a totally nontoxic substance. And the reason Dick Wurtman lobbies for it to become a prescription drug is that he stands to make absolute millions of dollars. He holds the patent for melatonin as a sleep aid. If melatonin is made a prescription drug and he enforces that patent, which he would do, he would be the only individual in the world who could advertise melatonin as a sleep aid specifically. And he has a company, Interneuron, which he founded, and he will make millions, possibly billions of dollars, so naturally he wants it to be a prescription drug. And I think that's— and if there were something toxic about melatonin I'd say of course make it a prescription drug. But at this point there's no rationale for depriving its use to a lot of people because it is nontoxic.

Okay, another thing I wanted to ask is whether you use the synthetic or the natural.

Well you better use the synthetic. The natural is often contaminated with some other brain extract materials and you could have latent viruses in there and everything. What's primarily available is of course synthetic, because you can't get enough natural. I mean you'd have to take millions of pineal glands to get very much melatonin at all. So all the products that are available are synthetic. It's a very easy molecule to produce.

Oh good. My other question was in the book on breast cancer they talked about various places throughout the world where use of xeno-estrogens in food and what not had caused precocious puberty. Could melatonin be used as a treatment for this type of precocious puberty?

Well certainly there's strong evidence that melatonin has effects on reproductive physiology, in fact delaying effects. Melatonin drops dramatically at the time of puberty, the night time levels. And it's been implicated in the regulation of fertility because of that drop, but it's not been proven. In other words, it's potentially possible that melatonin could be used in conjunction with these estrogen therapies to defer the precocious pubertal effects of the estrogens. We just don't know. It hasn't been tested, but melatonin does have some of those types of effects. But you know again there's just no clinical evidence to suggest it would be absolutely a way to use melatonin. I think the other potential effects of melatonin are so potentially beneficial that that would have a low priority in clinical studies.

Well it would have a lot to do with— it would make a tremendous impact on breast cancer rates.

I see. Well then it would have more of an impact.

Yeah. Because our age at puberty even has dropped to 12 years old from 17 years old. And so that makes a huge difference. Okay, when the lab animals' lives were prolonged with melatonin and they didn't die from cancer, what were they dying from?

Well eventually, in other words that's genetically determined. How long— you know no matter what we do, we'll probably never get humans to live beyond, much beyond 110. That will be genetically programmed. In other words, tissues can only function for so many years, and they will in fact give out. You can build the best instrumentation in the world, and it's gradually going to deteriorate. And there's nothing you can do about that. So they will not die of infections, they will not die of cancer, they will not die of degenerative disease. They will die of old age.

Of true old age.

Of true old age. Right. And most of us do not die of old age.

So we don't know what old age is because no one ever gets there.

Very few. Probably very few individuals get— or die of old age. They may get old, but they don't die of old age. That's correct.

In The Melatonin Miracle they set age at 120 and I know Chopra set it at 130. I think there's something that astrologically supports the 130. I don't remember.

Again. Living for long is of interest, but of greater interest to most people is living healthy as long as they live. And that's what we think melatonin has the capability of doing, keeping us healthy for a longer period of time. And if that also means extending life for a period of time, fine. I don't think people want to be ill from the age of 65 and then die at 85. If you're going to die at 85, of course you prefer to live healthy until near the end. And that's the secret to what I think melatonin is capable of doing.

What if I wanted to give melatonin to my cat or my dog?

I know people who are doing that.

How would you adjust the dosage for that? By body weight or—?

Yeah, but it depends on the size of the dog. Some dogs are big as humans. I would give the dog 3 mg. Just put it on peanut butter or something it likes in the evening. The dog should be given it in the evening just like anybody else.

So I've got a 16-pound cat that I think could benefit.

I would give her 1 or 2 mg as well. Just take one of those tablets that you get, acerate it, put it in her food or something she likes, a nip or something that she's going to eat at night and— some animals you can actually put it in their mouth and they will swallow it. They're eager enough to please and they're hungry enough. Or put it in a chunk of tuna. Just sprinkle it in tuna and give her a little tuna every night. I'm sure she would be wolfing that down just as you go to bed. You know I know quite a few people who in fact are using it on their animals for the very same reason it's going to be used on humans. They want their animals healthier longer.

Well particularly in Houston where we're now the most polluted city in the nation. We have a lot of problems that I don't think we had here 10, 20 years ago.

I'm sure you're absolutely right. You know all these are free radical things. All these toxins in the air produce free radicals in the body.

One more question. I noticed that infants don't produce their own melatonin the first few days after birth, so what have all these years of bottle feeding done and what does it do to these children in the long term?

The first few months they don't produce any melatonin. And I don't think enough gets through the milk, if a woman is nursing. You see, what happens is, you'll notice that children typically start to eat — eat— they eat from the beginning— they typically start to sleep at night after three or four months. This is coincident with the development of the melatonin rhythm. Melatonin is a sleep-inducing compound. We think that their biological clock, including the melatonin rhythm matures at about three to four months of age and that's when they begin to sleep at night and that's when they get significant amounts of melatonin. There's no melatonin for the first three months. And I don't think they get enough in the milk to make any difference. Now the question is why. Is there some reason they should not have the exposure to melatonin during this time? And there may be. What's happening during this time, the brain is maturing, sculpting itself. There's a migration of cells and there are divisions of cells. Things are happening in the brain that melatonin we now know could inhibit. So melatonin given to very young individuals like that may in fact prevent some of the maturational processes that occur in the brain and so there's maybe an evolutionary reason why for the first several months that no melatonin should be present. But, you know, again, that hasn't been proven, but there's strong evidence that that is the case. I think the body knows what it's doing when it doesn't give any melatonin immediately.

Okay that went through all of my questions, and I'm so glad I decided to try to get a Texas testimony because this turned out to be better for many reasons. For one thing I didn't know you were writing a book.

I'll send you an announcement of the book, if you don't mind, and a photo.

Oh, that'd be great.