CONTENTS

Introduction
Human Skin Cancer
Sunscreen and Fabric
The Mouse Model of Cancer
Studies Using Skin Tissue
Drugs and Sunlight
Plant and Algae Growth
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography

Future Work

Tony Larkum can think of all sorts of ways he could go in the future. For example, genetic engineering techniques could be used to produce plants that are not vulnerable to UV light. He thinks it would be too difficult to introduce genetic changes to all the plants in an ecosystem but that possibly it could be done for key species, especially in agriculture or aquaculture where there are vast areas of genetically similar plants. The problem is something that is peculiar to each individual plant and it can be found in the genes.

“One of the interesting things is that phytoplankton are now used in various farms up and down the coast for prawn farms and other sorts of molluscs which exist under very high light levels. Perhaps you could try genetic engineering to see whether you couldn’t come up with something which is not affected by UVB,” he says. “For the phytoplankton in Antarctica there are just a few key species so if genetic solutions could be introduced into these species it is possible the adaptions would spread like wildfire in natural populations. Competition would take over and help it spread.”

Further research into the repair processes of plants is another area which Larkum thinks might help improve plants. He is also interested in the screening compounds and how they might be improved and modified. Some plants don’t produce them very well and genetic manipulation might help to produce them in higher levels.

“But all of that is a technological fix,” says Larkum. “You really ought to get rid of the ozone depleting process. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if that will happen until there is a great deal more ozone depletion. Even if the second Montreal protocol gets going there will still be a rise in ozone depletion until the year 2000. If according to that scenario, all of the nations stop producing the CFC11 and 12, you would get a slackening off of the CFCs and the ozone would stabilise, but that depends on the underdeveloped nations following the protocol. It doesn’t seem that they will, especially China, so I would predict that you will get ozone depletion increasing well into the 2000’s, perhaps up to 2020 and past then. You can expect to have increasing effects of UVB into the next century.”

So as things stand technological fixes are likely to be popular. “If a discovery were to be made today about how plants could be genetically engineered to be more tolerant of UVB it would go into the literature and it would go right around the world. Scientists would be working on it immediately for a whole range of plants.” Larkum himself would expect to be able to do some of this type of work because he is also into molecular genetics.