Part time Naples resident, Dr. Mario Motta, was going to pursue astrophysics when he was younger but wound up going into medicine instead. Dr. Motta began practicing as a cardiologist at North Shore Medical Center in Salem, Massachusetts in 1983, and worked there until retiring in 2022. He is a graduate of Boston College, with a BS in physics and biology, and of Tufts Medical School.
Dr. Motta is board certified in Internal medicine and Cardiology and is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, and of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology. He is still an associate professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.
He has also long been active with the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), holding a number of posts through the years, including MMS President.
Dr. Motta was elected and served 8 years on the AMA council of Science and Public Health, and was elected to the Board of Trustees of the AMA in 2018, recently completing his term. In May of 2023 at its annual meeting, the MMS awarded Dr Motta its highest honor, the “Award for Distinguished Service.”
While he chose medicine as his profession, Dr. Motta has been an amateur astronomer throughout his life. He has built most of his own telescopes — down to the optics — including a large 32” telescope that may be the largest homemade telescope ever built. He’s used it to discover planets around other stars, for instance.
But as light pollution increased it increasingly attracted his attention as an astronomer — and around 1990 he met an epidemiologist named Richard Stevens who told him about research on how light exposure at night suppresses melatonin production. Melatonin is crucial to our immune system's function and its production is suppressed when we see light at night.
Research shows that suppressing melatonin production through excessive night lighting, especially blue light, leads health effects including an increase in certain endocrine-related carcinomas. It is now well known that circadian disturbance causes a 20–30% increase in breast cancer rates, and a similar increase in prostate cancers.
In 2017 the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to Young, Rosbach, and Hall, because they elucidated work showing the biochemical pathways that lead to increased cancer by melatonin suppression. Besides cancer, obesity, diabetes, and metabolism issues are all affected by melatonin suppression.
Dr. Motta and Dr. Stevens have collaborated on a number of papers collecting and presenting information about the links between light exposure at night and human health, and they have led to real-world results in how light — especially blue light — is or should be used, because of potential health impacts to humans and animals.
We discuss the nexus between light pollution and human health, the environment, and public safety.
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