BALDNESS BE MY FRIEND
Terence Kealey is amazed that his
research on baldness has caused such a stir
WE SCIENTISTS are shy, mole-like crea- tures. From the security of the laboratory we peer at a world of bright, brash confi- dence, and we abjure it. Yet last Friday no less than four television crews invaded my lab, I gave at least ten 'live' radio inter- views, and the telephone rang continuously as reporters called to check facts. My breakfast had been enlivened by the 'sight of my photograph in the Times, the story had also been carried by the Sun, Mirror, Star and Today, and it was also to be found in proper papers like the Telegraph or Guardian. This year's science Nobel Prizes had only been announced the previous week, but our news had easily outspaced those worthy laureates' in the press. If reporters' values reflect those of society, the major health threat that Britain faces today is the danger of receding hair.
Earlier this year my PhD student, Michael Philpott, and I succeeded in per- suading hair follicles, once isolated from the scalp, to continue growing in the laboratory. This obviously represented a useful advance in hair research, because an isolated growing hair provides a test-bed for the development of new drugs, not only for the treatment of baldness, and not only for the treatment of unwanted hair, but also for the treatment of sheep, goats and it's a jungle out there!' other animals whose fur is of commercial importance. But most scientists dismiss problems of the hair as cosmetic, and therefore trivial. We know this because we experienced great difficulties in publishing our paper. Nature rejected it because it was `of insufficient general interest' while Sci- ence wanted us to make a further six months' worth of experiments. In the end the Journal of Cell Science, Britain's lead- ing journal of cell biology, accepted it (unconditionally, bless them). But our problems with the journals left us unpre- pared for the eagerness of the newspapers. We simply did not anticipate media cover- age. Our first reporter was Peter Kingston of the Evening Standard. He had heard of the hair work from a mutual friend, and one afternoon he called in to have a look. Two days later, he telephoned to say that the Standard would be running the story and could he send a photographer? A photo- grapher! We called in Martin Green, our collaborator from Unilever, and for over an hour the photographer made us do silly things like pore through microscopes at pretend hairs or cheer as if we had just won a goal. Colleagues from other labs peered round the door to laugh at our clean white coats.
Then, on Thursday, 25 October, the Standard ran the piece. We had almost all of page 3, and half of it was dedicated to a huge photograph and an enormous head- line 'Hair today means it's not gone tomor- row'. Fame at last. But we did not expect any further interest. We assumed that coverage by one paper would kill the story for the others. We could not have been more wrong.
At 12.30 the telephone started ringing. And it did not stop. We had the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail, the Express, the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, Today and the Cambridge Evening News. We had Reuters, You and Yours, Radio Cambridge, LBC, Radio 1 Roadshow, eight different local radio stations, Look East (BBC TV), Anglia TV, CNN, ITV, David Frost on Sunday, CBS, ABC and Canadian broadcasting. We had friends telephoning, and the family, and the bald.
One poor man was to have a hair trans- plant on the following Tuesday — should he cancel it? (No). Another wanted to come down, from Glasgow that afternoon for the restorative cream (Ha!). A third had a patent method based (honestly) on frog extracts. It was bedlam, it was hell, it was fun.
Some of the reporters' questions were very penetrating. One girl from LBC asked me, live on the air, if we should not be researching into more serious diseases. Actually, as I explained, the baldness and acne work had emerged as chance by- products of more serious experiments on the skin and I had been as surprised as anyone else to find myself an authority. I had started, ten years ago, to isolate sweat glands to investigate cystic fibrosis, a very serious disease of children. Patients suffer from chronic bronchitis, pancreatic des- truction and, curiously, very salty sweat hence the mediaeval German proverb 'the child who is salty to the kiss will die'. It was only while I was isolating sweat glands that I realised I was also isolating hair follicles and the glands responsible for acne, the sebaceous glands. It seemed narrow- minded to ignore those by-products, and so I have also studied them.
Some of the reporters' questions were just silly. Everyone seemed fascinated by the fact that I was myself bald — was I trying to heal myself? No one believed that I did not care that I had lost my hair (and it was remarkable that the photographs in the Standard and the Times were angled to accentuate my bare pate).
Some of the questions were naughty.
The Today programme asked me to rank the discovery alongside those other Cam- bridge discoveries of gravity, the electron and DNA. What could I say but that our work was trivial? Yet the team in the lab gave me some dirty looks on my return from the studio.
Some of the questions were philosophic- al. CNN wanted to know if baldness was a disease at all. Should it even be treated? Baldness is caused by testosterone. Femin- ists will not be surprised to learn that, of the bodily changes associated with puber- ty, the offensive ones are all caused by testosterone, the male sex hormone. If women smell less than men, or erupt in fewer spots, or fight less, that is only because they have lower circulating levels of testosterone (but they do have some, fortunately: it is the testosterone which confers libido on both sexes). Another of testosterone's unfortunate consequences is baldness. If women are injected with tes- tosterone, as some sufferers from breast cancer are, then the same proportion of women will go bald as do men naturally hence the myth that baldness is associated with virility. Male and female hair follicles inherit equally the tendency to bald, and testosterone is only the trigger. All men carry sufficient testosterone to trigger bald- ness, should their follicles inherit the sensi- tivity, but no normal woman reaches those blood concentrations. Yet within the male population there is no correlation between testosterone levels and baldness. (It is also a myth that acne is caused by chocolate. It is caused by testosterone). Baldness, acne and body odour strike
most of us as undesirable, but the sociobiologists teach us that these phe- nomena reinforce important societal mes- sages. Acne, for example, has been de- scribed as the sexual traffic light — lust and fertility have been activated. (Acne' de- rives from acme, the peak time.) Baldness, presumably, signals male maturity and male leadership. In a healthy society like mediaeval China's, it might have been welcomed. 'You are looking delightfully bald these days, we must promote you.' But in our current worship of youth, the message is more ambivalent.
For many fit and healthy men, baldness comes as an unpleasant shock. It repre- sents the first stigma of middle age; it is a presentiment of mortality. Some men go to enormous lengths to disguise it. I know one patienf who, having run out of spare hair at the back of the head, insisted that his pubic hair be transplanted to cover the growing patches (the operation was performed in France). In America, when it was disco- vered that the blood pressure drug Minox- idil could, on occasion, restore some hair, bald men risked cardiac failure and death in their thousands, and created a black market, in their desperation for a cure. Who is to gainsay those men? Perhaps we who accept our baldness calmly are too complacent. Perhaps western civilisation was built by men who railed at fate. Perhaps we should encourage baldness as a fiscal goad. But we live in a free market, not a command economy, and the message from the chemists' counters is clear: men want a cure for baldness. Long may they: their vanity funds my research lab.
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