The fascination
When asked how you stay in research for 40 years, the answer for Paul Michael is simple. "I am fascinated by light", he states. His interest started out with rainbows, which made him decide, that he needed to know all the details about the light and the different colors.
Paul Michael himself describes his research as inspired partly by nature, partly by himself.
The professor believes that you can achieve important new research contributions if it concerns something that you yourself have experience with. He explains that it is difficult to invent or develop something new because everyone reads the same textbooks. But if we include personal experience, which is something that is not described in textbooks, then you can discover something unique.
Paul Michael explains the starting point for all his research: “I have asked myself what the most important thing in life is. Is it the green transition, or is it health? And then I think that if you are to do green transition research in the right way, then it’s really a matter of making a healthy planet. And then we must start with ourselves, so in reality the two things are connected".
The human
Paul Michael has a long history of collaborations with the Danish hospital system. He explains that he finds a lot of inspiration in interdisciplinary research. "I connect well with doctors" he says himself and believes that in many cases he has been let inside the hospitals because of good personal chemistry. "That is very important", he explains - there is no doubt about that when he mentions the numerous senior doctors, surgeons, neuroscientists, and obstetricians scattered throughout the country's hospitals with whom he has collaborated.
A long-standing collaboration with Rigshospitalet and Bispebjerg hospital has resulted in the development of a special light that can help people with depression.
We know that certain brain waves can relieve depression. They can be triggered by magnetic stimulation, but Paul Michael has shown that it can also be done with light if you design it correctly. Among other things, the light must contain the right colors and be used at specific times of the day.
With Hillerød Hospital, Paul Michael has designed a special light for people giving birth. It turned out that certain light could contribute to reducing the number of spontaneous caesareans - meaning those that occur during childbirth - by more than 40%.
For the past five years, Paul Michael, in collaboration with other researchers at the department, has explored nanostructures that can reduce the number of bacteria and are used in implants. As enthusiastic as the professor is about his external collaborations, he expresses just as much joy in working with skilled colleagues at DTU.
Serious diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have also been a part of Paul Michael’s research. He has worked on light, which can activate the brain activity in the degrading part of the brain in Alzheimer's patients. The preliminary results show that the brain degrades less, and that the patient gets better cognitive skills. And as of right now, he is working on a small optical probe that sends light into the brain and gives electrical signals that can relieve tremors in Parkinson's patients.
The planet
Biodiversity is also a theme for the professor's research, because, as he explains, health is not just about humans: "If we want to live in a healthy world, we must ensure that there is a balance. That we do not create technical solutions that work for ourselves, but are, for example, harmful to other animals".
Amongst other things Paul Michael works with, how streetlights affect insects and birds, and he says that the research shows that the animals are stressed by streetlights, so that they disappear from the cities and urban green areas. There has been no knowledge about this before, but it can be solved by designing the wavelengths in the light differently so that they still provide good lighting allowing us to see, but without stressing the animals.
Paul Michael explains that it is not only in the interests of the animals that problems like this are solved. The darkness hormone melatonin is essential for a large number of nocturnal animals to find food, but it is also absolutely essential for animals and humans alike to sleep. This hormone is suppressed by certain types of light. If you use that light at night, you ruin the good life not only for animals but also for people.
The greatest achievement
According to himself, Paul Michael's biggest research achievement is light-assisted antibiotics. Special light can make antibiotics more effective, and in this way, you can reduce the amount of antibiotics needed.
Reducing the amount of antibiotics will mean that we get much less resistance. The professor says that we have been talking about COVID for many years now, but that the next big health problem for the world is going to be antibiotic resistance. Because the day antibiotics no longer work, there will be a long list of simple diseases that we cannot treat.
Light, on the other hand, is something that is not harmful if you know in which doses and wavelengths to use it.
The journey towards light-assisted antibiotics started on Paul Michael's patio in Hillerød, where he sat outside and saw that there were algae in the shade, but outside the shade the sun's rays had removed the algae. And then he thought: "You can do that with bacteria". With nature as a direct source of inspiration, he believed that there must be wavelengths in this light that could help reduce the amount of bacteria, in the same way as antibiotics.
Despite the fact that many believed the project would never succeed, the professor was convinced that it would if he set aside the time and was systematic.
It is not the first time that light has been used in medical treatment. Paul Michael refers to how Finsen won a Nobel Prize for treating skin tuberculosis with sunlight, but adds that Finsen had poor options then, and that today we have fantastic options. We have been given LED technology so that we can design light ourselves, and Paul Michael describes it as both a huge task and an opportunity to use the technology in a good way.
The future
Paul Michael believes that in many cases we use technology in an uncritical way, and that we need to reflect more on what the good effects and the bad effects are of new technologies - like with antibiotics, which was fantastic in the beginning, but if you use too much of it, there will be some very serious consequences.
The professor puts it simply: "To achieve the healthy life, you have to be reflective and critical".
He believes that we are now beginning to understand how light affects people. And if you ask him here on his 40th jubilee, where research into light sources will be 40 years from now, he replies that we will have developed a completely new understanding of how we should use light to solve a wide range of health-related problems, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer's. For these serious diseases, light will play an absolutely decisive role, but Paul Michael believes that it requires us not only to just consider our own skills, but to combine them with knowledge from other specialist groups. He imagines that there will be much more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future, as this is the key to good research.
