The Shocking White Hair

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Speaker 1 I'm Dr. Adam Rutherford.
And I'm Dr. Hannah Fry.
And you are going to send us your everyday mysteries. And we are going to investigate them using the power of science.
Science. Science.
I like it

Speaker 1 hello curios now last week at the beginning of the show we mentioned how uh you know we'd lost count or we'd stopped counting how many episodes we'd actually made

Speaker 1 a few times a few times and then i actually went back because i suddenly thought we must be close to the big ton what a century yeah So I counted and you know

Speaker 1 have we done 100 120 that was three series ago

Speaker 1 and today's program is in some ways it is a return to a theme that we actually began with, episode one.

Speaker 1 Hang on, we've missed our party. We did miss our party.
So we have to get to 500 before we can have another party. I actually think I won't live that long.

Speaker 1 But the first ever episode is the hardcore curiosity. Do you think that this series has made you go grey?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, spending 120 episodes with you has been nothing but a joy.

Speaker 1 But you remember that the first episode was... About gingerness.
About gingerness. First ever episode.

Speaker 1 Indeed, and actually, during that episode, you grew your beard long and we found that you had ginger hairs in your beard.

Speaker 1 And now, Adam, you don't have ginger hairs in your beard anymore. No, I don't.

Speaker 1 They've all gone white. They've all gone grey.
And that's what this episode is about of The Curious Cases. Enjoy.

Speaker 1 Now, earlier in the series, we addressed the question of what makes teenagers teenagers and today we are at the other end of the age spectrum.

Speaker 1 Well, more in the middle, in middle age, because for some of us, that's Adam and not me, it's a time where things start to change colour. I'm sorry, what are you talking about? Hair, of course.

Speaker 1 Right, yes, it is true. I am not quite in silver fox territory yet, but I'd say a solid salt and pepper, you know, a bit of George Cooney going on there.
If you say so, Adam.

Speaker 1 Today's question, though, came in from Andy Osmotherly from Warwickshire and asked, why do hairs go grey as we get older?

Speaker 1 And can you really scare or worry a person into going white or grey or is it just a myth? Okay well this should be easy.

Speaker 1 The question of going grey overnight in moments of extreme stress is called Kennedy's Subita and it's probably nonsense. No it isn't.
Yep it's probably nonsense.

Speaker 1 But it's happened to famous people in history. Oh do tell me more.
Alright Henry III of Navarre, a sudden blanche with a moustache possibly after escaping the horrors of the St.

Speaker 1 Bartholomew's Day massacre. More likely he'd been sipping on a frothy latte.
Alright then how about Sir Thomas More?

Speaker 1 He was Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, and the day before his execution, his hair and his beard turned white, and that is why it's sometimes called Thomas More syndrome.

Speaker 1 Much more likely they had bad dandruff caused by the imminent separation of head and body. Fine.
Okay, what about Marie Antoinette then?

Speaker 1 It's called Marie Antoinette syndrome for that very same reason. Her hair turned white the night before she met the business end of the guillotine.
To which I say, boof.

Speaker 1 It's not an argument, Adam. Boof.
All right, what about Mary Queen of Scots? What about Shah Jahar, who built the Taj Mahal? What about my friend Jane's cousin from Three Doors Down?

Speaker 1 As you well know, none of these are verifiably true, and especially not your cousin's Jane's neighbour from round the corner. Three doors down.
You could be wrong though, Adam, you know.

Speaker 1 Well, I could be, although I don't think I am, but luckily, I don't have to answer this question because we have two hair experts to help us.

Speaker 1 Des Tobin, Professor of Dermatological Science at University College Dublin School of Medicine.

Speaker 1 And Professor Vicki Jolliffe from Queen Mary University, who is a consultant dermatologist at the Royal London Hospital and the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth. Okay Vicky help me out here.

Speaker 1 Case for the defence. You can't just wake up overnight with white hair can you?

Speaker 6 Well actually it's not impossible.

Speaker 1 Right. Okay Des, I'm asking you for the case for the defence because Vicky hasn't helped me out at all here.

Speaker 5 I would say it's highly unlikely.

Speaker 1 That's much better. Well Vicky you've always been my favourite.
But hang on hang on Adam. Let me try and persuade you of this because I've got a case study for you.

Speaker 1 There's somebody who has actually happened to that we have had a chance to speak to. Captain Eric Moody, who is a British Airways pilot.

Speaker 1 And in 1982, he unknowingly flew his Boeing 747 jumbo through some volcanic ash on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth. And all four engines failed.

Speaker 7 We had rather an easy evening's work from Kuala Lumpur to Perth in Western Australia. And I was the captain on the flight.

Speaker 7 And it all went well for a couple of hours or so until we crossed the island of Java. And all the engines stopped, all four of them, almost instantaneously.

Speaker 7 And we all three sat on the flight deck of that aeroplane, very concerned that we'd done something wrong.

Speaker 7 We worked for, well, my flight engineer worked very hard for about 14, 15 minutes to get them all going again. And we descended from 37,000 feet down to 12,000 feet.

Speaker 7 We had other little emergencies on the way down. So it was quite a traumatic evening.

Speaker 7 But in the end, the engine started up up when we got down to about 12,000 feet and we landed in Jakarta and we found out we'd flown through a volcanic eruption.

Speaker 1 Now, not only is he having to contend with having four engines mysteriously failing, problems with oxygen and so on, but the telephone system that he normally talked to the cabin crew to explain what was happening, that wasn't even working.

Speaker 1 So Eric decided to use the passenger address to convey the situation to everyone on board at the same time.

Speaker 7 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Eric Moody.
We have a small problem in that all four engines have failed. We're doing our utmost to get them going.

Speaker 7 I trust you're not in too much distress. And would the senior cabin crew member please come to the flight deck?

Speaker 7 That in itself should have told the cabin crew to prepare for a crash landing or a ditching.

Speaker 1 I mean, Eric does sound incredibly calm and laconic there, although I think that might have also informed the passengers that they should prepare for a for a crash landing as well it's a good way to handle it though so you know eric's a very highly trained he's very experienced a skillful pilot and actually he did manage to land the plane safely had no landing lights the windscreen had been sandblasted couldn't see anything out the windows but he does admit that the whole experience did give him a bit of a moment of fear Do you know, I can honestly say it was just before the first engine started, something flashed through my mind.

Speaker 7 And it wasn't the death bit. It was that I was going to have to land this aeroplane in the sea, which is impossible.
My landing lights aren't working. I've had no lights to help me.

Speaker 7 I reckon we were dead. We were over one of the deepest trenches in the world where we were.
But it was a brief moment. It really was.
And then the first engine, the first one to fail, started up.

Speaker 1 Now, I mean, this is a super cool story, and I hope that Eric comes out the other side of it.

Speaker 7 He obviously did, but I feel like this needs to be leading up to a hair event oh i'm not going to disappoint you adam i woke up one morning and the front of my hair sort of the ends of the quiff had gone i like to call it fair had gone white and it took a little while then maybe six months to a year i went white all over except for a little ridge along the back which stayed black but i'd had no nightmares no flashbacks no nothing i never have there you go qed Case closed.

Speaker 1 He got scared. His hair went white.
It's not, though, at all. I mean, like, Captain Moody sounds super cool in that.
And we've looked at pictures of him now and he's total silver fox.

Speaker 1 But that didn't happen suddenly. He actually said it took six months to a year.
And also bonus points for mentioning his quiff.

Speaker 1 All right, okay. So, right, Captain Moody's one wasn't immediate, but it does sound like the stress of that event prompted his black hair to go white.
Doesn't it? Des, help me out here.

Speaker 5 I'd be very interested to know a little bit more about Mr. Moody in terms of what age he is, whether he's...

Speaker 1 He's 41 when it happened. He was 41.

Speaker 5 So he's likely to be well on his way to natural greying. Men tend to grey a little bit earlier than women.

Speaker 5 So I don't know where he was to begin with, but I'm sure a stressful event like that will have jolted his system, may have flipped some of his hormonal interactions around and may have definitely influenced his pigmentary system.

Speaker 5 But I would be interested to know how many of his passengers also went white in the six months following that particular experience.

Speaker 1 We do see it in people though. I remember particularly seeing a photograph of Barack Obama in 2009, perfectly dark hair, and then 2012, just three years later, and it's all gone white.

Speaker 1 I mean this does happen.

Speaker 5 I think Barack Obama's case is very striking and clearly he had entered a very stressful phase of his life.

Speaker 5 It's possible that he's also entered a period when he had very poor sleep and we know that sleep deficit has a huge impact on the aging process.

Speaker 5 Maybe his diet also was less robust than it was when he was a senator before. But yes, there is evidence of significant severe stress aging the body and aging the hair too.

Speaker 1 And yet when Donald Trump became president, his hair didn't change at all. Vicki, let's just turn to you to ask for some of the absolute basics of hair growth and pigmentation.

Speaker 6 I think the first thing that's important to say is that we're born with the number of follicles that we have. So once you're born, you've got the number that you're always going to have.

Speaker 6 And for most people, that's about 100,000 follicles for the average scalp.

Speaker 6 It's also completely normal to lose up to a hundred hairs a day which actually especially if you have long hair can seem quite an extraordinarily large amount of hairs to be shedding but that would fall within the normal spectrum.

Speaker 6 It's typical for us to grow hair at the rate of about one centimetre per month.

Speaker 6 The cycle itself is very interesting that part of the cycle which we're interested in in terms of pigmentation is called anagen which is the active growth part of the hair cycle.

Speaker 6 This usually lasts between three to seven years for an individual and it's during this stage that the hair becomes pigmented through melanin.

Speaker 1 So, melanin is the basic pigmentation that gives us any sort of colour in our body?

Speaker 6 Absolutely, both in our skin and in our hair.

Speaker 6 And in fact, the colour of our skin and hair is determined by the relative proportions of the black melanin or the eumelanin and the more yellowy orange melanin or the pheomelanin.

Speaker 6 And it's the ratio of those which will determine hair and skin colour.

Speaker 1 So, when you look at your two presenters of this programme, me of partial Indian descent, and I have quite a lot of ewe melanin, but Hannah is more. Orange melanin, all the way.
Orange.

Speaker 6 That's exactly right, Adam. Another point that is really important to get across is that people often say to me, Oh, well, hair is dead.
You know, why are we excited about this? It's a dead thing.

Speaker 6 Well, the shaft or the hair fibre that we see emerging from the scalp is obviously not a living thing, but it's being produced under the skin by an absolute powerhouse.

Speaker 6 The dermal papilla, their sort of engine house, if you like, which makes the hair follicle, is an incredibly bioactive process.

Speaker 6 It's actually as as active as bone marrow, for example, or the lining of the gut. So, this is a process which needs a lot of energy.

Speaker 6 It's using a lot of micronutrients, so it's a highly energy-dependent process, which is also dependent a lot on subtle changes in the environment, for example, in stress, in smoking, in micronutrients, etc.

Speaker 6 So, these factors are relevant both for the growth of the hair and for the pigmentation.

Speaker 1 And, of course, there's enormous variation in hair texture and colour and density all over over the world, people with different ethnicities. Does that play into how pigmentation is distributed?

Speaker 6 It does indeed. It certainly also plays into how quickly one is likely to go grey and indeed the distribution of pigment.

Speaker 6 So, again, people tend to grey first if they're men around the temples, whereas women perhaps in the frontal area of the scalp.

Speaker 6 And the occiput or the little bit at the back of your head is the last area to go grey, and that may well reflect different levels of melanocyte reserves, if you like, from the stem cells in those particular areas on the scalp.

Speaker 1 And of course, like we're generalising hugely here because there's an enormous amount of variation in hair, colour, texture, and that varies between different ethnicities and different populations and different groups.

Speaker 6 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 And some of that will, of course, be related to the relative proportions of eumelanin and pheomelanin, but also to the shape of the actual hair follicle, the structure itself, whether it is curved, as for example in individuals with afro-textured hair, or more straight, as we find in individuals with a Caucasian type of hair.

Speaker 6 So there are multiple factors behind the actual appearance of the hair when it's come from the scalp.

Speaker 1 Well Des, okay, I might be stating the obvious here then, but when your hair goes grey, presumably that is about losing pigmentation, losing some of the melanin that Vicky was talking about there.

Speaker 1 Do we have any idea of how or why that happens?

Speaker 5 Increasingly, so the cells that make the melanin, the so-called melanocytes, are situated in the root of the hair and they get there through our embryogenesis when we're in a mother's womb.

Speaker 5 And that's why different parts of the scalp may have different tones of color or even different propensity to go grey earlier than in other parts of the scalp.

Speaker 5 But in each single hair follicle, we have a little factory of pigment production or melanin production. The cells that make that melanin are, like all cells, exposed to aging and stress forces.

Speaker 5 So with time, there seems to be a loss in the total number of these cells, but also the ability of each individual cell to make a certain package of melanin. So we have two things happening.

Speaker 5 We have a reduction in the cell number, but we also have a reduction in the capacity of each cell to make its full complement of pigment.

Speaker 1 And do we know how it happens? I mean, do we know if it just sort of all shuts down when a new hair comes through or whether you can sort of change as the hair is going along?

Speaker 5 I'm a believer that we can change as the hair is growing. So as Vicky mentioned, single follicle can continue to grow its hair fiber for up to six, seven years.

Speaker 5 So we have significant evidence of within that six-year period of hair shaft, we can see dilution of pigment and in some cases reversing of that dilution.

Speaker 5 So that would suggest that all that can happen during the actual process of making melanin and we don't need to wait for that hair to fall out and for the next generation of hair to grow in for that pigment shift to occur.

Speaker 1 I noticed you said there, I'm a believer, which is not famously a scientific phrase.

Speaker 1 Does that mean that there are some people who believe the opposite, that it only comes through when you get a new hair? You spotted my Achilles heel there, absolutely.

Speaker 5 Much of pigmentation science is based around mouse data. And in the typical black mouse, the hair will grow for a very short amount of time, typically weeks.

Speaker 5 So much of the data we get from aging of the hair follicle is coming from the mouse. And in that animal, you obviously wait for it to go grey by waiting for that cycle to turn.

Speaker 5 So wait a couple of months and then you have a new hair. So there's a lot of clear evidence that white hair grows in in that particular species.

Speaker 5 But going back to the human, if for example you haven't cut your hair, you can show that that greying has occurred during the process where that individual cycle is producing the fibre.

Speaker 1 White at the top by the root and coloured down the bottom.

Speaker 5 Typically that would be the normal way that you see the mass of hair or the array of hair to go. You would have the younger hair white and the older hair pigmented.

Speaker 5 So the root would be showing white fibre and the tip would be showing its original pigmented fibre.

Speaker 1 So finding these kind of scalp hairs where you can see exactly where a hair has turned white along its length while it's been growing, that's been part of Martin Picard's research, who's an aging researcher at Columbia University.

Speaker 1 That means he's someone who researches aging, not that he's just getting older, because we all are. We had a chat with him about his search for these elusive two-tone hairs.

Speaker 8 I had never never seen hairs like this. I had never looked.
But when I told my partner about this idea, she said, Well, I've seen hairs like this on my head before.

Speaker 8 And then she went to the bathroom and she came back and

Speaker 8 she had a couple of hairs that were part dark and part white. And then when we started to look, we ended up with 17 people who sent us two-colored hairs in Ziploc bags.

Speaker 8 And then some of them we followed up with, and we had them complete a diary with specific events that occurred over the past year and so on.

Speaker 8 I have about now 50 emails from people from all over the world that said, you know, now I know I'm not crazy. Like I have these two colored hairs.
My hair was gray and now it's dark.

Speaker 8 So this two colored hair demonstrates visually that this age-related process of graying is truly reversible.

Speaker 1 I mean, keeping hair in a bag is a little bit serial killer anyway, but the point is, as Martin said, he's asked these people who'd sent him their hairs to chart their life events over the last year.

Speaker 1 The idea being to match those events to the right point on on the hair and measure its color at the time.

Speaker 1 Not only did Martin find that stressful events correlated really well with the appearance of greying in the hair shaft, but also its disappearance once those events had changed.

Speaker 8 When we aligned this stress profile with the profile and the graph of the hair, that was dark, white, and dark, the similarity was astonishing.

Speaker 8 In particular, one of our participants who had a hair that was dark and then white for two centimeters or two months, and then the hair, boom, went back to its original.

Speaker 8 This person said, Well, you know, these were the most stressful two months of my life, right there in the middle. That corresponded exactly with the graying.

Speaker 8 She broke up with her partner and she had to travel over from the US to Europe, and she didn't know whether to take this job or that job.

Speaker 8 And she said, These were the most stressful two months of my life. And then in the end, she ended up moving to New York City and she felt better.
Her stress level of the graph fell from a 10 to a two.

Speaker 8 And that's exactly when the hair started going back to being dark again.

Speaker 8 The reversibility of hair graying is so interesting because it shows that there is plasticity, that there is malleability in the aging process.

Speaker 1 Des, I'm surprised that if this is possible for your hair to go from being grey back to having pigment again, surely there's money in this. I mean, have people not tried to look into this?

Speaker 5 It's very interesting on a number of levels, partly reflecting our total aging process as a body, but as you say, the aesthetic or cosmetic impact of it. That study that Dr.

Speaker 5 Picard was referring to had participants somewhere in their 20s and 30s. So my reading of that study would suggest that those individuals are at the very, very beginning.
of their greying period.

Speaker 5 So there is greater chance of reversibility occurring at those early days rather than if those individuals were say 20, 30 years older than that.

Speaker 5 So absolutely there's a huge cosmetic interest in this. It's one of the kind of harbingers of lost youth.
So people would like to kind of push that back.

Speaker 5 But you know, you can keep your hair pigmented, but your skin will age. So you'll end up with kind of discordance there, too.
So what do you do?

Speaker 1 It's too late for Adam. That's essentially what I hate.
Steady on. Well, I've got this sort of reverse question, Vicky.
What about...

Speaker 1 So we're talking about how hair can change colour if you live through periods of extreme stress, like flying through a volcano or your girlfriend leaving you or whatever.

Speaker 1 What about people who are just generally happy, who live good, positive lives? They still go grey as well, don't they?

Speaker 6 They do. I think a very important thing to take into consideration here is that your genes.
You know, what's happened in your family? Do you have a family history of early greying, for example?

Speaker 6 Or, you know, have a look round and get some sort of lineage idea in terms of the age of onset of greying in your family. And that's a very important thing to take into consideration.

Speaker 6 In people who may be greying perhaps earlier than we might expect, and for Caucasians, that would be perhaps before the age of 20.

Speaker 6 For those with Asian hair type, perhaps before the age of 25,

Speaker 6 and Afro-textured hair, maybe in their 30s that are so much later onset of typical greying and it may be that there's a genetic predisposition to greying which has then been precipitated perhaps by events such as stress which can cause oxidative damage to the process of generating melanin and oxidative damage releases free radicals which can then interfere quite significantly with the manufacturing of the melanin and therefore precipitate a greying in these circumstances.

Speaker 1 And that's what knocks out the melanin and that's what causes the the follicle to stop.

Speaker 6 Well, we think so. We think that what can happen is it actually paradoxically may have a bit of an acceleration in the processes, and then the whole thing gets depleted in terms of its supplies.

Speaker 6 And actually, what is interesting is if you look at greying hair, it actually seems to have a bit of a burst of energy paradoxically.

Speaker 6 It's not just sort of turning up its toes and stopping the process, it's actually

Speaker 6 using up a lot of energy. And a greying hair will grow faster than a non-greying hair.
So, that in itself tells us some interesting science about the biological processes that are going on.

Speaker 1 One thing I've really noticed as about grey hairs is that they tend to sort of stick out in lots of different directions. Is that just because they stand out more or do they actually do that?

Speaker 5 I think they actually do that and I'm focusing my answer really around Caucasian hair now because it may be different across the different ethnicities.

Speaker 5 But there's something about the changeover between a pigmented and a naturally greying hair that leads to a different fiber being formed. So it tends to have wider diameter or caliber.

Speaker 5 And if you look in the center of the hair shaft, you see the emergence of another structure called the medulla.

Speaker 5 I would often liken it to a kind of tubular steel effect where you get this kind of inner core that's kind of almost empty. It's there in the coarser hair.

Speaker 5 So we see it a lot in the beard of adult males and in the scalp, particularly in the greying phase. And the addition of that structure, think about it a little bit like a tubular steel.

Speaker 5 It can be very robust and strong even though the whole core of it is largely empty and it therefore is less inclined to lie flat less inclined to bend so it's it's much harder to colour artificially through a dye and so there's many many physical changes to the fiber but that's temporary usually by the time the person gets to their 70s or 80s the hair becomes much more aligned again the diameter shrinks again and it becomes a bit more refined looking again and appear more like it did when it was fully pigmented.

Speaker 1 I feel terribly seen in this whole conversation.

Speaker 1 And you're having this conversation about my beard right now, and what you're saying is that these sticky, outy white ones on my chin are going to get softer in another 40 years.

Speaker 5 Well, they're probably at their most robust phase right now.

Speaker 1 That's nicely put, isn't it? Yeah, let's just go back to the original point.

Speaker 1 Those historical cases that Hannah seems very wedded to, such as Marie Antoinette or Thomas More or the others that she listed, that I think are historically dubious.

Speaker 1 What do you think about trying to apply some scientific scrutiny? Did Marie Antoinette's hair go white because she was super stressed about having her head cut off?

Speaker 6 So, this is a really interesting question. And the problem with the historical records is that, of course, they're not really validated.
We haven't got absolute

Speaker 6 sort of photographic evidence or anything that we might want these days to.

Speaker 1 Don't back out on me.

Speaker 6 But what I would say is that there is an autoimmune condition of hair loss called alopecia areata, which is a condition where the body sort of attacks its own hair follicles and it preferentially will launch an attack against pigmented hair follicles.

Speaker 6 So in an individual who had say salt and pepper type hair and developed alopecia areata, then the pepper hairs would preferentially be shed, leaving you with the white, the salt appearance.

Speaker 6 And that can happen pretty quickly. To be fair, overnight, I think is

Speaker 6 being generous, but it could certainly happen within a few days or a week. week that you could experience this.

Speaker 6 But again, it's taking a slight assumption that that individual had that salt and pepper hair in the beginning.

Speaker 1 And do we know if her

Speaker 1 Marie Antoinette had like a war hair?

Speaker 6 Well, we don't know, but I mean, her age might perhaps help us to make a guesstimate of that.

Speaker 1 Is it not more likely, using the scientific principle of parsimony, that she just ran out of hair dye while she was in prison?

Speaker 6 Well, Adam, I think that's a very prosaic answer for what is a historically fantastic fact that keeps us dermatologists chatting for hours.

Speaker 1 Okay, Dez, I noticed you were a bit sceptical at the beginning about all of this. Now, I like to do my homework.

Speaker 1 So, I have found a literature review that describes 46, count them, Adam, 46 authenticated cases where a doctor or a physician had seen the person before and after the sudden whitening of their hair.

Speaker 1 Not just scalp hair, there was facial hair, there was eyelashes, there was body hair, too.

Speaker 1 How do you possibly explain that?

Speaker 5 46 cases.

Speaker 5 It's not that impressive in terms of a

Speaker 5 randomised clinically controlled study.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 I think essentially it's probably a case of alopeciariata in the vast majority of those cases.

Speaker 5 You can lose up to a third of the density of the hair without it noticeably going bald if the hair loss is in a diffuse pattern.

Speaker 5 So if you had, say, two-thirds of your hair white and one-third of your hair black, and you lost the one-third that was pigmented, you're going to unmask all those white hair and suddenly it looks like you've gone white.

Speaker 1 Let me make sure I understand this thing. So you've got loads of hair, and some of it's white and some of it's darker,

Speaker 1 and then you get really scared because you're in the French Revolution for whatever reason,

Speaker 1 and then hair falls out, but only the darker hair.

Speaker 5 Yes, I think that the immune system in general, the whole body immune system, is being jolted at that particular point.

Speaker 5 So, that if you were looked into many organs, you would probably find a momentary blip happening everywhere in the body. It's just that visually we can see it in the accessibility of the hair.

Speaker 5 But I think that there's something happening to the immune system of those individuals at the point of the psychosocial shock or whatever that is actually wobbling the immune system to the point where the normal checks and balances that would allow those pigmented follicles to be unaffected are now become visible to the immune system in a certain way and unfortunately visible as a foreign entity in the person's own body.

Speaker 5 And that kind of autoimmune attack seems to be targeted toward them.

Speaker 1 There are some cases though aren't there that have even been sort of verified by a doctor where there's no reported hair loss.

Speaker 1 I mean, you're talking about losing a lot of hair here and surely you'd notice.

Speaker 5 I noticed my hair loss for sure, but I've lost a lot more than one-third.

Speaker 5 But if you have a really dense head of hair, like the Bill Clinton type of head of hair, he could probably get away with a third less hair.

Speaker 5 And he still looked like he got better head of hair than most men. So I really do think that it's an unusual case of alopeciariata.
Alopeciariata is not that rare. The lifetime risk of probably 2%.

Speaker 5 That's a lot more than 46 cases.

Speaker 1 How about hydrogen peroxide? Isn't there a theory that that could be bleaching the hair?

Speaker 5 Hydrogen peroxide is a natural substance. It's not just something you get from the chemists in a bottle.
Your body cells make hydrogen peroxide.

Speaker 5 Indeed, it needs to make hydrogen peroxide, but it's all about the dose. The poison really is in the dose.
So if you make small amounts of hydrogen peroxide, it drives your body reactions.

Speaker 5 If you make too much, it can obviously damage them. So there is some evidence from a couple of papers suggesting that as you gray, the follicles start to make perhaps too much hydrogen peroxide.

Speaker 5 Now, whether that is enough to bleach out the full length of the fibers, I doubt very much, but it could damage the pigment-producing cells in the root to make less pigment in the future.

Speaker 5 That's the more likely connection, I think, with hydrogen peroxide.

Speaker 1 But not like a fuse traveling down the hair.

Speaker 5 No, not in real life.

Speaker 1 I'm claiming absolute victory in this case. Okay, but what about if a kangaroo saw a ghost? I don't think you're taking this seriously at all.
Maybe not.

Speaker 1 So, Dr. Fry, in the case of shocking white hair, can we say case solves? Yes, Dr.
Ruthford. Hair changes in pigmentation over the course of our lifetimes that can be sent grey or white by stress.

Speaker 1 This process is sometimes reversible. And there are people whose entire head of hair became more pigmented when they relaxed and went on holiday.

Speaker 1 But hair turning white overnight, we can probably say probably not. Apart from Marie Antoinette.
Where we can be almost certain that she ran out of hair dye in a revolutionary French prison.

Speaker 1 Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I don't like losing arguments.

Speaker 1 You did kind of set yourself up for a fail there. What I've noticed is that if you just proclaim victory, then actually often people believe you.
So it's a good job I won that one, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Yes, well done. You definitely won that one.
You know that thing about older people though?

Speaker 1 I really like the idea of, you know, older people going back to that soft hair, you know, that sort of young soft soft hair.

Speaker 1 That's a really beautiful memory, like that soft brush that a granny has when you pull it through her hair. With their hair like a sort of cloud.
Yeah, it's lovely. Or a bow bun.

Speaker 1 My dad's nearly 80, and he still has fully pigmented hair. It's extraordinary.
I think you're going to be all right. I mean, I felt, I did feel a bit seen during that whole episode.

Speaker 1 I don't feel the pangs of middle age too badly, but I do have a slightly grey beard. Yes, you're still a very dashing man, Adam Rutherford.

Speaker 1 Actually, I did a lecture at the Royal Institution recently that you were there, but you were sitting in the front row seats.

Speaker 1 One of my friends, who very kindly came to see me give this talk, was sitting up in the balcony. And afterwards, we went to the pub for a drink.

Speaker 1 And his first comment was, you're really going bald on the top. The lights were just shining.
Oh, Pam's back and she's got the thing. She's back.
Oh, thank goodness for that.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Pam.

Speaker 1 I think, though, with you saying that, Adam, I sort of think,

Speaker 1 I think if you don't feel like you're bald, then I think that some of you are not.

Speaker 1 I think this a lot whenever I see myself on TV, because whenever I walk around in normal life, I don't feel like a particularly large person, right?

Speaker 1 But whenever I see myself on TV, I'm like, good God, she is a giant.

Speaker 1 Like, she's actually towering over everyone. But I sort of think, well, if you don't feel like it in real life, then it's not true.
So if you just believe that you're not bald. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a bit like saying you've won an argument. Should we do Curia of the Week?

Speaker 1 Right. So Curio of the Week, I've come into this this completely blind.
I've got no idea what the notes are, who Curia of the Week is. That's really good.

Speaker 1 But Pam has just delivered to us a sheaf of paper and given it to

Speaker 1 okay, in the most elegant hand you can possibly imagine, we have a beautifully penned letter and it says, dear Drs Rutherford and Fry, hopefully this letter makes it to you.

Speaker 1 Well, it did indeed make it to us. I emailed these caricatures to you before Christmas as it didn't occur to me that I could simply post them to the BBC and stamp your names across the envelope.

Speaker 1 Clearly, my subconscious does not believe itself worthy of writing into the lofty realms of Broadcasting House.

Speaker 1 Well, Harriet, as we know you are called, believe me, this building is not quite the fantasy cathedral of creativity you imagine it to be.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I thought, Racket, hoped, that you may like to have actual hard copies maybe to make you smile while you broadcast.

Speaker 1 And essentially, Harriet has created these absolutely beautiful drawings of you and I. They are quite something.
Show me.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Oh, that's so cool.

Speaker 1 All right, so we've got to describe them. Basically, we are both, well, Hannah is a shield maiden called Fire Fry.

Speaker 1 She's literally on fire. and has a giraffe behind her, which is what I'm saying.
It's quite Viking, isn't it? Oh, it's so amazing.

Speaker 1 Well, you've got antlers. And then there's me, and I have a massive moustache, more hair than I've got.
Thank you, Harriet.

Speaker 1 And I'm Adam Davidson and his badger-tailed raccoon.

Speaker 1 I'm going to put mine on the wall. I think that's really good.
What I should say is, you'll notice that mine's quite a bit bigger than yours. It is.

Speaker 1 And it says here: the size of each caricature does not reflect any preference for either doctor. I merely ran out of the larger paper.
Harriet, these are absolutely spectacular.

Speaker 1 We'll put them on the website so that everyone can see the marvelousness of your giraffe and raccoon and us. It's a good moustache.
Look at that.

Speaker 1 Honestly, it's spectacular. These are absolutely terrific.
Harriet, you are curio of the week. As always, it's me doing the end.

Speaker 1 I've already left. You can feel free to send us in your questions, your curio of the week entries, anything you like, really.

Speaker 1 Just comments on Adam's moustache and salt and pepper beard and his dashingness and/or baldness. Two curiouscases at bbc.co.uk.
See you next week.

Speaker 4 Death by Conspiracy, a new podcast from BBC Radio 4. Gary Matthews was an artist and photographer, a familiar sight on the streets of his hometown in Shropshire.

Speaker 4 But in the last few years, he was drawn to conspiracies. And when the pandemic hit, Gary, who was suspicious of experts, ignored the rules.

Speaker 4 When he died of COVID-19, his distraught family and friends were left searching for answers.

Speaker 4 I'm Marianna Spring, the BBC's specialist disinformation reporter, and I've been investigating what happened to Gary by delving into the conspiracy underbelly of the picturesque town of Shrewsbury.

Speaker 4 From BBC Radio 4, Death by Conspiracy, a new 10-part podcast series. Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 9 I earned my degree online at Arizona State University.

Speaker 9 I chose to get my degree at ASU because I knew that I'd get a quality education, they were recognized for excellence, and that I would be prepared for the workforce upon graduating.

Speaker 9 To be associated with ASU, both as a student and alum, it makes me extremely proud. And having experienced the program, I know now that I'm set up for success.
Learn more at ASUonline.asu.edu.

Speaker 10 I'm Jason Connell, creative director of Ghost of Yotay, and I am here with Vince Gilligan on Sony's Creator to Creator.

Speaker 11 As a showrunner, you can do that job any way you want. You can just concentrate on the writer's room and work on story.

Speaker 11 You can pick any particular thing that feels like it's in your wheelhouse, like editing or whatnot. I am kind of a control freak, and I love all that stuff, and I love directing.

Speaker 10 Listen to Creator to Creator wherever you listen to your podcast.