Nature has an interesting piece on scientists and tattoos! Yep, cool scientists are getting tattooed along with Secretaries of Defense and all the lonely people. Nature notes:
... had wanted a tattoo for years, so when she finished her neuroscience PhD in 2019, she knew it was time. “It made sense that once I had my PhD, I would commemorate it this way,” she says. Barry’s research focused mainly on hearing-loss disorders, such as tinnitus, and she spent a lot of time looking at auditory thalamus neurons, the nerve cells that help to process sound. These were often stained using the Golgi method, highlighting the neuron’s cell body and dendrites that resemble tree roots and tendrils — and would make for a good fine-line tattoo. In 2021, she got the tattoo — aptly, behind her ear. “I really didn’t expect my tattoo to play as much of a part in my identity, but it just felt right,” says Barry, who is now a research fellow at the University of Western Australia and Curtin University in Perth. She’s not alone. Many scientists mark research accomplishments and career milestones by heading to a tattoo par
However, less than a year ago a Lancet article noted:
The popularity of tattoos has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Tattoo ink often contains carcinogenic chemicals, e.g., primary aromatic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and metals. The tattooing process invokes an immunologic response that causes translocation of tattoo ink from the injection site. Deposition of tattoo pigment in lymph nodes has been confirmed but the long-term health effects remain unexplored. We used Swedish National Authority Registers with full population coverage to investigate the association between tattoo exposure and overall malignant lymphoma as well as lymphoma subtypes.
That is not at all surprising. Tattoos elicit a massive immune response, resulting in methylation of histones and resulting in suppression and activation of lymphoma generating genes! Do these scientists have a clue!
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