THERE'S NOTHING LIKE A REDHEAD!

Medicine and Health Rhode Island,  Jan 2006  by Aronson, Stanley M

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British newspapers, earlier this year, carried an advertisement urging readers to switch to another brand of gasoline. The crucial phrase was the adage: "There are some things in life you can't choose." To illustrate this, they included a picture of a family, all with red hair. This generated many letters of protest from ginger-topped readers who were outraged that the natural color of their hair should be so disparaged, so demeaned. One indignant letter even labeled it as "reddism,"akin to sexism.

Admittedly, the number of people born with red hair, a recessive hereditary trait, is small, with some estimates signifying that it is about 3% of humanity. And while red hair is encountered in every region and ethnic group, certain regions, such as Celtic northwestern Europe, are the sites of relatively large numbers. Tacitus, the Roman historian, described the Picts of northern Britain as having red hair and large limbs. In general, red-headedness seems to increase in frequency in the northern latitudes and diminish substantially in the tropics. The Scots, with the world's heaviest concentration of redheads, have ascribed many traits to these individuals, including a greater readiness to sunburn, a more fiery temperament, a more mercurial nature and a feisty personality. According to surveys of Scottish males, a red-headed league unto themselves, women with red hair are "more sexually attractive and vivacious".

The number of red-headed actresses in motion pictures far exceeds the 3% that one would anticipate if the trait were evenly distributed, thus giving some credence to the Scottish survey findings. A cursory review indicates that the following well-known performers are alleged to have been red-headed at birth: Lucille Ball, Clara Bow, Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Susan Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Katherine Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Nicole Kidman, Shirley MacLain, Bette Midler, Maureen O'Hara, Julia Roberts and Ginger Rogers. [And, parenthetically, Queen Elizabeth I, Ann Boleyn, Nell Gwynn and Lilith.] Amongst male actors, there are Woody Alien, James Cagney, Van Johnson, Danny Kaye, Darren McGavin, Chuck Norris, Robert Redford, Red Skelton and Spencer Tracy.

Red hair is not unknown amongst great political leaders, such as Napoleon Bonaparte as well as a handful of American presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Thor, the belligerent Nordic god of thunder and mayhem, is said to have been red-headed; but so, too, were the Cabbage Patch Kids and Raggedy Andy.

On the other hand, there are exceptional instances where red-headedness is brought on by severe malnutrition rather than by genetic predisposition. In 1934 Dr. Cicely Williams reported a severe form of protein-calorie nutritional deficiency in African infants, often emerging shortly after the infant ceases breast-feeding and is transferred to a calorie-poor, carbohydrate-rich diet. The hollow-eyed, affected infant shows failure of growth, pronounced swelling of the abdomen, lethargy, peeling skin and a lightening of its hair color, often assuming a distinct reddishness. Africans called such malnourished children kwashiokor, meaning the displaced child. Kwashiokor children are often singled out by Western photographers when they wish to illustrate the gravity of famine in Africa. Kwashiokor has been only rarely encountered in Western regions although cases were noted in the starving children of the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

Has science identified any biological attributes associated with conventional red-headedness? Certainly red-heads, almost always excessively fair-skinned, are more sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. But more important, they are also victims of a substantially higher frequency of skin cancer. This has puzzled scientists until recently when investigators, culturing the pigment-forming cells at the base of hair follicles, discovered that a crucial gene responsible for hair color is the melananocortin-1 receptor; and a single mutation of this gene seems to be the basis for the reddish hue of hair. And further, that the pigment-producing skin cells of red-heads and thus the cells containing this mutation, are quantitatively more vulnerable to a greater range of solar radiation. The ensuing cellular damage often leads to profound chemical changes in the skin culminating in disruption of the skin cell DNA which, in turn, often leads to a cancerous transformation.

Are there still other physiological ramifications of redheadedness? Another team of scientists has discovered that red-headed women [but not men] are more sensitive to the effects of certain pain-suppressing pharmaceutical agents and therefore require reduced dosages of the analgesic drug to achieve a satisfactory level of pain relief. On the other hand, red-heads, in general, need more general anesthesia than the average patient in order to reach a satisfactory level of relief from the pain associated with surgery.

These physiological observations in red-headed women suggest that the biochemical substrate which results in a distinctive hair color, may also afreet the function of other organs, including the central nervous system. It is not a total stretch of the imagination to speculate that if the nervous system of red-headed women reacts differently to pain as well as to certain neurotropic medications, then such a modified nervous system might also alter the threshold levels for particular emotional states, and perhaps enhance still other, as yet unidentified, cognitive capabilities leading to intensified skills in acting.