Comment from Liliana Lettieri

As both a citizen and a scientist, I strongly support the Soft Lights Foundation’s call for a comprehensive, federally funded investigation into the safety and long-term health and environmental impacts of LED lighting. My training is in biology and physiology, where I studied how light environments affect living organisms across both short and long timescales. This work led me to a fundamental insight that remains underrepresented in public discourse: non-visible wavelengths of light exert powerful biological effects, even in organisms that lack the anatomical structures to “see” them. Biology responds to light far beyond vision. My own health challenges prompted a deeper examination of the scientific literature, which reveals substantial evidence that near-infrared and infrared wavelengths, now predominantly absent from LED-based lighting systems, are not optional or ancillary. These wavelengths play essential roles in cellular function, metabolic regulation, tissue repair, and long-term resilience. Given the near-universal and rapidly expanding use of LED lighting, it is both scientifically responsible and ethically necessary to rigorously investigate the full biological and environmental consequences of altering the spectral composition of light at this scale. A federally supported, independent research effort is long overdue and essential for protecting public health.