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John, thank you so much for being here. I'd love to hear a little bit about your research background. How did it bring you to tattoos and tattooing?
约翰，非常感谢你能来作客。我很想听听关于你研究背景的一些情况。它是如何让你接触到纹身和纹身艺术的？
So I'm a photochemist by training, which means I think about how light interacts with molecules and can drive chemistry.
我是一名受过培训的光化学家，这意味着我会思考光如何与分子相互作用并驱动化学反应。
And one of the areas we got really interested in was trying to understand why light causes tattoos to fade.
我们非常感兴趣的领域之一是想要理解为什么光会让纹身褪色。
This is a huge question when you think about something with laser tattoo removal, where you're talking about an industry on the scale of $1 billion a year.
这个问题很宏大，说到用激光去除纹身，这可是一个每年规模达10亿美元的行业。
And it turns out we really don't understand that process.
事实表明，我们完全不明白这个过程。
And so starting to look at how the tattoo pigments change when you expose them to light, what that might be doing in the skin, then led us to a lot of other questions about tattoos that we realized weren't well understood--even something as simple as what's actually in tattoo ink.
因此，当我们开始研究纹身颜料暴露在光线下会如何变化，以及它们在皮肤中可能产生的影响时，我们发现了许多其他关于纹身的问题，并且意识到这些问题我们并不是很明白——甚至连纹身墨水到底是什么这种简单的问题我们都不知道。
As someone with tattoos, the question of how they react to sunlight is, of course, a really practical concern in terms of caring for tattoos long term.
作为有纹身的人，纹身在阳光下会有何反应，这是个非常实际的问题，它关乎纹身的长期护理。
But yeah, it wouldn't have occurred to me that even the laser removal industry doesn't really know what's going on there.
没错，我甚至没想到连激光去除行业的人也不明白这里面的原理。
That's so fascinating.
这太神奇了。
So tattoo ink, what are some of the big issues your lab is concerned with?
那纹身墨水，你的实验室关注的主要问题是什么？
As we were doing a lot of our work, trying to understand something about the interaction of light and tattoos, we started noticing a lot of things in the ink that weren't listed as being component in its makeup.
我们做了很多工作，试图了解一些关于光和纹身的相互作用，我们发现墨水中有很多东西并没有被列在成分表中。
And so recently we've been looking at commercial tattoo inks and sort of surprised to find that in the overwhelming majority of them, we're seeing things that are not listed as part of the ingredients....
最近我们一直在研究商业纹身墨水，并且有点意外地发现，在绝大多数墨水中，我们发现了没有被列在成分表中的东西。
Now that doesn't necessarily mean the things that are in these inks are unsafe, but it does cause a huge problem if you want to try to understand something about the safety of tattoos.
这并不一定意味着墨水中的这些东西是不安全的，但如果你想了解关于纹身安全性的知识，这确实会带来巨大的困扰。
Some of the things we found can be pretty significant allergens for some people.
我们发现墨水中的某些东西，可能会让某些人严重过敏。
So it, it creates this environment where it's really hard to figure out what's going on in the body because we don't actually know what we're putting into the body.
这就导致我们无法弄清楚身体里发生了什么，因为我们并不知道自己把什么东西放进了身体里。
I was actually, just last night, getting my first tattoo in several years, and without me mentioning my anticipated conversation with you, one of the artists there was talking to her client about, you know, the sort of routine versus not so routine skin reactions people get from tattoos.
实际上，就在昨晚，我去纹了这几年里的第一个纹身。我并没有提到我今天会和你进行的对话，那里有一位艺术家在跟她的客户聊天，他们提到了纹身时人们会出现的常规或非常规的皮肤反应。
And she was saying, "Oh, I tend to have a problem with white inks but not all white inks, so I don't really know what that's about."
她当时说，“哦，我用白色墨水时总会出问题，但也不是所有白色墨水都这样，所以我也不知道这是怎么回事。”
And my artist was ...very passionate about ... people needing to take this more seriously--you know, the hunt for reputable companies and hoping that those companies have some understanding of what's in their inks.
我的艺术家非常热情地说，人们需要重视这件事，要找有信誉的公司，并希望这些公司能对他们的墨水成分有一定了解。
What kind of feedback do you tend to get from people in the industry when they hear about your work?
听说你的职业后，你往往会从业内人士那里得到什么反馈？
It's really changed over the last couple of years.
这在过去几年发生了很大的变化。
Before Congress passed the sort of updated regulations that obligated tattoo inks to be sort of examined and regulated by the FDA, I'd go into a room and I'd get a very mixed reaction, right?
在国会更新法规，要求纹身墨水必须经过食品和药物管理局的某种审查和监管之前，我走进某个房间时，人们的反应很复杂。
Some people would be very supportive; some people will be somewhat hostile, right, worried that we're going to be doing something that might cause the industry to get into trouble.
有人很支持我；也有人会有些敌意，他们担心我们做的事可能会让行业陷入困境。
After the change in regulations, though, it's sort of been night and day because part of what the FDA is looking for are scientifically peer-reviewed studies that talk about safety, that talk about something as simple as "What is a tattoo? Is it an injection? Is (it) something else....
在法规变更后，情况可以说是天壤之别，因为FDA寻求的部分内容是经过科学同行评审的研究，这些研究关乎安全性，关乎一些很简单的问题，比如“纹身是什么？它是一种注射剂吗？还是别的什么……”
Now, when I'm talking to a room of people, it's much more often to--"What can you tell us? How can you help us? FDA is asking for this, and we don't know what to do."
现在，我再跟人们交谈时，更多的情况是——“你能告诉我们什么？你能怎么帮助我们？FDA要求这样，可我们却不知道该怎么办。”
And one of the things that has been really important to the team and I from day one is that we really want to be collaborative with the tattoo industry, right?
而且从第一天开始，对我和团队来说非常重要的一件事就是，我们真心希望与纹身行业合作，对吧？
We're not anti-tattoo. We're not out to try to get tattooing banned or anything like that.
我们并不反对纹身。我们并不是要试图禁止纹身之类的。
And a lot of what motivates us is trying to support artists and their clients so that we can get the best outcomes for everybody.
并且，激励我们的很大一部分因素是努力支持艺术家和他们的客户，让每个人都获得最佳结果。
And so a lot of our work at looking at tattoo inks is kind of driven by this idea that we, as chemists, have access to really powerful tools that your typical artist would not have access to and that even some of the manufacturers don't have access to.
所以，我们研究纹身墨水的很多工作都是基于这样一种想法，即作为化学家，我们可以使用一些非常强大的工具，而这些工具艺术家通常无法使用，甚至一些制造商也无法使用。
And we're always happy to talk to artists.
而且我们总是很乐意与艺术家交谈。
We love that we have some good friends that are artists in the industry, and we find that there's such a rich, unbelievable wealth of knowledge that longtime tattooers have that's really important and useful and often not understood in the scientific literature...which has really helped us in our research.
我们喜欢这样，我们有些好朋友也是这个行业的艺术家，我们发现长期纹身的人拥有非常丰富、令人难以置信的知识财富，这真的很重要、很有用，而且这些知识科学文献往往不理解……这对我们的研究真的很有帮助。
