Considering the widespread actions of the pineal hormone melatonin in vertebrate organisms, it is remarkable that so few biomedical scientists took the pineal gland seriously until only recently. When melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) was discovered in 1958, Lerner and colleagues (1) hoped that it would be a treatment for irregular skin pigmentation that occurs in humans with certain diseases. This action of melatonin in humans has proven unproductive although in non-mammalian vertebrates an association of melatonin with dermal melanophores is well documented (2).
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Rüssel J. Reiter (1996) studied this question.