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Japanese Scientists Create Artificial Eyeballs
MikeyMars writes: "CNN is reporting that Japanese scientists have grown artificial eyeballs [cnn.com] for tadpoles. This is the first time in the world something like this has been accomplished. 'Since the basics of body-making is common to that of human beings, I think this might help enable people to regain vision in the future,' Asashima was quoted as saying."
The BBC are also carrying this story @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 743000/1743987.stm
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Got to wonder how long until this ingredient makes it to Iron Chef....
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Is vastly different from transplanting it succesfully and getting the transplantee's vision adjusted and working correctly.
Thought I'd try my hand
Remove tadpole eye
Try not to drop new one
Tadpole sees perfect
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
Now my mom really CAN have eyes in the back of her head...
I am !amused.
How DARE you suggest that anyone on Iron Chef would use ARTIFICIAL ingredients! Philistine!
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
"Your eyes...I designed your eyes"
"If only you could see...what I've seen with your eyes."
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I design your eyes.
If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes
Wow, I had no idea that eye sight loss in tadpoles had gotten so bad that Sceintists in Japan dedicated time to finding a solution. Although the three blind mice have already filed a discrimination lawsuit seeking matching funds.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Get your Unix fortune now!
-- Xenph, "Bionic Eyes" Jan. 2002
From a film made more than 20 years ago:
INT. COLD STORAGE ROOM NIGHT
Except for the work table with its sharp gleaming instruments, the room is as barren and sterile as a morgue. The glass-doored apartments in the walls look like crypts. Some of them small as post office boxes. From one of the Chew removes a vacuum, packed box. Carefully separating the seal, he reaches into the purple jell and with a pair of tweezers extracts an eye.
Through the jeweler's glass, which he has not bothered to remove, Chew holds the eye up to the light and studies it a moment. His other hand searches through his pockets.
...
CHEW: I know you. I made your eyes. You are nexus - 6.
ROY: If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.
The entire original script may be found at http://www.nootrope.net/bladerunner.html
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Someone needs a biochemisty and cellular biology lesson. The "body building" process referred to is the biological method of cells multiplying and differentiating to create biological structures, and is essentially the same process among all complex multicellular life forms. This post should have been moderated Score: -1, Moron
They actually managed to restore the sight of a tadpole which had had its eye surgically removed. The new eye reacted to light a week later. The tadpole was later disected, and the researchers confirmed that the optic nerve had reattached itself.
I am sceptical of this working for more developmentally mature organisms, especially in adult mammals, however. The nerve reattachment is tricky, and there is other stuff besides. Nerve cells need to be trained early in development. There have been experiments on kittens, where one eye is sown shut after birth, and then allowed to open normally several weeks later. The kittens are always blind in that eye. Even if a human adult had sight in childhood, and lost his eyes later, I wonder if the nerve cells could be retrained for newly grown eyes.
If you can cure blindness, then start working on growing ears. We can cure deafness too.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I guess the Eyes have it. :)
:)
Sorry, couldn't stop the were-cheeser tranformation....
Seems to be a very eye-ventful day, isn't it? :-)
I think you misunderstand this technology
It's not like they designed eyeballs from scratch. They took undiferentiated cells, which already had the information on how to become regular eyeballs, and then made them grow in that direction. Going from this to actually changing the ways those eyes work would be like engineering eyeballs from scratch. We're not even close to having the information or technology required to get there. Sure we know how eyes work, but changing genes to make them produce different results is NOT where we are right now.
Besides, if we had the ability to do this, I wouldn't consider it a misuse, although I can see why a lot of people would. Besides, all of the applications you mention are already available, cheap and common through different gadgets
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Ohhh, if only you knew the things I have seen... with your eyes.
(Sorry, it just had to be said.)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Yet another reason to oppose the Bush Administration's idiotic policies restricting stem cell research. It looks like the sight-impaired in this country can look forward to having new eyes with little "Made in Japan" labels.
Okay so the question becomes which eyes would you rather have? You could go with artificial eyeballs (Artificial Eyeballs) or upgrade to Bionic eyes (see Bionic Eyes). My choice would go to the first one that gives me an X-ray vision option.
Now that they've found a way of reproducing eyeballs, I suggest they begin work on artificial eyelids. Of course, why replicate nature's work exactly when we can always improve upon it considerably. Think if you could embed a layer light-emitting polymer within the flesh of the eyelid. Close your eyes, instant total recall as your portable computer displays the material inside your lids. Give the eyelids a feed from an infrared or UV camera, or simply one with zoom, and you suddenly have a rather innocuous system of super-vision. I'd pay for it so long as the lids looked natural. Miniatiurize electronics enough and this might be much easier than redesigning eyeballs from scratch to achieve this kind of goal.
There are problems beyond the tech, of course. First, I imagine that one might suffer nausea after prolonged use. Second, what would happen when millions of drivers began watching television on their eyelids while driving down the highway, squinting or holding one eye open so they can catch CNN?
Pax Digitalia
what would stop
them from changing the spectrum of vision? perhaps adding uv or infrared to the normal visible light
Firstly, such an eye would have very few advantages on a microcamera - in terms of ease of use, it would be much simpler to hide tiny cameras in artificial cavities in someone's body than to do what you're proposing. Furthermore, the nervous system requirements to process the additional information simply are not there (infrared = red and your superspy can't see normal colors? Ooh, sign me up today.)
In order to do what you're proposing, you'd need to take a human eye and genetically modify it so that it could safely detect either infra-red or UV light, problems with that proposal include -
1) The human eye works by converting photons in the visible range into electrical potentials, which then produce nerve impulses. Photons are converted into electrical potentials by chromphores (big, organic molecules with many double bonds.) These chromophores can allready detect UV, but when they do they're destroyed. There's a membrane in the eye that exists purely to screen UV out. So, if you want to be able to see UV, you have to modify all the receptors that are allready in there to resist UV.
2) Genetic modification of these chromophores is exceedingly difficult, since they are not coded for by genes in and of themselves (they are produced by a host of other proteins.) So, you'd need to replace the dozen or so proteins that make a chromophore (in a particular cell, at a particular time) with a dozen or so genes/proteins that make some UV (or IR) sensitive chromophore. Then, you'd need (somehow) to alter all of the proteins that recognised the old chromophore so that they recognise the new chromophore, instead, so that it is properly inserted into the cellular architecture. This sort of technology is, optimistically, a century away, and has many more sinister potential uses than making an organic wide-spectrum camera.
3) It is extremely difficult, using only organic molecules, to distinguish between IR and physical heat. Unlike infrared light, which makes bonds bounce back and forth more quickly (= heat), or ultraviolet light, which cleaves bonds (in addition), visible light has the property of raising the electric potential of "pi" electrons; electrons which participate in a double bond but which are not strictly required for the bond to exist. Note that by this definition "visible" light does extend a little farther in each direction than what we can actually see.
After you've finished your epic feat of genetic and chemical engineering, you need to take your modified cells and insert them into embryos who have had there eyes removed and see if the modified cells still grow into eyeballs. I envy your budget.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This takes all the fun out of "It's all fun and games until an eye gets taken out." I mean if you can get your eye replaced, it'll be fun to take an eye out too! (/joke)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I think these prosthetic arms might be misused. The concept is great -- everyone can now have the ability to wave and and pick up litter and stuff -- but what would stop them from including built-in razors and anthrax infected needles? Perhaps adding a toothbrush adaptor or squirt gun extension... and then you would need the abiity to aim... slightly modified it would let you shoot acid at people, I think these plastic arms would be perfect weapons...
For those incapable of recognizing sarcasm, I will give you a clue by indicating that the above paragraph was NOT flamebait or troll, but merely expressing my frustration that anyone could be so fucking stupid as to moderate the parent post as "Insightful."
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
And I thought "Four-Eyes" jokes were bad...
Can't replace a complete brain at once without losing personality and accumulated knowledge/memories. So replace one piece of brain until completely new brain.
It would be IR that you would want. IR is the wavelength of light that MOST matter produces at around 293K(280-300). This means that at normal room temperature, pretty much everything is emiting these nice photons. There wouldn't be any problem with distinguishing these from heat. In fact, a body(or any item for that matter) that is at around 280-300K is MORE responsive to a photon with a wavelength in the infrared range(isn't that like 600nm?... been a while since I've worked with such short wavelengths) You wouldn't have to worry about the UV because the only real abundant sources of UV on Earth are Lights.
I do, however agree that modifying our genetic makeup to do this would be dificult at best, impossible at worst.
Pat
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Make lots of them to make all bugs (even in WIndows!) shallow?
A coat hanger mounted eyeball should be as good
as an x10 -- for security purposes that is.
Eyes...I just do eyes...
Will they make these things the proper size, or will everyone who has them look like they just stepped out of anime?
~Philly
And amazingly enough, they're not repeats!
Play with my webcams and lights here
I think you're being unduly pessimistic as to the feasibility of constructing IR sensitive eyes.
IIRC, there are a number of animals (some snakes come to mind), that already have a sensitivity to infrared. In which case, it's less a matter of having to design from scratch and more an issue of figuring out how nature does it. Hell, maybe we'll just invent a way to successfully graft snake heat receptors. A daunting task, but not so unapproachable.
Of course whether or not it would ever be useful is still questionably, especially if one has to given up some portion of the normal spectrum in exchange.
Hmmm... I guess the title says it all..
I'm blind in one eye, in 8 years the doctors promise me that there will be artificial eyesight. I've never been able to see in 3D, maybe I'll finally see the hidden picture in the "Magic Eye" a la Mallrats."When will I see the sailboat?"
Back in 1982. The movie was Bladerunner. Remember the Japanese scientist who worked for Tyrell?
."
"I only do eyes. .
Where Rutger Hauer and his dumb partner go to visit the Chinese man that made their eyes in a lab. Then the dumb guy starts putting eyes on the scientists shoulder while Hauer interogates him - funny stuff. Now it's all too real ;)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Me too.
Theres never been a better time to create a low-grade voyeuristic pr0n site! Gotta go get me some 'bawls.
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
Sorry, I meant to say, it would be almost impossible to distinguish IR from ambient heat using a chromophore. Obviously, there are all sorts of organic materials that image IR just fine. My bad. I don't know how snakes do it but I don't think it involves generating an electric potential in a chromophore.
In any case, adding the "pits" that snakes use to sense heat to someone's eyes would be even more difficult.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
...if only you could have seen what I have seen with your eyes.
Elgon
our own, hahah i hope all those god freaks are going nuts.
would it be possible to take the cells from a different gender of person to use to grow the eyeballs? the article doesn't say that the undifferentiated cells came from the tadpole they used (and in fact seems to indicate that they didn't). Could we thus grow a tetrachromat eyeball, if we had an undifferentiated cell from a tetrachromat? (more info on tetrachromat's here..
From the previous slashdot article on tetrachromats, it appears that it's because of the eye construction that they can see, but maybe you need to be born with it for the nervous system to be able to handle the information? it might be an interesting experiment at least..
I don't know answers, I just do eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
J.F. Sebastian. He's the one you want....
You could probably grow the eye but the wiring is not their in some one you would need 4 data streams to the brain the normal person is hardwired at birth for 3 so unless you want to run cabling from the optic nerve to the brain and make sure you don't cross any wires it would be possible, but than you would have to be trained to use it since you have been using 3 colored vision you entire life who's to say your brain isn't stubborn and decides to ignore the extra color
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
someone, quick call Ridley... this has GOT to be the most references in a single /. article to Blade Runner (from an article not thus related)
:)
yeah yeah, go ahead an mod me OT... it's ok, I'll see you coming with the new eyes I just got thru eBay...
the problem is that they would not be able to see colors they would see like a snake and that would lead to a social outcast (not knowing what color you clothes are socks that mismatch ties that pokadotted) it wouldn't be fair to a child to do that to and we don't have any where near the technology to take out a perfectly normal adults eye and put in a modified eye with out a lot of rejection not to mention connecting the optic nerve back to the eye.
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
"When the day comes that we can grow new eyes (Livers, Hearts, Lungs, etc...) for humans, you can kiss alot of today's medical problems good-bye"
The problems would still be their we would just be able to give people a replacement. This seems at first like a great thing but what is to stop some one from getting an overhaul every 30 -40 years replace every organ in their body (we've all seen the sci-fi movie where the bad guy takes organs from people he has killed to keep him self alive) but is living forever... or at least until the brain wears out a good thing? Heck why stop their if we could just use some advanced MRI scanner you could image the brain and load it in a computer and interface the computer to the body (or robotic body) and live forever but when in all that mess do i stop being me once i have replaced all my body parts and have an electronic brain (that could be copied for backup incase anything happens to me) is it still me? And what if I copy myself are both of them me? They would think so... I would just point out that starting to replacing bodily organs can/will open up a whole new source of problems
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
.. Eyes in the back of your head.
Sorry. Couldnt Resist.
I see. (*ba dum bum*)
Thank you, thank you, don't forget to tip the bartender.
-Legion
...what?!
Furthermore, the nervous system requirements to process the additional information simply are not there (infrared = red and your superspy can't see normal colors? Ooh, sign me up today.)
I agree with you're other points, but not this one. I've read reports of some women having extra green receptors. They don't have extra resolution in their retina, just two sets of green receptors sensitive at different frequencies. This may explain why color blindness is less prevalent in women, if they start out with two and lose one they still can see color about as well as a man.
If you managed to engineer new color receptors that weren't baked by UV and were sensitive from infrared to UV you could have the three RGB's and a UV and infrared. You would have a harder time finding the edge between a green and blue surface at the same brightness but it wouldn't be a handycap since we already have much lower color resolution than brightness res, just look at how JPEG and TV signals are encoded.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is someone out there that can already see well in UV and infrared, there isn't much of an advantage so it won't wipe out our simple RGB eyes in the gene pool. I only discovered I was more sensitive to IR than average because I was getting blinded by the bright IR LEDs that others would only admit to seeing in a dark room. Not much of an advantage in our modern world, and with no extra 'regular red' sensitivity I couldn't really distinguish it from a bright red (it is really red, prolly cuz it's completely undetected by the blue & green receptors.)
Still your other points hold, it's far off. If we can replace a blind newborn's eyes in 20 years with normal eyes that would be fantastic in and of itself.
I'd really love to have 1024 individual sensors for a in-eye spectroscope though. "Johny is that a diamond or cubic zirconia on Sally's finger?" or better yet, "Cmdr. Checkov is that planet M-Class?"
that was funny dude you shouldn't have got modded a troll
All employees must wash hands before using the bathroom. - The Mgmt.
I agree with you on the "not from scratch" part ; but note that I'm being told that the only approching tool biologists have nowadays is taking cells and putting them in an specially iradiated enucleated egg, which grows a full organism.
The problem I have with this article (hum, or this fifteen lines summary, should I say) is that they leap directly from "we took undifferentiated cells" to "we implanted the new eyeball in the toadpole".
So, if they've been able to grow a single organ and not a total organism, that's already very interesting, even if it's not "from scratch" (which is a totally different, and much more complicated problem).
Olivier
Singularity stupid: stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape
Horace ate himself one day
He didn't stop to say his grace
He just sat down and ate his face
..."Stop him, someone," Mother cried
"Those eyeballs would be better fried."
And then you wonder why you can't get no dates
"I his bow, and spun and wove, likes you." Vere de Vere out of my mould's mouth dragged me of the voluntary apes.
This was on the local TV news here -- funny story. The newscaster said: "Japanese researchers have created artificial eyeballs for tadpoles... from the embryos of *frogs*!' As if she thought that tadpoles and frogs were separate species. TV newscastors never cease to amaze me...
WTF is wrong with you stupid assed moderators? YEs, I mean you!!! THis was at least vaguely relevant, and i thought it was at least a little funny, and now becasue of you, my turtle my be condemmed to a life of monocular vision.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
"...but is living forever... or at least until the brain wears out a good thing?"
I dunno. Lets find out.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
go back to #/. where you belong :}
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