Slashdot Mirror
Eye Transplant Enables Blind Boy to See
Chris Gondek points to this story carried by the Sydney Morning Herald, excerpting: "A one-year-old Pakistani boy saw the world for the first time yesterday through an eye donated by an Indian. Mohammed Ahmed gained partial vision after a difficult operation at the Agarwal Eye Institute in the southern city of Madras. Doctors said Ahmed, who was born blind, would get near-normal sight by the time he heads back to Karachi next week."
Maybe this is of note beacuse it is a poorer country with less medical support or maybe its beacuse he was born blind.
Have you metaroderated recently?
Here I thought a boys WHOLE eye was replaced! That would have been amazing and something for the whole world to rejoice for. Then I remember that we can not currently do eye transpants, and then I confirmed it by reading the article and other posts. You assholes should burn in hell for giving me that huge lump of amazment then slaping it down.
Sure, this kind of science has a long way to go. But doesn't everything? This is frickin' amazing! For me personally, I always had this weird fear growing up of anything making me blind. When I was a kid I actually wanted to get glasses specifically for the purpose of having a shield over my eyes! If there is eventually full transplant success, the possibilities would be incredible. I'm not sure if there's another physical feeling that would be as powerful and emotional as someone who has lived their life blind getting the opportunity to see at last.
Stem cells seem to know what to wire though. Putting stem cells near kidney cells turns them into kidney cells. The cells themselves must have known how to wire it in the first place (since we can see).
I think much more money should be spent in this kind of research. Immortality is just around the corner if successful brain transplants can take place. As well people inprisoned in quadriplegic bodies can be helped by this research along with many others with similiar neuron/motor neuron problems.
I guess the most difficult part of the whole procedure was to convince the Pakistani family to accept the donation from an Indian. =)
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
That's the great thing about the human brain - It can hande the fact that the "green" nerve is now "yellow", red is blue, etc... It just takes time to work itself out.
I doubt we'll see perfect transplants for a LONG time, but something that would "work" is not that far off.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Actually there's never been a people-to-people problem between India and Pakistan: visitors from one country generally feel overwhelmed by the hospitality shown in the other. Indian films are hugely popular in Pakistan, Pakistani singers are hugely popular in India.
Last year, having spent a year (my first) in the US, I visited India for a few weeks. I had just left a country where the press was heaping the vilest and most unspeakably vulgar abuse on a historical ally, France, for daring to suggest that the Iraq war may not be necessary. The NYT had just run a story on how French high-school students, visiting the US on long-established exchange programmes, were not able to find American families willing to accommodate them (the same story also remarked, by the way, how Americans continued to be welcome in France -- something I can believe, I had lived two years in France before that.)
And I was now in my home country, India, where the papers were full of goodwill stories on the heart operation on a girl from the "enemy country", Pakistan, and the Pakistani parents were feeling overwhelmed by the good wishes they had received. (A few months ago, when the Indian cricket team toured Pakistan for the first time since the 1980s, Indian fans visiting Pakistan experienced similar hospitality.) This wasn't a surprise but it was hugely pleasant to see after a year watching Americans puke all over their oldest ally.
I had already decided that the US was not the country for me, but last year was when it crystallised: the US may be the most developed nation in the world but it's also the most immature in many ways: no other country uses the words "enemy" and "evil" so routinely and unthinkingly. I'm leaving for home in a few weeks.
The post anonymously option you are [not] attempting to use is one that isn't available to your user.
P.S. If you ever see someone moving his head from side to side, don't assume he's crazy - he might just be a monocular(?) person like me trying to judge depth.
The post anonymously option you are [not] attempting to use is one that isn't available to your user.
If eyetracking were practical, encoders would even only transmit what you are looking at
Not unless time traverl were practical, too. The problem is that encoding often happens well before display. How do they know when they make the DVD what you (and all the people watching with you) will be looking at when you watch it? Once you get the DVD to your house, you might as well display everything, since the bandwidth available to you between the DVD player and the TV is huge.
Even if you're talking about point-to-point real-time video display, there are very few cases where the bandwidth is low enough to require heavy encoding and the latency is also low enough to allow the encoder to respond to eye movements quickly enough. The eye moves really quickly.