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Scientists Transplant Functional Eyes On the Tails of Tadpoles
New submitter physlord writes in with a story about tadpoles with eyes on their tails. "Using embryos from the African clawed frog (Xenopus), scientists at Tufts' Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology were able to transplant eye primordia—basically, the little nubs of flesh that will eventually grow into an eye—from one tadpole's head to another's posterior, flank, or tail....Amazingly, a statistically significant portion of the transplanted one-eyes could not only detect LED changes, but they showed learning behavior when confronted with electric shock."
Scientists are hard at work to fix blindness in amphibians. Where the hell is the human medical technology? Seems to me that medical science has been going in circles for decades.
"they showed learning behavior when confronted with electric shock." You shock anyone's little nub's of flesh enough and they tell you anything you want to hear.
Well that sounds useful.
could be very useful.
To summarize:
Scientists removed the eyes from a tadpole and attached those eyes to another tadpole's ass, then shocked it to see if it could learn to see with it's ass. Hilarity ensued.
"I'm a mom, I have eyes in the back of my ass." -Ms. Tadpole
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Sh*tty outlook on life.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Eyes in the back of their heads.
Did I miss any?
Way to sensationalize a scientific article, Fox.
If by functional one means able to send nerve impulses to the brain then maybe. If by functional you mean sending nerve impulses to the brain that can be resolved into pictures similar to the eyes in the head has not been proven. They throw about terms like "statistically significant" yet this the measurements of performance are taken by subjective humans. Humans have a tendency to see what they want to see. This experiment has not been replicated and is therefore suspect.
The headline should say "on to". I'm becoming I grammar Nazi, but damn it editors...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Let me be the first to bow down before our all-seeing tadpole overlords.
Certain humans have had interchangeable head parts and posterior parts for years now. We call them "politicians".
Isn't life already tough enough for tadpoles without some "scientist" grafting eyes onto their butts and jolting them with electricity?
#DeleteChrome
"This research was funded by the Dr. Alphonse Mephesto Foundation"
Sometimes you hear about shit that some researchers are up to, and you know that they've got that circuit in their head that causes them to gravitate toward experimental research like putting drops of acid into rabbit's eyes or raising chimpanzees in total isolation with nothing but chickenwire mother surrogates, all justifiable with perfectly reasonable arguments about how it's a shame there's no other way to do it and the insights are too valuable to pass up, but in your heart you know that the right thing to do is to stuff that researcher into a big canvas sack with a cinderblock, beat it with a baseball bat until it stops screaming, then dump it over the side.
A Doc who deliberately exposed himself to a bug for acute gastic illness earned himself a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
Testing on yourself is a time-honored tradition in both science and medicine.
It's been known for some time that you can transplant cells for things like limbs on amphibians and they would be functional. Unfortunately it only works because they are very simple organisms. The same things don't apply to reptiles let alone mammals so it's not an advance that will lead to regrowing eyes. It's Frankenstein tinkering that leads to pointless suffering. A different standard needs to be applied to lifeforms than other sciences in that a question of "what if we did this" shouldn't be a enough to rationalize the research. There's plenty of worthy lines of research that don't involve vivisection.
...the man with eyes in his ass is king.
You say all that above but face it, you're wrong. Much of medicine has been a matter of "what if we do this?". Same for much of science in general. That is what science is; asking questions and then testing to get answers.
Understanding how things work for one organism can lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of other organisms. You may not see that, but it is still true.
captcha: nearby
Where's the humanity?
Not only do the scientists blind a tadpole, but they then graft the eyes onto another tadpole and where else but onto it's arse.
Sometimes I think that mankind deserves to become extinct.
" they showed learning behavior when confronted with electric shock"
Yes, I bet they did.
These perverted monsters get their rocks off by torturing animals all day.
Don't think so? Then why are they terrified of the public SEEING what they actually do?
You know those undercover videos you've seen inside vivisection laboratories, where the so-called 'scientists' are punching beagles in the face, screaming at the animals they are supposed to be 'caring' for, and committing atrocity after atrocity? Just ask yourself - how many people who love animals could actually go and work at one of those hellholes, to get video footage of the abuse, while not being able to do anything to stop it, and while having to PARTICIPATE in torturing animals to death every day, in order to get that footage? Quite obviously only a tiny number of people could do such a thing. So how come there is so much footage like this?
Vivisection is medical fraud. The pharmaceutical industry is a massive scam, by and large, they paid billions of dollars in fines last year. Iatrogenic deaths are unbelievably high.
>Sometimes I think that mankind deserves to become extinct.
You are cordially invited to lead the way.
I think this is an interesting discovery, myself.
Technically, it isn't a discovery at all. They have been grafting body parts on tadpoles for a long time. The process is well documented. This may be the first time with an eye, but then again, until it is reproduced in another lab, it is just a report. Even if reproduced, it still wouldn't be a discovery, any more than building Hoover Dam was a discovery because nobody else had done it before.
Maybe within a few short years conservatives who are keeping their head in the usual place might actually be able to see themselves looking back.
We could call it an "eyenus".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Politicians that don't talk through their ass and can pull their heads completely out of their rectums.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I mean... what the fuck kind of shit do we do to animals in the name of "science"?
Expect to see the 5-assed monkey coming out of a lab near you!
"Lame" - Galaxar
> Testing on prisoners
Google for "Nurenberg Doctor Trials". Those nazi doctors all claimed to have followed orders, but that reasoning did not impress the war crimes court very much.
...he's just trying to get a better look at the camera?
Here's the problem (forgive the shout) BIOLOGY HAS NO FIRST PRINCIPLES.
When a physicists set out to do an experiment, they start with first principles to establish a theory. This avoids wasting resources on pointless 'what if' s. Biology has nothing of the sort. Consider this experiment (which the TFA suggests has something to do with exploring the limits of the brain's plasticity):
a) done on the larval stage of a life form when cell development is at its most flexible unlike a mature human brain. Note as the tadpole becomes a frog, the tail is absorbed suggesting it plays a role in development and is a fertile area for growth eg. stem cell rich;
b) what are the commonalities between the human and amphibian brains (and tadpole butts); and
c) what understanding is there of the amphibian brain/body system. From the TFA itself it is staggeringly poor; the blinded tadpoles without ass-eyes reacted to the LED's and so "may" have another means of detecting light (a very IMPORTANT factor in this case since it invalidates the experiment).
A first principles approach would at least have identified the last item, tadpoles can detect light via something other than their eyes. Ergo, this experiment was pointless. Biology is not science, it is butterfly collecting, and when biologists get it in to their heads to pretend to be scientists, the acts they commit stagger the mind.
As an aside, do you know what the 'learning' was? One LED meant 'shock'. The other meant 'no shock'. What was 'learnt' was to exhibit fear actions when a 'shock' LED appeared. Just ponder that situation from the blinded tadpole point of view for a second.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The blurb was so disturbing, I don't know if I even want to read the article. WHY would anyone do this? For that matter, what happens when the tadpoles mature? The frog is sitting on its eye. Could you imagine the pain that would cause.
And what is the point of this anyways? Sounds like something out of a horror movie. Sounds to me like these scientists need to be arrested.
Doesn't take a blind frog, or a frog with eyes on it's ass for that matter, to learn they don't like getting the shock treatment...