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."

Comments

Unless you want a Nobel

[witherstaff]

A Doc who deliberately exposed himself to a bug for acute gastic illness earned himself a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

Re:Unless you want a Nobel

[uncqual]

Yes - but he was convinced that he had found the answer already. He was not, at least in his mind, using himself to test on -- he was using himself as a subject to overcome the "settled science" mentality of the entrenched medical and scientific community by showing that he had, in fact, found the answer.

It seems to me that cases like these are quite different.

Re:Functional?

[TheLink]

It's already long known that a lot of the seeing is done in the brain. When someone draws something on your hand or other part of the body you can still "see it" even if you are blindfolded. The resolution is just isn't as good. Humans can learn to see with their tongues: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/description/The_Seeing_Tongue

They can also see with sound - either echolocation or pitch vs left-right volume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/

This transplant experiment isn't very useful in my opinion. Yeah it shows that if you grow an eye on a different spot on a tadpole it can sometimes kind of work. But how useful is that? The artificial eye experiments on humans are far more useful.