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.