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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."
"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
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.
Did I miss any?
No, your life's work is now done and you are free to stop posting.
Please.
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"
Yep, that should have been "I'm becoming a grade I grammar Nazi".
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Where the hell is the human medical technology?
Sit tight, we've dispatched a emergency team of psychiatrists armed with a boot-load of Valium.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Where the hell is the human medical technology?
I don't know about you, but I'd just assume pass on grafting eyeballs onto my bum TYVM.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
...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.
"If my tadpole was ugly as you, I'd implant eyes on its butt and teach it to swim backwards"
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
It is called basic science. Basic science leads to applied science and applied science leads to technology. But if you don't put in the money for the basic science, the fields to explore for applied science will dry up.
Understanding how the eyes communicate with the brain of a growing organism is extremely important. If the general principles behind tadpole sight are understood, they might be able to scale up to human applications. But you don't know if you don't study it.
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
I take it then that Google Ass isn't gonna be much of a success?
np: Bauchklang - Expo (Live In Mumbai)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
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.
Hi there. As a neuroscience doctoral student, I needed to chime in. We're still hammering out the details for how neurons from the retina organize and head to the brain, then map themselves out appropriately. Sperry's frog eye experiments helped a ton ( thanks Dr. Sperry! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoaffinity_hypothesis) but we've been stuck with a bunch of problems and we're not ready for beta testing in humans yet, let alone a gold release. Among a bajillion other issues, amphibians are much better at reconnecting their nervous system than us fancy mammals. Sorry about looking like we're going in circles, we really should release more updates. Actually, we do release updates in journals. So maybe you should read more before opining. Thanks!
This is /.
If you read it at all, you can't help but becoming at least mildly fascistic with respect to grammar.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.