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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.
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.
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
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.
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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.