Citizen Scientists Develop Eye Drops That Provide Night Vision

rtoz writes: A group of scientists in California have successfully created eye drops that temporarily enable night vision. They use mixture of insulin and a chemical known as Chlorin e6 (Ce6) to enable the user to view objects clearly in darkness up to 50 meters away. Ce6 is found in some deep-sea fish and often used to treat night blindness. The solution starts to work within an hour of being applied to the user's eyes, and lasts for several hours afterward. The test subject's eyesight returned to normal the next day. The organization Science for the Masses has released a paper detailing the experiment on their website.

Comments

The important bits

[Okian Warrior]

Some nutter uses a syringe (!) to inject your eyeballs with fish guts in his garage.

Firstly, it's a glorified eye-dropper not a syringe.

Secondly, it's an important biomedical advancement made by citizen scientists. (The important part of that sentence is "by citizen scientists".)

Thirdly, there's an organization which is a nexus for citizen science.

The important bit of this announcement, and the one that makes it interesting to me, is that people are making biomedical experiments on their own, bypassing regulatory agencies and big industry alike.

This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a stagnant market dominated by large monolithic entities. It's usually a small upstart company that's more agile than the big conglomerate, but it works the same in research as it does everywhere else.

For a games-theory argument, consider that the regulatory agencies are free to require any safety requirements at no cost to themselves, but if something goes wrong they are held responsible. As a result we have a system where it costs 2.5 billion dollars to bring a drug to market, so that it's economically infeasable to implement existing cures for rare diseases. It's also impossible for individuals to manage their own risk with informed consent.

For a games-theory argument, consider that health insurance companies see care and maintenance as a cost to be minimized and rates as profit to be maximized. As a result, insurance companies are unwilling to pay for newly minted procedures and therapies because "it's experimental".

(As a concrete example, it tool a loooong time for the insurance companies to consider MRI scans non-experimental.)

So it's not really *surprising* that people are taking things into their own hands and doing their own research, but it's an important development.

Oh, and cue up the kneejerk response from established players about risk, gold-standard regulatory bureaucratic fandom, and how no one without a PhD can possibly do real research.

Re:The important bits

[wonkey_monkey]

Secondly, it's an important biomedical advancement made by citizen scientists.

Is it important, and is it even an advancement?

They didn't come up with the idea and the effect was already known.

Their idea was inspired by a patent filed in 2012, claiming that if you mix insulin, Ce6 and saline to someone’s eye, their retina absorbs much more light and they can see much better in the dark. The patent also mentioned that instead of insulin, you can use a substance called dimethlysulfoxide (DMSO). The Science for Masses guys thought “Why not use both?”.

So their sole contribution appears to be the idea of using both insulin and DMSO (for no readily apparent reason and probably to no actual benefit).

Thirdly, there's an organization [scienceforthemasses.org] which is a nexus for citizen science.

Said "organization" appears to be two guys with unknown qualifications and "our fair share of body mod tools for when the mood strikes us." Their "paper" looks more like a blog post to me, and their "tests" were subjective at very best (something they do at least admit).

I'd half expect their next "paper" to be a study on the effects of downing a glass of diet coke after eating a packet of mentos.

The test subject's eyesight returned to normal the next day.

Yeah, so far.

Meaningless words and statistics FTW

[wonkey_monkey]

view objects clearly in darkness up to 50 meters away.

Define "darkness." It obviously wasn't completely dark. Was it dark like a moonless night dark, or dark like an interior hallway dark?

Secondly, how do you define night vision in metres?

Re:How do I get eyes like that

[X0563511]

What I don't understand is why they did this to both of his eyes.

You'd think it would be far more prudent to dose one eye, and put a patch over the untreated eye to prevent interference.

"I can still see!"

[FrnkMit]

Did no one learn from Ray Milland in _The Man with the X-Ray Eyes_?