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

Re:How do I get eyes like that

[Half-pint HAL]

Not a patch, but having one eye as "control" wouldn't be a bad idea. If the subject had one "normal" eye and one "doped" one, you could make some kind of meaningful-ish comparison. The eye-patch would be a bad idea as the patched eye would be constantly adjusting to the darkness and would end up being "super-powered" itself by the time of the test.

Actually, if the buy was wearing darkened contact lenses and sunglasses after treatment and before the test, and the "control" subjects weren't, the whole thing's basically just a waste of time, as we don't know how much of his improved accuracy over the others was down to the increased light-sensitivity as a result of blocking out light for several hours.