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

[Anonymous Coward]

How do I get eyes like that

First, you gotta kill a lot of people...

Re:What if you use it during the day

[Enry]

You grow hair on your palms and...nowait, that was...you know what, nevermind.

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.

Re:The important bits

[nbauman]

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.

(1) If you read a little further down that Google search, you find out that maybe it doesn't cost $2.5 billion after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...
$2.6 Billion to Develop a Drug? New Estimate Makes Questionable Assumptions
Aaron E. Carroll
NOV. 18, 2014
The bottom line is that the report contains a lot of assumptions that tend to favor the pharmaceutical industry. While the Tufts Center reports that $2.6 billion is the cost to develop “a new prescription medicine that gains marketing approval,” it might be more accurate to say that it’s the cost to develop certain new molecular entities for which pharmaceutical companies did all of the research. That’s very few drugs, in the scheme of things.

(2) Another game theory argument is that drug companies and doctors will sell drugs to make as much money as they can, even if they give people drugs that they don't need and it harms them. The Nobel-prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote that a free market in health care is impossible, because the consumers (patients) don't have enough information to evaluate what the doctor is telling them.

(3) Most scientists agree that theory should be confirmed with empirical fact. In fact, there are countries that until recently had almost no government regulation, and they bring new drugs to market all the time. Unfortunately, most of those new don't live up to their claims when western doctors try to use them. So their drugs aren't any good. Those facts disconfirm your theory.

(4) In fact, without regulation, drug companies and doctors sell drugs with unfounded claims, and give patients drugs that are inappropriate and harmful, following their financial motivation rather than the interests of their patients. This confirms Arrow's theory.

For example, China has relatively few government regulations.

JAMA Intern Med. 2014 Dec;174(12):1914-20. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.5214.
Use and prescription of antibiotics in primary health care settings in China.
Wang J, Wang P, Wang X, Zheng Y, Xiao Y.

RESULTS: Most staff in the primary health care facilities had less than a college degree, and the medical staff consisted primarily of physician assistants, assistant pharmacists, nurses, and nursing assistants. The median (range) governmental contribution to each facility was 34.0% (3.6%-92.5%) of total revenue. The facilities prescribed a median (range) of 28 (8-111) types of antibiotics, including 34 (10-115) individual agents. Antibiotics were included in 52.9% of the outpatient visit prescription records: of these, only 39.4% were prescribed properly. Of the inpatients, 77.5% received antibiotic therapy: of these, only 24.6% were prescribed properly. Antibiotics were prescribed for 78.0% of colds and 93.5% of cases of acute bronchitis. Of the antibiotic prescriptions, 28.0% contained cephalosporins and 15.7% fluoroquinolones. A total of 55.0% of the antibiotic prescriptions were for antibiotic combination therapy with 2 or more agents. In nonsurgical inpatients in cities, the mean (SD) duration of antibiotic therapy was 10.1 (7.8) days. Of the surgical patients, 98.0% received antibiotics, with 63.8% of these prescriptions for prophylaxis.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Antibiotics are frequently prescribed in Chinese primary health care facil

Re:The important bits

[avandesande]

DMSO is one of the most effective solvents known and makes the solution pass readily into the eyeball.

Re:The important bits

[jdavidb]

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

I was a little confused when I saw that wording in the story, and now that I'm hearing this wording is the important part, I'm getting a little concerned. Are we not all citizens? Have we been divided into citizens and ruling class, now?

I'm all for popularizing science among all citizens, but I'd rather we word that as "science for the masses" or something.

Re:The important bits

[gnunick]

DMSO is one of the most effective solvents known and makes the solution pass readily into the eyeball.

Yes, and absolutely everything else that it has been able to dissolve before it gets dropped into your eye also gets transported directly into your body.

As you rightly point out, it is a very effective solvent. Inside or outside of the lab it's dangerous stuff. I've always marveled at the "health nuts" who think DMSO must be good for you because it makes you smell like garlic.

Re:The important bits

[mysidia]

DMSO is one of the most effective solvents known and makes the solution pass readily into the eyeball.

Wait a minute... DMSO itself is a substance thought to be explicitly harmful to the eye.

But there's a bigger problem.... it's too good a solvent... as in, exposure to Dmso can allow toxic materials to be absorbed through the skin that the skin would ordinarily protect against. Very dangerous stuff.

Re:The important bits

[ultranova]

I was a little confused when I saw that wording in the story, and now that I'm hearing this wording is the important part, I'm getting a little concerned. Are we not all citizens? Have we been divided into citizens and ruling class, now?

We've always been divided into serfs and lords. Human spirit simply doesn't have the strength to resist using power to get more. The lords, blinded by the seeming invincibility of their position and the system which grants it then end up draining that very system to the point of collapse and revolution, and the cycle repeats.

Whether it can be broken is anyone's guess. Democracy has slowed and complicated the gravitational collapse of current system somewhat, but it couldn't alter the end result, since all manifestations of power in our societies are not under democratic control, and are thus free to join biggest existing masses of power and make them even bigger.

I'm all for popularizing science among all citizens, but I'd rather we word that as "science for the masses" or something.

That very desire should already answer your question. As our masters keep telling us: if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.

Re:The important bits

[mysidia]

to ensure that only the intended active pharmaceutical ingredients and excipients are in the dose

It goes beyond purity of the dose. If a person ingested some medicine containing DMSO as a delivery vector.... even if there were no contaminants in the dose, when the DMSO gets into the blood stream, it can dissolve things that are on the surface of the skin, which would not otherwise be a danger.

Where the hell can I get eyes like that?

[Guerilla Antix]

Gotta kill a few people. Then you got to get sent to a slam, where they tell you you'll never see daylight again. You dig up a doctor, and you pay him 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs.

Or here, use these eye drops.

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:Meaningless words and statistics FTW

[gewalker]

Easy, they were used to D&D where infravision is defined in terms of distance, which is of course bad physics, even for D&D.

The article mentions they were able to detect humans up to 50 meters distant.

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.

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.