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Science

Japanese Scientists Create Artificial Eyeballs 149

Posted by timothy from the wizards-of-ix dept.
MikeyMars writes: "CNN is reporting that Japanese scientists have grown artificial eyeballs [cnn.com] for tadpoles. This is the first time in the world something like this has been accomplished. 'Since the basics of body-making is common to that of human beings, I think this might help enable people to regain vision in the future,' Asashima was quoted as saying."
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Japanese Scientists Create Artificial Eyeballs More

Japanese Scientists Create Artificial Eyeballs

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  • BBC Also have this story (Score:1, Informative)

    by Celt ( 125318 )
    The BBC are also carrying this story @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 743000/1743987.stm

  • Now eat it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Papa Legba ( 192550 ) on Saturday January 05, 2002 @03:13PM (#2791148)
    Got to wonder how long until this ingredient makes it to Iron Chef....

  • Is vastly different from transplanting it succesfully and getting the transplantee's vision adjusted and working correctly.

    • Re:Growing an Eyeball..... (Score:5, Funny)

      by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Saturday January 05, 2002 @03:31PM (#2791212) Homepage Journal
      Yes, but if they get this working can you imagine the great advantage it would give us? Why just the time saved alone would be astounding. Have you ever tried to put a pair of glasses or contact lenses on a tadpole or full grown frog? Its not easy.
    • Did you perhaps not read the article? It explicitly says that the eyeball successfuly connected to the optic nerve and showed no signs of rejection.

      You are correct on one thing though: How do we know it actually works as it "should"? I guess we'll have to wait until we can do this in a human subject an (s)he can tell us :)
  • Thought I'd try my hand

    Remove tadpole eye
    Try not to drop new one
    Tadpole sees perfect

    • Good try. Traditional Haiku, though, is of the form:

      5 syllables
      7 syllables
      5 syllables

      Of course, tradtional Haiku is also in Japanese, applied to the seasons, whatever. Personally I don't mind as long as it sounds good.

  • tyrell & green to drop 'green' (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05, 2002 @03:14PM (#2791158)
    he say you blade runner / tell him i'm eating

    "i just do eyes"

  • Oh great... (Score:3, Funny)

    by 11thangel ( 103409 ) on Saturday January 05, 2002 @03:16PM (#2791161) Homepage
    Now my mom really CAN have eyes in the back of her head...
  • "Your eyes...I designed your eyes"

    "If only you could see...what I've seen with your eyes."

  • You tadpole, huh? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by verch ( 12834 )
    I design your eyes.

    If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes
  • Wow, I had no idea that eye sight loss in tadpoles had gotten so bad that Sceintists in Japan dedicated time to finding a solution. Although the three blind mice have already filed a discrimination lawsuit seeking matching funds.
    • Perhaps the luddites like the ones who want to prohibit experiments with stem cells and embryos that consist mostly of unspecified cells based on silly Bible-thumping arguments are the reason for this?

  • I guess, (Score:3, Funny)

    by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john.lamar@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Saturday January 05, 2002 @03:22PM (#2791187) Homepage Journal
    we won't need these! [slashdot.org]

  • "After all the years of eye damage from CRT radiation I have a chance to see again :) This will sell well with all the hardcore hackers :)"

    -- Xenph, "Bionic Eyes" Jan. 2002 [slashdot.org]

  • "Japanese Scientists Create Artificial Eyeballs"

    ... does this mean their tadpoles now have Lum's [tomobiki.com] doe-like eyes, in true anime style? :-)

  • What's next? (Score:2, Informative)

    by ai0524 ( 1952 )
    From a film made more than 20 years ago:

    INT. COLD STORAGE ROOM NIGHT

    Except for the work table with its sharp gleaming instruments, the room is as barren and sterile as a morgue. The glass-doored apartments in the walls look like crypts. Some of them small as post office boxes. From one of the Chew removes a vacuum, packed box. Carefully separating the seal, he reaches into the purple jell and with a pair of tweezers extracts an eye.

    Through the jeweler's glass, which he has not bothered to remove, Chew holds the eye up to the light and studies it a moment. His other hand searches through his pockets.

    ...

    CHEW: I know you. I made your eyes. You are nexus - 6.
    ROY: If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.

    The entire original script may be found at http://www.nootrope.net/bladerunner.html [nootrope.net]

  • Great step (Score:4, Informative)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Saturday January 05, 2002 @03:40PM (#2791236) Journal

    They actually managed to restore the sight of a tadpole which had had its eye surgically removed. The new eye reacted to light a week later. The tadpole was later disected, and the researchers confirmed that the optic nerve had reattached itself.

    I am sceptical of this working for more developmentally mature organisms, especially in adult mammals, however. The nerve reattachment is tricky, and there is other stuff besides. Nerve cells need to be trained early in development. There have been experiments on kittens, where one eye is sown shut after birth, and then allowed to open normally several weeks later. The kittens are always blind in that eye. Even if a human adult had sight in childhood, and lost his eyes later, I wonder if the nerve cells could be retrained for newly grown eyes.

    • Re:Great step (Score:5, Interesting)

      by the_quark ( 101253 ) on Saturday January 05, 2002 @04:49PM (#2791413) Homepage
      The issue with the kittens is that the parts of their brain that would be used for that eye get taken up by other functions. Research seems to show that, if you had eyesight during that critical learning phase, and then lost it later, the brain function is still there and you should be able to recover your sight.

      As well, even if it were only useful in immature organisms, it could be marvelous for kids who are born blind at birth (obviously in cases where there is simple physical eye damage). Further, my brother has Retinitis Pigmentosa, which is a progressive eye disease where he loses his peripheral vision. He still has fine eyesight in the little field he has; he can read, but is very likely to trip over large objects because he can't see them in his peripheral vision. As he likes to say, "I'll see the penny on the other side of the room; I'll just trip over an elephant I didn't see on the way there." As I understand it, his problem is entirely in his eyeballs; if you could replace them, it would completely solve his problem (until RP showed up in them again 30 years from now, assuming that the cause isn't local to the eyeball).

      I do have concerns as well that the eye would be able to hook up. But I think a good analogy might be the cochlear implants for deaf people. They hook up in adults, but the inputs are so different from the natural ones that most adults never learn to integrate the information. However, with a grown eyeball, that shouldn't be a problem - the information should be very similar to what they used to receive.

      Still exciting stuff, if only from a biohacking standpoint...
      • The issue with the kittens is that the parts of their brain that would be used for that eye get taken up by other functions.

        I was born with improper muscular control over one eye, which meant that I never developed binocular vision. The problem was detected when I was still a very young infant, but the doctor said that it was too late -- they could fix the muscle problem, but the period during which my brain would be able to develop the necessary associated brain-bits (sorry for the technical term) was over.

        Sucks, really.
        • Yes, my same brother who has RP also had "lazy eye" (as they termed it in the early 70s). He had surgery to correct it, but it was too late for him to develop true binocular vision (which I now understand needs to happen in the first six-nine months). After that, as you said, the portion of the brain needed to process binocular vision and associate it into your worldview is already taken up by something else.

          However, it has led to a weird confluence with his RP - as I decribed earlier, RP causes his vision in each eye to reduce to a pinpoint. Since his brain never really wired up for binocular vision, he doesn't really have the strong lock keeping his eyes looking the same way. As a result - completely unconsciously - his brain is turning one of his eyes OUT. This effectively doubles his field of vision, at no real loss to him (since he can't see depth-of-field anyway). Isn't the brain an amazing thing?
      • Oliver Sacks' "An Anthropologist on Mars" contains a (somewhat sad) case study of a patient who had been essentially blind since early childhood, and who had been diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa.

        As it turns out the patient really just had severe cataracts, which were then surgically removed. Bingo, the guy could 'see'!

        But he had enormous problems adapting to the new inputs his brain was receiving. He wasn't able to interpret depth very well; moving objects terrified him because he couldn't tell how far away they were. In his life he had adapted completely to being blind, and the operation turned out to be something of a mixed blessing.

        Here's an excerpt [oliversacks.com].

        As a side note, the book also contains the fascinating story of Temple Grandin, the autistic professor who has huge difficulties with human social interactions but who has made a career out of designing super efficient slaughtering houses that don't panic animals during the process leading up to their deaths.
        • In an odd coincidence, I've just discovered Sacks and am reading Awakinings, right now. I previously read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which alludes to the cataract story. An Anthropologist on Mars is on my wishlist. As I recall, the patient you describe ended up spending a lot of time sitting in the dark to get away from the endless visual "noise" that he perceived.

          Temple Grandin is a very interesting woman, and I keep running across her. I'll much look forward to hearing a complete history of hers; in the past I've only run across her in the types of thumbnail descriptions you used.
    • I am sceptical of this working for more developmentally mature organisms, especially in adult mammals, however. The nerve reattachment is tricky, and there is other stuff besides. Nerve cells need to be trained early in development.
      Actually, I suspect that if they can get around the nerve reattachment problem, retraining the optic nerve and its related brain centres might not be too difficult.

      The brain would probably correlate the signals from the new eye with the signals from the remaining natural eye, and begin to train itself that way. Perhaps even restoring true binocular vision. But only in a few rather limited circumstances.

      Having no existing signal to provide such correlation would exclude people totally blind in both eyes.

      If sight in both eyes had already begun failing do to a degenerative condition, the new eye would have a degraded signal to correlate against, and would quite possibly retrain to the same degraded standard.

      It seems that this would be most useful in cases where a degenerative condition had been diagnosed prior to symptoms becoming too severe. Presumably, the new eye would not suffer from the same degenerative condition, and even though it is retrained to a degraded standard, would not degrade further.

      And no, IANAN (neurologist).

    • The tadpole was later disected, and the researchers confirmed that the optic nerve had reattached itself.

      Don't forget about them frying it up and serving it in a French restaurant afterward too....
    • >The nerve reattachment is tricky...

      That's the understatement of the century.
      If you can reattach nerves, you can do much
      more than "just" cure blindness.

      You'll be able to cure almost all paralysis,
      probably brain damage, and even, yes, cure Death,
      at least some forms of brain-death.
  • If you can cure blindness, then start working on growing ears. We can cure deafness too.
    • The ear does not hear though (and they have grown ears on the backs of mice, although I do not have a link for this, just search Google [google.com] [google.com]. It is actually what is inside the head that does the hearing.
    • Groups are working on deafness too, it's not like everyone's doing eyes today. Rush Limbaugh has gone deaf and is trying a new surgery to regain his hearing.

      We're chiefly visual creatures. I'd rather be deaf than blind. Much safer, plus you can drive.

      • Re:Ears (Score:1)

        by mgv ( 198488 )
        Groups are working on deafness too, it's not like everyone's doing eyes today. Rush Limbaugh has gone deaf and is trying a new surgery to regain his hearing.

        There are many forms of deafness. It can be a conductive deafness - for example if the bones in your middle ear are broken or ossified. This is similar to but much worse than the way your hearing weakens if you don't pop your ears on a plane descent. This sort of deafness is easy to fix. Often amplifying the sound will help.

        Then there is neural deafness, which can be in the cochlea (where the implants help) or directly in the acoustic nerve (such as when a tumour of the nerve - acoustic neuroma - has to be removed. It can also be developmental if you have never heard sounds, although in these people the brain seems to rewire the centres to other language such as signing.

        These different forms of deafness will require different treatments.

        The new eyeball described here wont help with certain forms blindness. Cortical blindness, due to a stroke of the brain centres processing vision, for example, isn't going to be helped by this.

        Michael
  • I guess the Eyes have it. :)

    Sorry, couldn't stop the were-cheeser tranformation.... :)
  • Seems to be a very eye-ventful day, isn't it? :-)
  • Ohhh, if only you knew the things I have seen... with your eyes.

    (Sorry, it just had to be said.)
  • Yet another reason to oppose the Bush Administration's idiotic policies [slashdot.org] restricting stem cell research. It looks like the sight-impaired in this country can look forward to having new eyes with little "Made in Japan" labels.
    • It looks like the sight-impaired in this country can look forward to having new eyes with little "Made in Japan" labels.

      As long as they don't add those little watermark bugs in the lower right corner I don't think people would mind so much.

      You think that NBC logo is annoying now, wait til you have to see it every second of every day.

    • I don't remember any policies of the current administration that restrict research using tadpole stem cells.

      There is one important distinction between what you imply and the truth With respect to human stem cells research. There is not a restriction on embryonic stem cell research, just a policy not to fund using federal dollars. Since there is not a shortage of biotech research funds in this area, there is not much of an issue in reality.
  • Okay so the question becomes which eyes would you rather have? You could go with artificial eyeballs (Artificial Eyeballs [cnn.com]) or upgrade to Bionic eyes (see Bionic Eyes [nasa.gov]). My choice would go to the first one that gives me an X-ray vision option.
    • Id go for the Bionic Eyes Space eyes just for the name
      on a sidenote Im going to kill myself if I see another bladerunner-I-made-made-your-eyes reference/joke geez enuff is enuff.

  • Companion: Artificial Eyelids (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Digitalia ( 127982 ) on Saturday January 05, 2002 @04:25PM (#2791351) Homepage
    Now that they've found a way of reproducing eyeballs, I suggest they begin work on artificial eyelids. Of course, why replicate nature's work exactly when we can always improve upon it considerably. Think if you could embed a layer light-emitting polymer within the flesh of the eyelid. Close your eyes, instant total recall as your portable computer displays the material inside your lids. Give the eyelids a feed from an infrared or UV camera, or simply one with zoom, and you suddenly have a rather innocuous system of super-vision. I'd pay for it so long as the lids looked natural. Miniatiurize electronics enough and this might be much easier than redesigning eyeballs from scratch to achieve this kind of goal.

    There are problems beyond the tech, of course. First, I imagine that one might suffer nausea after prolonged use. Second, what would happen when millions of drivers began watching television on their eyelids while driving down the highway, squinting or holding one eye open so they can catch CNN?
    • Man, that just creaps me out! :/
    • I think you'd have trouble concealing the on/off switch, channel changer, etc. and making it look natural and if it didn't those things you can say goodbye to sleep and sanity. Those cable and electric plugs, or batteries and antenna going into your head are bound to give you away eventually. Watching CNN isn't much good without hearing it aswell. IMO this sort of thing is a long way off. Hopefully by that time the human will have been taken out of the drivers seat of a car. It is a cool concept though, I'll be first in line when/if the chance arrises to become a cyborg, even if only very small ways.
  • This takes all the fun out of "It's all fun and games until an eye gets taken out." I mean if you can get your eye replaced, it'll be fun to take an eye out too! (/joke)
  • And I thought "Four-Eyes" jokes were bad...

  • Can't replace a complete brain at once without losing personality and accumulated knowledge/memories. So replace one piece of brain until completely new brain.
  • Make lots of them to make all bugs (even in WIndows!) shallow?
  • A coat hanger mounted eyeball should be as good
    as an x10 -- for security purposes that is.
  • Will they make these things the proper size, or will everyone who has them look like they just stepped out of anime?

    ~Philly
  • And amazingly enough, they're not repeats!
  • Hmmm... I guess the title says it all..
  • I'm blind in one eye, in 8 years the doctors promise me that there will be artificial eyesight. I've never been able to see in 3D, maybe I'll finally see the hidden picture in the "Magic Eye" a la Mallrats."When will I see the sailboat?"
  • Back in 1982. The movie was Bladerunner. Remember the Japanese scientist who worked for Tyrell?

    "I only do eyes. . ."
  • Where Rutger Hauer and his dumb partner go to visit the Chinese man that made their eyes in a lab. Then the dumb guy starts putting eyes on the scientists shoulder while Hauer interogates him - funny stuff. Now it's all too real ;)
  • Theres never been a better time to create a low-grade voyeuristic pr0n site! Gotta go get me some 'bawls.
  • ...if only you could have seen what I have seen with your eyes.

    Elgon
  • our own, hahah i hope all those god freaks are going nuts.
  • I don't know answers, I just do eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.

    J.F. Sebastian. He's the one you want....
  • someone, quick call Ridley... this has GOT to be the most references in a single /. article to Blade Runner (from an article not thus related)

    yeah yeah, go ahead an mod me OT... it's ok, I'll see you coming with the new eyes I just got thru eBay... :)
  • .. Eyes in the back of your head.

    Sorry. Couldnt Resist.
  • Japanese Scientists Create Artificial Eyeballs

    I see. (*ba dum bum*)

    Thank you, thank you, don't forget to tip the bartender.

    -Legion

  • Much to his mum and dad's dismay

    Horace ate himself one day

    He didn't stop to say his grace

    He just sat down and ate his face ...

    ..."Stop him, someone," Mother cried

    "Those eyeballs would be better fried." ...


    And then you wonder why you can't get no dates ...!?!

  • This was on the local TV news here -- funny story. The newscaster said: "Japanese researchers have created artificial eyeballs for tadpoles... from the embryos of *frogs*!' As if she thought that tadpoles and frogs were separate species. TV newscastors never cease to amaze me...

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