Biologists grow human-eye precursor from stem cells | Hacker News Reader

Biologists grow human-eye precursor from stem cells

nature.com

56 pointsdaegloe9 comments

I look forward to the day when organs such as eyes can actually be replaced. Currently if you have a severe problem with your vision... well, you're mostly screwed.

As someone with one eye, severe retinopathy, glaucoma, and an artificial lens, news like this excites me to no end - not for me, of course. It's probably too late to do anything about my damaged vision.

My eyesight has been fairly stable for most of my life, but I've had 8 eye surgeries over the years, there was a 6mo period back in 2008 that was pretty frightening, and I spent all of last year slowly going (more) blind and seriously thinking I would permanently lose my vision.

I've dealt with my poor vision quite well, I think, but watching it deteriorate to the point where I couldn't do things like cook dinner or walk down the street without a cane, and the thought of losing what's left was so downright awful that I think I've actually suffered some PTSD from last year's ordeal. Some nights, despite the fact that my vision is much better than it was (as good as it has ever been, though I am still legally blind), I sleep with a light on, because waking up in total darkness is terrifying.

I'll be glad when these worries are a thing of the past.

Tell me when they can grow me a new inner ear and cure tinnitus. I want to experience the tranquility of true silence, and I want it from something other than the cold embrace of the grave.

Have a look at white noise. A friend of mine finds a lot of relief in it. Its like hacking your ears! http://www.google.nl/search?aq=f&client=chrome-mobile...

Impressive! I wonder if this technique has advantages over the "scaffolding" technique[1]. Maybe the eye doesn't have enough of a protein scaffold between its cells for that method to work?

[1]http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/replacing-body-parts.html

This no doubt also has implications for lab-grown meat because so far the stuff being produced is essentially just a homogeneous slab of tissue (e.g. would taste more like spam than fine meat). If full animal organs can ultimately be grown, including the textures, you could really imagine moving away from live-animal sourced meat.

And growing animal muscle for food is a good precursor to growing legs or hands or fingers for amputees.

"Some at the meeting had already tried and failed to reproduce Sasai's mouse experiment using human cells."

Hopefully this is temporary...

Maybe this will convince the "Intelligent Design" community that an eye-ball actually could be the result of many iterations (via selection) of photo-sensitive cells.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com