Scientists have strived for successful eye transplants for centuries. Early attempts read like the diary of Mary Shelley: implanting a dog’s eye into a rat’s groin, transplanting a rat’s eye onto the neck of another rat, plucking the eye of a sheep from one socket and placing it into the other.
But never has a whole-eye transplant been successfully done in a living person. The eye’s complex web of muscles, blood vessels, and nerves — connected directly to the brain — has doomed past experiments to failure.
Now a team of Pittsburgh transplant surgeons aims to turn that tide, and they’re hopeful they can do so in just the next decade, using donor eyes to restore sight in people who have suffered traumatic eye injuries.
“I’m hopeful that in 10 years we will be doing eye transplants in humans,” said Dr. Kia Washington, plastic surgeon at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and head of the research team. “There are people who are very skeptical, obviously, for obvious reasons. It is kind of a moonshot.”
Read the full article at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/researchers-human-eye-transplant-decade/Share