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Chemical or mechanical causes of pseudo-aphakia
Does anyone know of any drugs that affect the composition of the eyes lens, because evidently humans can respond to ultraviolet wavelengths but the lens filters out a lot of it. That being said I think most of us would agree that having a lens in our eye is a tad more advantageous than ultraviolet sensitivity
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Agreed!ok, so most of the papers that i have found point to returning to stability as opposed to what a medical would consider "lens degradation". There are many reports of people seeing into the UV after surgery, but it heals and goes away.
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Right which is why I didn't know if there was a way to maintain that sensitivity. Maybe some sort of phase shifting material injected into the lens? I read a paper awhile back about a guy in colorado who was using quantum dots that responded at various frequencies.
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Alright...here are my thoughts on afaxia thus far: First off, not every patient who received a lens removal and artificial implant reported UV vision; I believe only around 2-3% did. So native retinal sensitivity may have a significant role to play in UV vision as well. As far as non-surgical means of inducing afaxia, here's what I've come up with so far: 1. Blanching. We are born with our lenses nearly completely clear; later on in life, the become yellowed and cloudy, blocking a decent swathe of short-wavelength light (for a damn good reason; UV plays hell with epithelial tissue). Assuming you wanted to do this (I wouldn't!) you could either look for a means of chemically "bleaching" the lens, or attempt to reverse the genetic process involved in pigmentation (<--way out of my league). 2. It seems reasonable to assume that there is some small amount of UV radiation whichmakes it past the lens and strikes the retina, but which is nigh undetectable due to the small amount. This ought to be relatively easy to test with a stim unit similar to the one @Cassox is working on, but with NUV rather than NIR LEDs. Assuming this is a viable theory, I'll be looking into something called light amplification surgery: http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/WO2008106605 This procedure is still in primate trials, and is being developed to treat certain degenerative retinal conditions. Essentially, you take nano-scale crystals ("quantum dots") which fluoresce when bombarded by photons at certain wavelengths, and apply a bio-targeted coating to them designed to adhere only to specific tissues--in this case retinal/vitreous tissue in the eye. Light strikes the particle, the particle fluoresces--voila! Amplified. Nanocrystals can be purchased online from reputable sources; @glims is the guy to talk to about the biotargeted coating, I would imagine. Keep in mind that both methods--afaxia of any kind & light amplification--do not increase sensitivity to UV in any way. They merely increase the saturation of photoreceptive cells w/ UV light.
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Oops, you beat me to the quantum dots :P
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As the resident naysayer, i must point out that the concentration of quantum dots necessary to stay below toxic levels is a very very small number.however, anyone who desires some uv qd's to inject in their eye, i will be happy to supply them with such, as long as i get to watch.for science.
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@glims how much are you selling them for?
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haha, i hadn't even considered that. let me look into it. making qds are time intensive but not actually very hard. i'll get back to you.
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@glims awesome. I may just try and look into finding either a doctor or professional enough practitioner and see what I can make happen. Can you make the coating as well?
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I would definitely do A LOT more research before sticking a needle full of nanosand through your pupil... Edit: Also, I repeat, the quantum dot method (or aphakia, for that mattter) WILL NOT INCREASE UV SENSITIVITY. If you're going to try this, you might as well test your native sensitivity to UV via electroretinography. Go to http://scienceforthemasses.org/ and read @Cassox description of ERG for an idea of how to go about doing that.
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@Saal absolutely. I don't plan on going about this all willy nilly, should the time come for the procedure I will have researched and documented all I can, because despite having 2 eyes, prosthetics just aren't good enough to justify losing one :p
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@mitravelus i work in a biocoating lab actually. the coatings would actually be more difficult than the qds themselves.
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@glims Alright, I need to do more research evidently. I will stay in touch now that I have something to obsessively learn about.
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We had this thread here: http://discuss.biohack.me/discussion/21/tetra-chromacy-mod#Item_38
@Rubix has done a lot of work on an SWS gene hack that enables UV tetrachromacy.@Saal: On the topic of lens yellowing...Is that caused by UV tanning of the lens? I'm interested to see how A2 impacts this because apparently it is a phenomenal UV blocking compound. If the lens darkening is simply due to UV tanning then the lens should loose its tint over time with A2 but UV would be blocked by that compound anyway I guess. Just thinking out loud here. -
On a side note here, from what I understand NAC eye drops have shown efficacy at clearing some of the yellowing of the lens.
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Why not remove the lens entirely and engineer an intraocular lens (IOL) with the desired light transmission characteristics? If you attempt to inject anything into your natural lens, you're likely to induce the type of clouding that produces cataracts and the lens will need to be replaced any way. This would just speed up the process and make the whole experiment much easier to perform. The new IOL could be fully tested ex-vitro before inserting it into the eye.
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*copy paste one of my rants about smacking non biologicals into a biological system and hoping it works*IOLs suck compared to normal lenses. They are better than the alternative... not exciting tho.
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@glims, I disagree. I've had IOL's for years with no detrimental affects. They are a proven technology. Besides, I was offering it up as an idea for discussion. We shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss things out of hand if we want to make progress.
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I didn't say there would necessarily be a detrimental effect, Just that there are all the risk associated with putting a chunk of inorganic into ones body, which everyone tends to ignore around here. While we are all pretty ok with this, and they are totally a proven technology, my point was that they are a prosthetic that fixes a detrimental situation, as opposed to an augment.I'm not being hasty dismissing things. The "why not remove the lens entirely" comment should be examined in the same way one says let's remove an particular biological part. If you don't have a superior augment, then removing the current one doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I am under the assumption that we want to augment the human condition.
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