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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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.
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.
@Rubix has done a lot of work on an SWS gene hack that enables UV tetrachromacy.