injectable night vision

[dragon]

You know I would be reeally nervous about volunteering caause if it goes wrong you could end up blind.

A Team of Biohackers Has Figured Out How to Inject Your Eyeballs With Night Vision
Max Plenke's avatar image By Max Plenke March 25, 2015
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In "people becoming superhuman" news, a small independent research group has figured out how to give humans night vision, allowing them to see over 50 meters in the dark for a short time.

Science for the Masses, a group of biohackers based a couple hours north of Los Angeles in Tehachapi, California, theorized they could enhance healthy eyesight enough that it would induce night vision. To do this, the group used a kind of chlorophyll analog called Chlorin e6 (or Ce6), which is found in some deep-sea fish and is used as an occasional method to treat night blindness.

"Going off that research, we thought this would be something to move ahead with," the lab's medical officer, Jeffrey Tibbetts, told Mic. "There are a fair amount of papers talking about having it injected in models like rats, and it's been used intravenously since the '60s as a treatment for different cancers. After doing the research, you have to take the next step."

To do so, team biochem researcher Gabriel Licina became a guinea pig.

How it happened: With what's basically a really fine turkey baster, Tibbetts slowly dripped 50 microliters of Ce6, an extremely low dose, into Licina's speculum-stretched eyes, aiming for the conjunctival sac, which carried the chemical to the retina.

Gabriel LicinaSource: Science for the Masses

"To me, it was a quick, greenish-black blur across my vision, and then it dissolved into my eyes," Licina told Mic.

And then they waited. From the patent they read, the effects start kicking in within an hour. Licina and Tibbetts had done their research, going so far as to post a paper called "A Review on Night Enhancement Eyedrops Using Chlorin e6." But they are, after all, a bunch of guys working out of a garage. So they went out to a dark field and tested Licina's new superpowers.

Did it work? Yes. It started with shapes, hung about 10 meters away. "I'm talking like the size of my hand," Licina says. Before long, they were able to do longer distances, recognizing symbols and identifying moving subjects against different backgrounds.

"The other test, we had people go stand in the woods," he says. "At 50 meters, we could figure out where they were, even if they were standing up against a tree." Each time, Licina had a 100% success rate. The control group, without being dosed with Ce6, only got them right a third of the time.

Gabriel LicinaSource: Science for the Masses

Hacking the human body: Biohacks like these are a perfect example of where science and biology can go, and something like providing temporary night vision could be used for more than just a really serious Doctor Mid-Nite costume. Imagine search-and-rescue teams being able to see in the dark in forested areas or hostage situations.

It doesn't have to be done with a colossal budget, either. With the amount of information freely available, pursuing science can be more about curiosity than resources.

"For us, it comes down to pursuing things that are doable but won't be pursued by major corporations," Tibbetts says. "There are rules to be followed and don't go crazy, but science isn't a mystical language that only a few elite people can speak."

What's next? For the lab's night vision experiment, there are other tests they need to do, with hard science with actual lab equipment and getting real numbers on the electrical stimulation in the eye. But for now, it's fair to say it worked.

"Once you get the hard numbers, that's it," Tibbetts says. "You take it and quantify it and write it down, and release it. ... This is how science works. It isn't flashy. But it makes it more accessible. It shows it can be done. If we can do it in our garage, other people can, too."

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[Borgholio]

Yeah I wouldn't want them to put that shit in my eyes...but the results are still really cool.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I wouldn't hold your breath. It would be nice to see an actual scientific investigation into this. Nothing about their little experiment is terribly convincing. There paper describes the "tests" in an incredibly vague way (instead of, say, relying on any of the dozens of standard vision tests used in typical experiments), and they only tested one individual. One individual who happens to be intimately involved with the study and who directly stands to benefit with a positive outcome. Color me skeptical, for now.

[Sea Skimmer]

The short paper they put out you can find in the original article openly calls its own testing subjective, said that they are building on other work by more scientific types working to treat eye conditions, and spends a third of its length talking about junk science and how it the testing they attempted was held back by lack of actual test facilities. So I don't think these guys are trying to bullshit anyone, and unless they faked the image, that totally looks like a person who should have superior night vision by some measure. They seem clear enough that they just wish for other people to look at this subject, because they might be on to something serious.

Claiming improved night vision that works at a mere 50m, with 100% success for the test against 33% success for the unaided eye, isn't perhaps the most surprising or leap ahead accomplishment anyway.

Back in WW2 many navies used Atropine eye drops to dilate the eyes and improve night vision (all secret sauce at the time) and it was considered useful at much greater distances, if against larger objects AKA ships. This had no light amplification ability at all, just your eye open as wide as possible, and prevented from adjusting dimmer. It worked especially well when combined with special night telescopes intended for use by men doped in such a manner which produced wide images. It worked, but going back into high light levels was actively painful. Eventually this technique stopped being used because atropine is pretty damn toxic and its administration can only be justified on medical grounds, usually as an antidote to poisoning, which is why you never hear about it anymore.

It looks like this chemical in the formula used had something like that effect, plus it just slightly amplified light, and that would certainly make a major difference. It'd just be nothing like as good as night vision goggles that can image an image tens of thousands of times brighter and work even at very low ambient light levels. This chemical effect may for example not scale well below certain thresholds. They are certainly not trying to answer questions like that yet.

[Ziggy Stardust]

The short paper they put out you can find in the original article openly calls its own testing subjective, said that they are building on other work by more scientific types working to treat eye conditions, and spends a third of its length talking about junk science and how it the testing they attempted was held back by lack of actual test facilities. So I don't think these guys are trying to bullshit anyone, and unless they faked the image, that totally looks like a person who should have superior night vision by some measure. They seem clear enough that they just wish for other people to look at this subject, because they might be on to something serious.

I have no doubt that they are sincere in their efforts, and aren't actively trying to trick people. That doesn't make their results any more trustworthy. There's a reason blinding is ubiquitous in scientific studies; ultimately, it is just too easy to unintentionally bias the results of an experiment, especially one relying on subjective measures like this.