What complete eye transplant story tells us

Krishna: That is the problem with the media. They try to create sensation when something is done for the first time. Then they forget all about it.

Until the surgeons who performed this operation update us on this, there is no way to find out about the progress.

Initially, doctors were just planning to include the eyeball as part of the face transplant for cosmetic reasons. But they later thought of learning more from it.

The transplanted eye is not communicating yet with the brain through the optic nerve for the image to form. Surgeons harvested adult stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injected them into the optic nerve during the transplant, hoping they would encourage healing of the connection between the donor and recipient optic nerves.

Some research teams are developing ways to connect nerve networks in the brain to sightless eyes through insertion of electrodes, for example, to allow vision.

This transplant is just an experimental one, and Aaron James might not regain vision in the transplanted left eye. He himself told the media, “The doctors never expected it to work at all, and they told me that from the get-go”.

Even if he can't see... maybe at least the researchers can learn something to help the next person. That's how you get started in scientific research. Hopefully this opens up a new path. You just don’t get the results in the beginning itself. You have to keep trying using various methods. You have to experiment a lot until you succeed.

And you learn a lot at each step, what works and what fails.

Scientists and researchers are the first people who enter new arenas all the time. They very well know they won’t succeed the first time, the second time, the third time ….. but they keep trying until they succeed.

Good science will always be hard. But the reward is amazing ; the thrill of extracting from nature a few key secrets and knowing that these will be building blocks for future works, mostly by others and finally success to whole mankind, not just one researcher!

This case is just one such stepping stone.

Man on the street: Don’t expect much from it. Had there been progress in his vision, it would have been reported. That silence tells a different story.

People in research labs: you learnt a lot and that is great!

And please donate your corneas. That at least will give sight to some people.

Image source: iStock