Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Hi there,
@50: eyes transplantation is a quite complicated thing, primarily for two reasons. The firstone is the muscular structure around eyes. Muscles like thigh muscle or arm muscle (I don't know the proper english names) are quite simple, as they are big and work in rather simple way. Muscles around eyes are much smaller, fitted in a small area, and expected to move eyes in various directions, controll your caps etc. This is not easy to reproduce during a transplantation, everything must fit perfectly, otherwise the patient would have quite hot times after waking up.
But this problem is not that significant compared to the secondone, consisting of joining patient's optical nerve to the new eye. This is a real trouble, where things get stuck, as nerves can't be simply joined with glue or something like that. They must grow together, what is a quite unpleasant fact considering, that neurons and neural paths do all possible sorts of things just not growing.
Neurons are one of the longest living cells in human body, most of them are already created when a baby is born, and last for the whole lifetime. Neuroscientists believe, that some neural paths are built during development of brain, but after the circuits are set, they don't grow or reproduce anymore.
Thus, it's not that hard to understand, how challenging is to get these two things to join together.
There were some very interesting progresses in this problem in recent years, with successful restoring sight of mouses with cut optical nerves.
But the methods are not strong enough yet to work on humans, so further research is necessary.
As for moral aspect of transplanting an eye, I wouldn't have problems myself with it. These sorts of transplantations are done already with other organs, so eyes would be just another entry on the list. The person originally wearing them won't need them anymore, and they would decay after some time anyway, so making use of them is the best thing to do. And if the person wants them in his grave so strongly, I can still return them after my death.
But seriously, as far as I know, you must give an agreement to use your organs for transplantations after your death, noone will be opening corpses with "you know, we need something from this guy. Don't worry, he will look normally again after we close him."
That means, that the person explicitly wanted his eyes to be donored, and thus having them transplanted is okay.
Best regards
Rastislav
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