TRANSPLANTING EYES

Southland Times, Issue 19518, 18 May 1922, Page 7

TRANSPLANTING EYES

VIENNESE SURGERY The enterprise and audacity of operative surgery during the last few decades have been simply astounding. No organ in the body has escaped the attentions of the surgeon’s knife and needle. Glands have been transplanted; dimples have been dibbled; Roman noses have been constructed; gaps in limb bones have been bridged with bits of leg-of-mutton bone; tumours have been cut out of the most vital convolutions of the brain; several arteries have been stitched together like lengths of hose-piping; and even the heart itself has been sewn up like a torn bag. Yet even still there remain new worlds for the modem surgeon to conquer, and within the last year a young Hungarian student named Koppanyi effected a new operative miracle and opened up new possibilities to surgery. Under an anaesthetic, Kopponyi painlessly removed the eyes of a rat, put into the empty sockets eyes from another rat and demonstrated that the transplanted eyes thrived and grew, and became useful organs of vision. “A few months ago” (writes Ronald Campbell Macfie, M.A., M. 8., in the “Daily Chronicle,”) “I visited the Institute in Vienna where Koppanyi had performed his wonderful experiment. Koppanyi himself was on leave, but his famous colleague, Professor Pribram (under whom the young Hungarian had worked), kindly introduced me to a rat in possession of another rat’s eyes. The transplanted eyes were bright and beady, and, except that one was somewhat protuberant, both looked absolutely normal. The pupils of the eyes, moreover, contracted to light, showing that they were functionally sound, and the rat itself was perky and active, . jumped from my hand into its cage, and behaved generally as if it had perfect sight. The operation performed by Koppanyi was as simple as possible. He merely put the new eye-ball into the new socket, and prevented it from falling out by stitching the eyelids together. In a day or two the nerve joined, and soon the rat acquired the sense of sight. Tran Rpl anta,tion of eyes had previously been carried out in fishes and in amphibians; but this operation of Koppanyi’s was the first instance of transplantation of eyes in a warmblooded mammalian animal, and was not only very extraordinary in itself, but at once suggested the possibility of a similar transplantation of human eyes. Yet, though in view of Koppanyi’s operation there would seem to be some hope of grafting even human eyes, we must not be too sanguine. For in the first place, human beings have not got the healing and reconstructive faculty of the lower animals; and in the second place, human beings have peculiar chemical idiosyncrasies so that unless giver and receiver are near blood relations an organ transplanted from one man to another usually soon perishes. The first difficulty, however, may not be insuperable; and with regard to the second difficulty, it is certain that many a father and a mother would gladly give one of their eyes to a child of their own. So that it is not impossible that the day may come when a child blinded by some accident may see the world again through the eye of one of its parents. Nevertheless, even if an eye were successfully transplanted from one human being to another, it is extremely unlikely that it would ever acquire the understanding vision of a normal human eye. The normal human eye has exceedingly intricate nerve connection with the intellectual centres of the brain, and a man who sees an object or a word not only sees it but recognises its full intellectual significance. A transplanted eye would probably be little better than a rat’s eye, for though it might see objects and words it "would not recognise their meanings. Still, even a rat can see colour and light, and the outline of solid objects, and a blind man would be glad to obtain even such limited vision, and may well see a gleam of hope in Koppanyi’s wonderful operation”.