Daring biohackers from California's Science for the Masses collective have just performed the world's first night vision-enabling "Shine Job." They employed a chemical called Chlorin e6 (Ce6), which is extracted from deep sea fish and occasionally used to treat night blindness, to give a human the ability to temporarily see in the dark using painless eye drops. "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," Science for the Masses medical officer Jeffrey Tibbetts told Mic. "After doing the research, you have to take the next step."
That next step apparently involve dribbling 50 microliters of Ce6 into human guinea pig Gabriel Licina's conjunctival sacs (the part of the eye that transports chemicals into the retina) which gave him the ability to effectively see in the dark at distances up to 50 meters -- at least for a little while. Lincea describes initially being able to first spot shapes the size of his hand, then written symbols and moving objects at a distance of 10 meters. At 50 meters, Lincia could easily find find people standing still in front of trees. In fact he spotted them every single time while a control group was successful only about 30 percent of the time.
Now, while the Science for the Masses team did its homework before this experiment you have to remember this is a far cry from knocking back a few drops of Visine. In short, please don't go injecting stuff into your eyeballs all willy-nilly in an attempt to recreate this effect for yourself.
[Image Credit: Science for the Masses]
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