This Man's Eyeballs Were Injected To Give Him The Ability To See In The Dark

The group called Science for the Masses theorised that 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, Mic reported.

According to io9, back in 2012 a patent was filed by Totada R. Shantha on a mixture that, when absorbed by the retina, would act to induce night vision — the ability to see nearby objects in low light conditions. The patent holders claimed it was safe to use for treating a condition known as night blindness, but also for improving night vision in healthy people.

The Science for the Masses hackers basically used this same formula, but they created their own concoction by adding both insulin and dimethlysulfoxide (which increases permeability) to the saline solution (normally, just insulin is used in conjunction with Ce6 and saline), io9 reported. The compound works by influencing the way our retina's light-sensing rods work in the dark.

"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.

"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.