Eyes: Newt, Rat, Human

Theodor Koppanyi, young Viennese biologist, who claims to have succeeded in transplanting seeing eyes in small animals, is coming to America at the invitation of a Chicago hospital for a stay of a year or two to conduct more ambitious researches. So far his experiments have been confined to rats and rabbits, but in Chicago he hopes to work on monkeys and larger mammals.

The grafted eyes produced by Koppanyi look normal, and it is said that ihe animals show normal reflexes to the stimulus of light. Proof is difficult, however, that the nerves of the transplanted organs have actually united with the native nerves, and a violent discussion has been aroused among medical men. A number of European savants are convinced of the achievement, including Prof. Gustav Kolmar, Vienna physiologist, and Dr. D. D. R. Burt, of St. Andrew's University, Scotland, who has himself transplanted eyes in toads. But the majority of eye specialists and many physiologists and biologists, are dubious. A Russian doctor, Katz, recently announced the restoration of sight in blind humans by an artificial device, but not by transplantation of a living eye (TIME, April 14). And right here in Paterson, N. J., the well press-agented Lemonowicz boy had a pig's eye grafted, but without gaining the confidence of the medical profession.

Koppanyi, still in his twenties, was a student of Dr. Hans Przibram, the great professor of experimental zoology at Vienna, and worked in the same laboratory with Prof. Eugen Steinach, gland implanter. The work of all these men is gravely hampered by lack of funds and equipment, as is generally true in the laboratories of Central and Eastern Europe today.

Koppanyi's work should not be confused with that of Prof. Paul Kammerer, also of the University of Vienna, whose experiments in the transmission of acquired characteristics have recently aroused widespread interest here and in England, some biologists going so far as to rank him with Darwin (TIME, May 12). Kammerer grew eyes in the proteus, a sightless newt whose eyes are mere rudimentary spots beneath the skin, atrophied through ages of living in deep marine caves. He did it by exposing the newts to red light in their watery home continuously for five years from birth. After several generations, one group appeared with eyes that pushed through the head. The offspring of these also had eyes, and Dr. Kammerer believes it a true instance of hereditary change.