PITTSBURGH — Recently, we have witnessed remarkable, fictional-
sounding advancements in science and medicine. There's a guy who
can hear color, another with a bionic eye attached to his brain,
and a woman fighting back against the debilitating symptoms of
multiple sclerosis by placing electrodes on her tongue. But for
our next trick, we're going to need a bucket of tadpoles with
eyes on their butts and some good old-fashioned alternating
current. In other words, things are about to get all kinds of
weird. There's a great deal of wow to unpack here, so let's take
it piece by piece. Using embryos from the African clawed frog
(Xenopus), scientists at Tufts' Center for Regenerative and
Developmental Biology were able to transplant eye primordia —
basically, the little nubs of flesh that will eventually grow
into an eye — from one tadpole's head to another's posterior,
flank or tail. They don't play around with nerve endings or
"wiring" or anything like that. They just cut out the cells from
the head, slice open a