In March, Gabriel Licina pinned his eyes open and had his friend, Jeffrey Tibbetts, place several drops of a carefully calibrated liquid into his eyes. After a few minutes, to let the drops settle in, they headed outside to a dark field. The drops contained a small amount of a chemical called Chlorin e6, or ce6. The chemical has been used in cancer treatment for years, but that’s not why Licina put it in his eyes. Licina and his team were using it for another property: ce6 makes people’s eyes more sensitive to red light. They had used it to make night-vision drops.
You might have heard about this story. Licina says he never expected the huge amount of press the project got. “We had no idea it was going to happen.”
Some of the coverage was frustrating. Several stories suggested that Licina had injected something into his eyes (he didn’t) and that they had stumbled across an amazing breakthrough (they hadn’t). “It was a little distressing to see first-hand how easy it is for media to take a project and distort it,” he says. “The first article used the word injection. So the next 15 all had the word injection.” He laughed. “It’s a fancy eyedropper.”
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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Night Vision Without the Goggles
