Researchers aim for first human eye transplant within the decade

An eyeball with whole attached optic nerve of a rat in the lab of Dr. Kia Washington, a plastic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center pioneering the research into whole eye transplants. PITTSBURGH -- Scientists have strived for successful eye transplants for centuries. Early attempts read like the diary of Mary Shelley: implanting a dog's eye into a rat's groin, transplanting a rat's eye onto the neck of another rat, plucking the eye of a sheep from one socket and placing it into the other. But never has a whole-eye transplant been successfully done in a living person. The eye's complex web of muscles, blood vessels, and nerves -- connected directly to the brain -- has doomed past experiments to failure.