Building the body electric
Eyes can be grown in a frog’s gut by changing cells’ electrical properties
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336783/title/Building_the_body_electric
I believe that Science News only allows some articles to be free for a certain period of time, so this link might not always be valid. The gist of the article is that scientists, in addition to being able to regrow tails of tadpoles with small jolts of electricity, were able to actually grow complete eyes anywhere they wanted to using a similar trick. While it is certainly very far from any sort of application to humans, it does lead to interesting potential that wasn’t so exciting before. I have also read articles in the past that describe research that indicates that scar tissue is actually the first stages of tissue regeneration that is somehow interrupted in humans, so the idea is that the newt’s ability to regenerate lost limbs is inherent in the human genome and has been lost. If we can somehow understand how the regeneration process is being interrupted we could grow back lost limbs, and now possibly even something as complex as eyes!
