At first thought, one might believe that the respected people at Stanford University have actually begun to lose their minds. Maybe the sheer pretentiousness of higher education finally got to them (or the number of zeroes on their student loans). Unfortunately the truth is much worse, researchers have managed to find science in the one place science should never be found – the lunchboxes their moms pack for them. The pigment tartrazine, found in Doritos, allows light to permeate the skin of mice, making it invisible. This allowed the researchers to view the body cavity of the mice, including internal organs and blood vessels. One of the most significant merits of this method is that it can be performed on living organisms, enabling scientists to observe biological processes as they happen (we can now see tiny little rat hearts beat).
Many scientists believe that this technique may give rise to advanced methods of scanning, especially in combination with other radiology techniques. This could lead to the development of a method “permitting deeper imaging than either could alone,” says an editorial article from Science. All this seems insignificant in the face of the literal bazillion things that are going terribly wrong in the world but this experiment does have a lot of interesting applications. Scientists think that this pigment could eventually be applied on human skin to have the same effect. Now we don’t just have to take the doctor’s word for it when they give us medical advice! That one uncle can now actually see the vessels around his heart struggling to operate because his blood type is KFC +.
Even continuing to use mice as model organisms, this innovation opens up several avenues for medical and anatomical research, such as improved clinical trials for drugs as well as animal histology. But what does this all mean? The lesson to be learnt from this is not rooted in the science behind the experiment but rather the motivation behind it. We often wonder why seemingly wacky experiments like this one make the headlines so often, it’s one of the reasons why a lot of people consider science to be a dead end. In reality, we can draw parallels of the current state of the scientific community to that of the divided one we saw nearly 2 centuries ago: one side with scientific minds working on things that seemed unfathomable in their lifetime (from the telescope to the steam engine) and the other side filled with critics who felt it was a waste of time. We live in an age of constant discovery, so the next time you see a headline like this and think the premise is stupid: too bad, deal with it.
