
Originally Posted by
galexander
It is said the MoF used a torch to temporarily blind the occupants of the car before shooting the male occupant first. But how could the investigators have known this about the torch if there were no surviving eyewitnesses?
But maybe there were "eye"witnesses...
.Willy Kühne, professor of physiology at Heidelberg, took up the study of rhodopsin, and in one extraordinary year learned almost everything about it that was known until recently. In his first paper on retinal chemistry Kühne said: “Bound together with the pigment epithelium, the retina behaves not merely like a photographic plate, but like an entire photographic workshop, in which the workman continually renews the plate by laying on new light-sensitive material, while simultaneously erasing the old image.”
Kühne saw at once that, with this pigment which bleaches in the light, it might be possible to take a picture with the living eye. He set about devising methods for carrying out such a process, and succeeded after many discouraging failures. He called the process optography and its products optograms.
One of Kühne’s early optograms was made as follows. An albino rabbit was fastened with its head facing a barred window. From this position the rabbit could see only a gray and clouded sky. The animal’s head was covered for several minutes with a cloth to adapt its eyes to the dark, that is to let rhodopsin accumulate in its rods. Then the animal was exposed for three minutes to the light. It was immediately decapitated, the eye removed and cut open along the equator, and the rear half of the eyeball containing the retina laid in a solution of alum for fixation. The next day Kühne saw, printed upon the retina in bleached and unaltered rhodopsin, a picture of the window with the clear pattern of its bars.
Two years later he repeated the process with the head of an executed criminal. The resulting optigram, which he reproduced in a drawing, is the only known picture taken with a human eye. Unfortunately, the scene it displayed was unidentifiable.