Under the lid – the mysteries of the eye are being unveiled

Unique: Researchers are piecing together the complex workings of the human eye.

When the body of Dr Yoshiki Sasai, an eminent Japanese biologist, was discovered in August, his death was widely mourned across the world of science. Not just for the abrupt end to his glittering career,for which he had won several awards, including the 2010 Osaka Science Prize. Nor because of the tragic manner of his death the 52-year-old was found hanged in his own laboratory an apparent suicide, some say, after a scandal over a research paper he'd co-authored in January.

Instead, the scientific world lamented what, perhaps, Dr Sasai was about to achieve. As one of the directors at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, in Kobe, he was one of the world's leading experts in stem cell technology.

His team had pioneered incredible new techniques for creating organ-like structures making giant strides towards a future where replacements for our failing human organs could be grown in a Petri dish.

The late Dr Yoshiki Sasai, stem cell pioneer. Photo: AFP

And most tragically, the months before his death had heralded Sasai's biggest achievement. His team had already grown partial pituitary glands and even bits of the brain, but now he'd coaxed embryonic stem cells into forming the functioning tissue of arguably the most complex and scrutinised organ in the entire animal kingdom.

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Sasai had grown an eye. In doing so, he'd also helped resolve a scientific obsession that had lasted centuries.

In very basic form, the eye is thought to have first developed in animals about 550 million years ago. But such is its perfect design its infinite adaptability, and irreducible complexity that many argue it is proof of the divine itself.

Even today, Christians and creationists argue that Charles Darwin himself was troubled by its existence seizing upon an (oft-misquoted) aside in Origin of Species, where Darwin remarked that the idea that something so flawless "could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree".

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Under the lid - the mysteries of the eye are being unveiled