Creating new medical procedures

Dude, I love science babble! As long as it sounds good I'll accept it as a valid excuse for anything. (As one could probably guess by my love of Doctor Who. )

Anyway, if this takes place in the future, look into current research and look at the way transplants are currently carried out and the difficulties with them. I do know they do cornea transplants already, so that would be a good place to start.

Your number one challenges are going to be nerves and rejection. Maybe they have a new technique to make donor material somehow genetically compatible, or just better drugs to prevent rejection. As for the nerves...I'm just thinking randomly here and haven't researched this, but maybe they've developed a drug or technique to help stimulate nerve growth (stem cells?). Maybe they've found a way to do it with nanobots or computer technology or something like that.

If you're writing in the future or it's scifi, I think the main issue is plausibility. It needs to sound viable, even if it wouldn't necessarily work in the modern day. So my advice is to just do some research and try to find something that sounds feasible. If you know a doctor or surgeon you might even be able to run the idea by them and see how it sounds (or ask an expert here).

We do have an Ask the Expert forum. There's also forums for almost everything, as well as newsletters for most industries, and there's always the traditional medical journals where researchers publish, PubMed, etc.

They did eye transplants in that Tom Cruise movie (can't recall the name) but they didn't go into any details. That might be an option to consider, unless it's necessary for you to explain everything.

If you wrote: "We remove the eye, insert the new eye and attach the optic nerve." that would be enough for me to believe it.

Don't make it any more difficult than you need to in order to make the reader believe it.

Hope that helps.

Don't talk about the how. Talk about people's reactions.

Tate said:

I have to create this type of eye transplant for my mc in my story but I don't really know how I would go about this without it sounding like something I just made up.

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Hey, it is something you just made up. The same way Mary Shelley made up revitalization of a corpse in Frankenstein. The same way Robert Louis Stevenson used a medical potion to transform Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The same way H.G. Wells used surgical procedures to transform animals into pseudo-humans in The Island of Dr. Moreau. None of those works gets dissed for such flights of imagination.

Go write the story. If it works, or doesn't work, you'll only find out in that manner.

caw

How do the other people around the character respond to the eye transplant? Amazement? Derision? As they would a breast enhancement or liposuction? Like they would an abortion? Or like they would for gallstone surgery? What does the character think or feel or believe about it?

I think this depends on how you're using this whole scene. Is a doctor giving a consult to his patient? Are you doing an in-operation scene? Is someone just talking to a friend about how the operation panned out when they had it done?

I think I understand the OP’s quandary, and agree that research wouldn’t do any harm, yet I wonder what research was done by the early authors of Frankenstein, Werewolves and the like.

Yet there has to be a believability factor of sorts, even for the most outrageous fantasy; didn’t Frankenstein only rip apart those that created him?

The authors are still human, mostly, and will still write about feelings and falling in love, whatever horrors may be described. And we don’t need to do too much research into feelings, sitting in a quiet corner with a notebook should suffice.

A solid name would be something along the lines of "Oculomotor nervous transplant". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculomotor_nerve

They did eye transplants in that Tom Cruise movie (can't recall the name) but they didn't go into any details.

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The movie was Minority Report

The film Minority Report was based on a novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. I can't recall whether the eye transplant thing is in the novel, but I do remember that Minority Report is an awesome book (as are all Dick's books), and it might be well worth your time to read it, just to see how he handled it (if he did.)

A mechanical eye that works with high clarity and can attach to nerves is something people not far off in scientific advancements and completely believable in a modern society. In one of my stories, my MC gets shot in the face and has his scrambled eye replaced with a mechanical camera eye. Since it's a sci fi book and there's technology far beyond that work, it doesn't need that much explanation.

This all depends on genre. If it is fantasy, horror, or some others, there is a little more leeway. But I just had some major cringe fits from reading some of the posts above (As an academic researcher, I'm a neurobiologist.) You may be better off by having parts of the eye transplanted rather than the whole thing (there is both research and medical methodology for such things). But unless one is willing to go into the robotics aspect of human medicine (and thus, again, have significant leeway in fiction), using terms like oculomotor (the oculomotor nerve is totally separate from the optic nerve) will get an author in hot water with some readers. If one is going to use medical facts/terms in support of "fantastic" fictional procedures (just like using historical facts in a historical novel), they better be right. This requires research. Also, a total eye transplant in an adult human won't work because all of the neural connections between the retina and the optic regions of the brain require precise and experiential developmental ordering, which would be impossible to duplicate, even if one could get cut axons in a nerve to connect to donor axons in a transplanted optic nerve. The eye would be able to form images, but the messages to the brain would be gibberish.

Keep in mind, though, that a neurobiologist like me doesn't have any problem reading horror and supernatural suspense, which both frequently defy anatomical and physiological fact. I write the stuff, so I do deviate from human physiological and psychological reality with no problem in those settings.

If you are writing something futuristic but not in one of the genres that allow a total bend of our medical realities, your best bet might be to incorporate some aspect of optical robotics since mating man with machine allows some freedom from physiological reality. But even then, be very careful with terminology and any anatomy or physiology that is mentioned. It doesn't require that much research to get the details right.

Uncle Jim's suggestion totally sidesteps these problems and allows focus on a totally different kind of emotional reaction to the medical events in a story, so that should be considered as well.

If the story is about the eye transplant technique, then you'd better know your stuff, down to the fine details.

If the transplant is just one plot point in the story, one detail, you can get away with fudging.

One caveat: If your story is not speculative, you shouldn't make up a procedure that doesn't exist.

I made up a medical procedure (a treatment for blindness) for my book Second Sight, a mainstream thriller pubbed in 1998. That procedure actually exists now.

Beth

You could give a one sentence explanation and then name the procedure after someone.

A plot point for Blood Witness involved an infant needing all his blood replaced immediately after birth. When I first wrote the book I gave the infant a disease I thought required a blood exchange shortly after birth. I later discovered that in the 80s, when the story takes place, transfusions weren’t used as treatment. I searched for other illnesses (and they had to be genetic, so the parents knew it was coming) that would require a newborn to get blood transfusions, but couldn’t find one. So I invented one, but was having trouble coming up with a good name for it.

I had been listening to Scott Sigler’s “Infected.” Scott used the names of well-known podcasters for past victims of his disease, and it brought a smile to my face every time he did it. And considering that “Infected” (and the sequel, “Contagious”, which is a New York Times Best Seller) are about ghastly diseases, I thought naming the illness after him would be a great inside joke. I sent him an e-mail asking permission and received a one word reply: “Cool!”

And thus “Sigler’s Syndrome” was born.