You are right and this is more than a moon shot or Mars shot. A Titan shot. Until eye transplants work in mice or rats it is nuts to try this.
Retinal ganglion cells will very reluctantly regrow toward the thalamus after a nerve crush, but reestablishing any functional contacts in the dorsal lateral geniculate or superior colliculus, let alone “vision”, has not succeeded. Not nearly suceeded. And not for lack of trying 100+ methods. Albert Aguayo was the first to make headway in mammals in the 1980s:
Eldon E. Geisert and colleagues at Emory have coaxed a small percentage of retinal ganglion cells to grow through and far beyond the crushed region of the optic nerve in some genotypes of mice (but not other genotypes of mice). His group studied a very wide variety of genotypes of mice—30 or more. Impressive effort and real progress rather than a shadow of a unicorn. But getting to the geniculate is still a huge unachieved reach even in mice. Regrowth distances in human are roughly 20x farther. And there is a huge difference between a crushed optic nerve and a whole eye transplant.
Retinal ganglion cells will very reluctantly regrow toward the thalamus after a nerve crush, but reestablishing any functional contacts in the dorsal lateral geniculate or superior colliculus, let alone “vision”, has not succeeded. Not nearly suceeded. And not for lack of trying 100+ methods. Albert Aguayo was the first to make headway in mammals in the 1980s:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ruTKhvUAAAAJ
Eldon E. Geisert and colleagues at Emory have coaxed a small percentage of retinal ganglion cells to grow through and far beyond the crushed region of the optic nerve in some genotypes of mice (but not other genotypes of mice). His group studied a very wide variety of genotypes of mice—30 or more. Impressive effort and real progress rather than a shadow of a unicorn. But getting to the geniculate is still a huge unachieved reach even in mice. Regrowth distances in human are roughly 20x farther. And there is a huge difference between a crushed optic nerve and a whole eye transplant.
Here is a recent bioRxiv paper:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39416210/