Gregg Homer, a medical researcher with Stroma Medical in Laguna Beach, California, has announced that he has figured out a way to surgically change a person’s eye color from brown to blue. The permanent procedure involved removing pigment from the iris. Nancy Dillon of the New York News, writes in a recent column that the procedure takes just 20 seconds, but really does work.
So, far, according to Homer, twelve volunteer patients in Mexico have been successfully treated. The procedure involves the removal of a layer of pigment, via laser, in the iris. Homer says brown eyed people have two layers of pigment in the iris, whereas blue eyed people have just one, and that one layer at the bottom is the same for both blue and brown eyed people. Thus, the procedure really does nothing except remove the top layer, sort of like what renovators do when they remove paint from a painting to find the master underneath.
Homer claims the procedure is a hundred percent safe, because all it does is make brown eyed people the way blue eyed people already are, but he plans to conduct many more experiments with volunteers in other countries over the next year or so before applying to the medical establishment in this country to allow the procedure to be done.
Homer says his research has shown that an added layer of brown pigment likely developed in people as a means of better handling direct bright sunlight, the environment that early people in Africa, the Middle East and Asia lived in thousands of years ago. Modern life by contrast is generally devoid of such environments.
Even though the procedure takes just twenty seconds, it takes about a week or two for the color transformation to take effect. If it does pass muster here in the states, unfortunately for those who would like to have the procedure done, it likely won’t happen for at least three years. New procedures in this country have a very lengthy and involved trial process.
Most people have brown eyes of one hue or another, some estimates put it at about 80%. And those with blue eyes are for the most part have some bit of Nordic ancestry as that is where it first showed in people. Homer, who has patented the procedure, says that his company has done some polling and finds that about seventeen percent of the population with brown eyes, would opt for switching to blue given the choice.