he first cut is too small. With gloved hands, Nobuyasu Maki slices the cornea again, this time with more pressure. The anesthetized amphibian doesn’t twitch beneath the spotlights focused on its speckled yellow head, no bigger than a large Tic Tac. A timer beeps somewhere in the lab, like a heart monitor in a hospital room. Switching instruments, Maki raises a pair of miniature tweezers vertically above the newt’s head, then plunges the point down into the eye. The alarm, unrelated to this experiment, stops. Maki pulls the tweezers up, extracting a small, clear orb, no larger than a pinhead. He lays down the instrument and picks up the motionless newt, placing it inside a plastic carrier. “It’ll wake up in an hour,” he says, stripping the latex gloves from his hands.
But long before the animal stirs, macrophages will flood the injury site and mediate the removal of pigment ...
