Penny Sarchet

speaker

1,050 appearances 18 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 6d ago

Penny Sarchet’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.

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The World, the Universe and Us · Scientists Pioneer Surgical Methods for Human Head and Eye Transplants · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

And the second is a way to fuse a severed spinal cord.

And, you know, potentially that could allow people with spinal injuries to walk again and also potentially pave the way to so-called head transplants.

Body transplants, I think they should be called.

So don't say it, Rowan.

No, I have to say it.

All right, I'll allow it.

From New Scientist, this is The World, The Universe and Us.

I'm Dr Penny Sarche.

I think it's worth sort of stressing just how amazing the retina is because we can keep all kinds of bits of humans alive, can't we?

But the retina, like you say, is this sheet of light-sensitive cells that...

They're all kind of doing these special chemical reactions constantly to sense light.

And then all of that ultimately needs to be sort of plugged in to neurons in the brain.

It's an incredibly sort of delicate thing to work with, isn't it?

And so I guess the idea here is to then one day be able to transplant an entire eye so that someone can see again.

Am I misremembering this, but the octopus got it right and we got it wrong?

You can't get a detached retina.

Well done, octopuses.

And so potentially might something like that be useful for things like age-related macular degeneration because these are sort of these conditions that are actually very common and take our sight but are really hard to treat.

Yeah.

Well, because it's the eyeball.

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