Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.
“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”
In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”
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A dual stem cell scaffold improved vision and eye surface scores in a small first-in-human trial for aniridia-related keratopathy.
For people with ARK (aniridia-related keratopathy), progressive damage to the eye’s surface can gradually cloud the cornea and severely reduce vision. In a first-in-human clinical trial at Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London (UCL), a stem cell treatment improved vision in patients with this previously untreatable rare genetic condition. The findings were published in JAMA Ophthalmology.
Aniridia is an eye surface disorder involving limbal stem cells, which are located at the boundary between the sclera (white of the eye) and cornea (the clear area at the front of the eye). Usually caused by an inherited genetic abnormality affecting eye development, the condition can result in profound vision loss.