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Patients get Solar Implants in Eyes
Ben Sullivan writes "As reported at Science Blog, ophthalmologists have implanted Artificial Silicon Retina microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa. The implant is a 2mm chip that contains about 5,000 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. Already some patients have experienced improvements such as not bumping into objects around the house, and being able to read the time on a clock."
My wife has early onset RP and it does far more than affect night vision and peripheral vision - it ultimately causes all vision to be lost, from the outside in. In the past few months my wifes central vision in her right eye has started to fail dramatically.
Normally RP is diagnosed later on in life so the full effects of the disease are not normally experienced, however many suffer from childhood and it is those people that will benefit from this type of technology.
In tandem with this research there has also been progress made in retinal transplants using stem cell growth mediums to allow the cells to function normally.
Its nice to see some hope, particularly for my wife who has been told that she would be blind by the time she was ten. That was 23 years ago.
That russian girl was flown to the US for further testing - this was on nat-geo or discovery not long ago. This is all from memory so I may be wrong...
She had to specify the problems of 7 or 9 patients (can't remember exactly) - she did score quite high, but not high enough for it to be any more believable than educated guess work. Threw a bit of a tantrum when she found out she would not be able to view the bodies of the patients before making her decision.
She took far longer to make a diagnosis under test conditions than the the scratchy home video's from Russia.
She had been hanging around hospitals back home, so this is not at all suprising. All the evidence points toward her 'not' having any magical powers.