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Nano-Optical Switches To Restore Sight?
Roland Piquepaille writes, "Researchers in California are now using light to control biological nanomolecules and proteins. They think it can help them to develop treatments for eye diseases, such as the loss of the light detectors in the retina that is a major cause of blindness. They envision putting some of their nano-photoswitches in the cells of the retina, restoring light sensitivity in people with degenerative blindness such as macular degeneration. It will be a while before this technique emerges from the laboratory. ZDNet has additional references and pictures of what you can do with these photoswitches."
While this is very cool research (and we are looking at hiring one of the graduate students involved in this project as a post-doc when he graduates), they are still not addressing many of the fundamental issues related to retinal degeneration such as retinal remodeling that we have addressed for the past couple of years. The problem is that the retina (like any other neural system) will remodel its connections when the inputs have been lost. In retinal degenerations, when the photoreceptors degenerate, you lose your inputs and any new input you put in, either bionic implant or biological transplant will have to deal with corrupted circuits.
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... they could restore sight, but with 100 times the clarity (think more pixels) than human sight? Would the brain be able to cope with this? Would baseball players be able to bat .800 because they could see the seams of the ball better? Is there anything that fundamentally prevents some kind of development like this from happening?
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that will really help me out snoozing in my office meetings...
Copy & paste is the new "writes"
see for yourself who comes up
Cool! Now I can see with my fingers or my toes. How convenient would that be for peeping down blouses or peeping up skirts.
Why bother when William H Bates already found a way to restore sight in 1920? His book on the matter can be viewed from http://www.iblindness.org/books/bates/here
Mad props to this guy for the successful self promotion. This technology really blurs the line between molecular biology and nanotechnology. Because the NIH and NSF have a massive woody for Nanotechnology at the moment, people must rebrand their science as such even if a different name like protein engineering would be more accurate. But they are using light too? This has been done before nano was a trendy word.
Small interfering RNA has been used in human clinical trials as a very safe way to treat age related macular degneration.
thats a molecule one billionth the size of a normal molecule, right?
Hey so they can give this to people who aren't blind? If so then I want some. Think of my idea metaphorically as upgrading from 640x480 @ 16 bit color depth to 1600x1200 @ 32 bit color depth :D :D :D :D
Upgrading eye hardware sounds fun heh
my classification
When I was sandbox-age, my eyes were infected with toxoplasmosis (the bacteria that grows on kitty poo). It caused scar tissue to form on my retinas, rendering my left eye all but useless, and impaired my right to a moderate degree as well. If you look at magnified pictures of my retina, it's one of those textbook cases where even a layperson can look at it and say "whoah that's messed up".
The lack of light receptors in my left retina occurs right in the center of the optical cortex, basically leaving me with some peripheral vision. No depth perception, can't read with it, just recognize shapes and movement. My right eye was spared somewhat, although I can see no better than 20:40 - 20:60 (when tired) and that's _with_ some pretty high-index lenses to correct nearsightedness. There just ain't enough data getting to the brain for me to read most things beyond a couple of feet. Road signs--forget it.
I'm not blind--in fact far from it as compared to someone who never had sight, but this crappy vision thing affects my quality of life every waking second of every day. You know how stupid it feels not to be able to recognize a friend or co-worker walking towards you until they are 15-20 feet away? Or heaven forbid if my glasses were to go missing! I wouldn't be able to read except in an excruciating exercise of a fixed two-inch focal length and the facial recognition goes down to just a few feet.
Anyway, this article is precisely the sort of future biotech that I follow very closely.
P.S. Try catching a line drive baseball with one eye closed.
Then I could really have a One Eyed Snake.
> the loss of the light detectors in the retina that is a major cause of blindness.
the loss is NOT the final cause! restoring them is NOT a solution. it's only a poor man's temporary fix. like duct tape and a plastic plane for your window.
this fix will solve the problem as much as the plastic plane stops anyone from throwing stones on the window!
But who cares when you can make profit with it! Damn hypocrites!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
As opposed to the other kind of molecules? Ug.
If the artificial retina can receive colors that are either not normal for human vision, or for which someone had some condition that prevented normal color vision (e.g. colorblindness), will the brain be able to perceive those new colors having never been acustomed to them?