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Gene Therapy Causes Blind Woman To Grow New Fovea
Al writes "A woman with a rare, inherited form of blindness is now able to read, thanks to a gene therapy that caused a new fovea — the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors — to grow in her eye. The patient suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis, meaning an abnormal protein makes her photoreceptors have a severely impaired sensitivity to light. She received the experimental treatment twelve months ago when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye — about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter. Along with two other patients receiving the same treatment, her eyesight improved after just a few weeks. Now the physicians report that this patient seems to have developed a new fovea, exactly where she received the injection. Because the woman has been effectively blind since birth, the results suggest that the brain is able to adapt to new visual stimuli remarkably quickly."
but when the new eyes achieve sentience and telepathically conspire to enslave humanity, don't tell me I didn't warn you against this sort of thing!
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"Fovea"? That sounds dirty. Gene therapy is the Devil's work, I tell you!!!
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This is very cool stuff. But in terms of adapting 'remarkably quickly' to visual stimuli after congenital blindness, I'm slightly dubious. There's been quite a bit of recent research done on this recently through Project Prakash (which is also a very cool humanitarian mission at the same time), which finds that adults who regain vision see things very differently than we do... For example that have major problems with depth, object segmentation (think two overlapping squares -- normal observers will typically say there are two squares, overlapping, while newly seeing adults will report 1 square, where the overlap occurs), full field motion etc.
an amazing achievement, hopefully a preview of better things to come and a brighter future for us all
prepare the survey weasels.
when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye â" about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter.
That's 1/3 of an inch! How many injections did it take to cover that area? Or, is the article so poorly written that the author failed to convey there was just a single injection with the injected material spreading out that far? Maybe we should ask the author directly?
"Windows has finished installing drivers for your new device, it is ready for use"
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
Can you imagine living in darkness your whole life and then see for the first time? It would be amazing to see that there is more to surfaces than just texture.
The game.
What's the mechanism to inject gene sequence into existing cells? How do you sustain them after the cells so modified have died off?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"This Wizard is searching for hardware that has been connected to your computer recently but has not yet been installed"
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
TFA says that instead of fixing what was there, they managed to make a different part of the eye more sensitive. Maybe this treatment might become commonplace one day, to give people better-than-normal eyesight where it's needed.
"Because the woman has been effectively blind since birth.."
How did she learn to read!? She was blind!
Could this be used to grow a fovea covering the entire retinal wall, giving us peripheral vision as sharp as central vision?
If the brain does not receive visual stimuli as a child, then the visual centers never form properly, or at all. There is a certain time window, where the brain is plastic enough to learn the new input. After it has passed, then there are certain things the brain can not do, or do well - like learn new languages without an accent.
..........FULL STOP.
once posited that humans are "hard-wired" for speech (quotation marks are around his words). This is still an open question but the data seem to show he was right, and more data over time has swung the pendulum toward this view. It appears as if the DNA leads us toward syntax in some yet unknown manner.
Perhaps we are also hard-wired to see. This seems very likely to me; likely enough that I am willing to put a huge bet on it, if there are any takers....
TFA just reinforces the view that human sensory abilities and culture itself in fundamental ways are dependent on genetic information.
As long as you can keep the people who lied about their own miracles away from the methodology that makes breakthrough science possible.
The actual achievement is that she was able to see at all because Oliver Sachs(you remember the movie about him, Awakenings) found that most people who have been blind and then suddenly develop the ability to see can't deal with the stress of the new sensory input. Apparently one patient of his wanted to be blind again. I'm not 100% sure of this because it was my wife who read all his books, not I but surely someone here knows what I am referring to.
Hallway repair please. /And leave off the hymen.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Company are selling pills claims will inject gene code of a 7" owner.
I care quite a bit, since I study vision... and understanding the differences between a newly seeing adult and a seeing adult really help us understand a lot about brain development and theories of vision. Things like this, and Project Prakash which I've noted above have also shown that 'critical periods' in neural development, while they exist, are a lot less important in humans than say, cats (or barn owls), where most of the classic studies of critical period have been done. This leaves me optimistic that both genetic/stem cell approaches and neural prosthesis in general have a lot more promise than was thought several years ago.
The point of my comment though, was that the summary implied that she had gained essentially normal visual function, which I doubt is the case... and that while this is an amazing treatment that can probably help quite a few people, we still have a lot of work we can do to improve it -- especially on the low-tech side such as better visual displays and therapy regimens that improve final post-operative function.
But she's blind, not infertile.
...when did she learn how to read?
physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye â" about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter
Did anyone else think of that part on Star Trek First Contact where Picard dreams about being borg and having that machine inject something in his eye. Still gives me the creeps.
Anyways, pretty cool scientific advancement.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Because the woman has been effectively blind since birth, the results suggest that the brain is able to adapt to new visual stimuli remarkably quickly.
We knew that already. People have been equipped with a camera and an actuator that "projects" an image through the tactile nerves on a patch of skin.... Those people similarly report being able to "see" using that hardware.
This leads me to believe that our brains are not hardwired to interpret visual information only on just the optical nerve. During the first few years, we learn what nerves are connected where. And our brains are flexible, and will be able to adapt to changes in what-connects-where.
In an experiment, a long time ago(*), a person was equipped with glasses that flipped the image in his eyes upside-down. In about two weeks he didn't notice the difference anymore. Also, learned skills, like skiing, were instantly possible with the re-wired visual hardware. Adapting to the original situation (no flipping glasses) was quicker than adapting to the flipping glasses.
(*) http://wearcam.org/tetherless/node4.html I intended "a long time ago" to mean something like "in the 19-seventies", turns out the original experiment dates back to 1896!
Test only, please ignore.
Having issues posting thru proxy.
The race to be "First" has spawned really stupid replies that waste our time and obscure pertinent observations. Is there a solution?