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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!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
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,
indeed but the real question is can this technology be used to make a man's penis longer, harder and lets not forget thicker. Until that day comes we will always be at war with our selves...
That's the current theory. This result may cast questions upon the current theory. Or perhaps it won't. We'd need more details to tell. But in any case if there's a conflict, experiment trumps theory.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Ok, fair enough, I can understand that. But the other poster is right: you treat this as it is almost meaningless, while in reality someone who was blind can now at least read a clock. That's a better level of vision than I have without my glasses, btw.
And hey, who knows, maybe you are curing blindness every day, maybe this will _not_ lead to further enhanced cures, maybe the "real" breakthrough is just around the corner. But for now this seems to be a major step, and once in a while it is good to step back and stare in awe at what mankind has achieved thus far.
Now bring on that Mars-colony already, damnit. I was born after the first man walked on the moon, I don't want to die before the first man walks on Mars...