Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys

SpuriousLogic writes "After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time. Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn't a debilitating condition, but it's a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible. 'We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I talked to said, absolutely not,' said study co-author Jay Neitz, a University of Washington ophthalmologist. 'And almost every unsolved vision defect out there has this component in one way or another, where the ability to translate light into a gene signal is involved.' The full-spectrum supplementation of the squirrel monkeys' sight, described Wednesday in Nature, comes just less than a year after researchers used gene therapy to restore light perception in people afflicted by Leber Congenital Amaurosis, a rare and untreatable form of blindness."

Comments

Next step: Tetrachromatism

[Gizzmonic]

What about those crazy women with 4 color receptors. They are real life mutants! Are we going to get some gene therapy like that? I want 2 receptors for green! I'll be like a human HDTV! In fact, that will be my crimefighting name: The Human HDTV! I fight crime in 1080i! (it would be in 1080p but that's as high as my TV goes)

Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism

[1 a bee]

Why not go infra-red? From the article..

Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. âoeUltimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,â he said. âoeNot only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.â

âoeThis study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,â continued Williams.

Aye. A story deserving of being /.

Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism

[Trahloc]

That was the first thing I thought of as well. If they can bring a sub-par eye up to normal levels then I can't wait until we can add infravision 60'

Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism

[Miamicanes]

> First of all, do you think tetrachromats know they perceive colors differently?

Actually, yes. I read about an interview with a British woman who's believed to be a genuine tetrachromat. One thing that came up was the fact that color photographs and TV never look "right" to her. Prior to learning about tetrachromaticy, she always just thought she was "picky".

The 20-bit example is a good one. I'm actually trichromanomalous. In terms that make sense to most Slashdotters, most people with statistically normal color perception have roughly 17-bit green, 16-bit red, and 15-bit blue fidelity. I'm missing a red bit. The result is that I made it to my mid-20s before ever finding out there was officially anything wrong. Up to then, I just thought I had bad taste in colors. It turns out, my taste is as good as everyone else's... there's just a slightly wider range of reds that I think look good with a given mixture of blue and green than most. If I take a Munsell color test (the one where you have little cylinders that vary by a subtle fraction of a shade and have to be quickly arranged without scrutiny), I screw up the last two in the red-green series about 50% of the time... they both look like grayish peachy-beige. It happens because the frequency of my main red peak is slightly higher (and closer to my green peak) than 99.9% of the population's. In other words, I'm part of the group that's worse than 99.9%, but within the best 99.99%.

I'll never mistake a red traffic light for a green one, but I'm paralyzed with fear anytime I have to make decisions about color. The hardest part about remodeling my living room wasn't replacing the drywall, rewiring the entertainment wiring, or the custom moulding... it was picking the damn shades of off-white for the walls, ceiling, and trim. I agonized over it for weeks, driven by mortal fear that I'd accidentally pick a subtly brownish-beige that was too pink, or a subtly creamy-white that was too green. For subtly-anomalous trichromats, beige is a deadly minefield of potential embarrassments.

Cerebral achromatopsia

[mindbrane]

Cerebral achromatopsia will give you a different take on colour blindness as a result of brain damage. Localized brain damage can drain all the colour from your world and leave you in a world of the grey hued zombies. What we tend to think of as our vision isn't just a straight run from the retina back to the occipital lobe, and, much of what we think of a vision is a complex production of various brain modules.

Re:Cerebral achromatopsia

[rgspb]

I always find it interesting how some color-blind people know that they don't see a color the same way a non color-blind person does. There have been quite a few posts here stating how they see the color and then describing what the non color-blind person sees. I'm color-blind (red/green) and don't have any idea I'm seeing something different until someone brings it up. I didn't know peanut butter was NOT red until I was 30. It's how I always saw it and since normally the color of peanut butter is not a topic of discussion it just never came up. (it finally came up in a radio commercial. the kid asks mom "why is peanut butter brown"? I looked at my friend and said "what a dumb question, everybody knows peanut butter is red"!) So I have no idea how someone else sees the color of peanut butter. For me, part of it is a learned thing. Grass is green, everybody knows that, so my mind sees green, but my eyes see brown. It's like a picture of a frog, like a cartoon picture. The assumption for me is that it would be green, because cartoon frogs (not just Kermit) are usually green. So I would see the brown frog but say it is green unless I'm not thinking. Some have asked me if I color-blind with red/green then why did I think peanut butter was red. Because it LOOKS red. I can see red and green, but they don't always come across as red or green. Then you get into all the shades. Pink is a tough one for me, sometimes I don't see the pink at all and other times it looks grey or silver (think pink car). Dark colors are worse for me, I don't even try to separate my own socks. I'm not real sure I'd want to see normal colors at this point anyway, wouldn't I have to learn my colors all over again? Wouldn't I see non-problem colors differently too? I did try one of the red contacts on a few years ago and that's what happened. While my problem colors were improved, my non-problem colors were hurt. I think I'll just pass on the eye injections!

Re:Cerebral achromatopsia

[Citizen of Earth]

One could imagine a cell-phone application that tells you the color at a crosshair in the camera input in a couple of different color models and using closest-match simple words like "pink" or "reddish pink". Then you could find out the true color of something just by whipping out your cell phone.

Re:Cerebral achromatopsia

[am 2k]

There are some nature paintings from color-blind people. Those are very enlightening, they don't look like nature at all for non-color blind people like me.

Re:biotech rocks

[interkin3tic]

I'd wait until they find a way to make it work without injecting the viruses into your eyes. I haven't been following gene therapy or viral transfection, I'm assuming there's still the problem that these viruses still insert their genes into your genome at random, potentially interrupting, say retinoblastoma. I think if that happened you'd be many times more likely to develop the cancer the protein is named after.

Re:We prefer to be called "Chromatically Challenge

[QuantumG]

They wouldn't let me join the army because I am "color blind". No-one mentioned this to me when I was in Cadets, and it's not like the topic didn't come up. I remember one day we all lined up in front of a field:

Instructor: Right. Everyone, listen up. Today we are doing a sweep search exercise. Hidden in this field are 6 soldiers, all highly trained in the skill of camouflage. You will form a single line, one arm length seperation, and walk this field. Be attentive, they may be right in front of them and you won't see them.

[I raise my hand]

Instructor: Yes cadet, what is it?

Me: Do you mean [pointing] that guy, that guy, that guy, that guy, that guy, and that lady?

Instructor: [Sigh]. Ok smart-ass, you're dismissed. Everyone else, turn around while we reconfigure.

But hey, at least they won't draft me.

 

Re:biotech rocks

[Runaway1956]

Ditto here. I saw the article at discovery dot com today, and read it. Man, it would be GREAT to get a shot or six, and start seeing all those colors people SAY that they see. I could swear that people are involved in a conspiracy to convince people like me that we're nuts. Purple, lilac, lavender, and a whole lot of others are ALL THE SAME!!

Oddly enough, the little sample color vision chart they stuck in the article? I was able to see the eye in it. Not real clearly, but when I read the tag caption, I was able to see the eye. The real charts just don't work, though.