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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."
Upon seeing the new colors, the monkeys also made the signs for "far out" and "trippy, dude".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Not as much as geology rocks...
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
Now all those poor monkeys will finally be able to get unrestricted pilot licenses!
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)
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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.
ideopath @ play
As someone who is color-blind (severely red/green), this news just astounds me.
The basic fact is that I have no idea, no point of reference to even understand what it is I don't see. It is impossible for me to imagine what "Purple" actually is, since to me it is merely a dark blue. Not hard to imagine, like an unusual experience is, but as far as I'm concerned impossible to imagine.
Until seeing this article today, I had assumed that I would never be able to understand what most people saw. Having the possibility open up is simply mind-blowing. Imagine what kind of leap that would be for more serious conditions like actual blindness.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
> Could you imagine being able to see halfway down the IR spectrum, or well past UV on the other end
IR might be do-able, but UV is almost structurally impossible for the human eye to meaningfully view. The spectral peak of "blue" cones is actually closer to violet than blue. If you look at a sensitivity curve for human blue cones, you'll notice that its peak is just slightly above violet, and its lower third is simply chopped off or attenuated away. The problem is the cornea -- it blocks most UV light. What the cornea doesn't block, the fluid inside the eye absorbs and scatters. There have been reports that people who've had cataract surgery are able to perceive UV as hazy, diffuse "purplish-yellow" light. The idea that something can be purple and yellow is strange, but not as crazy as it sounds when you consider that the color we call "purple" is NOTHING like spectral violet, and is actually an artifact of human vision caused by a nonlinear slope in blue sensitivity. There's a tiny area where the upper end of blue overlaps with the lower end of red, with a small ripple in blue that introduces just enough error in that region to make purple possible.
There's another problem: chromatic aberration. Ever notice that you can make a fake 3d-like pic using pure red and pure blue, so the blue parts seem to be floating in space compared to the red? That's chromatic aberration at work. The cornea can only focus light from a relatively narrow band. The lower you go, the less-focused the light would be. Similar distortion would become problematic in the infrared range, though not as quickly as at the blue end.
"Monkey see, monkey blue"
Table-ized A.I.