Sundays New York Times had a story about some amazing medical advances that are helping the blind gain some degree of vision.
I do wear glasses so having good vision is not a problem. My problem with blindness has to do with my heart, not my eyes. There is unfortunately nothing modern medicine can do about blind love. 🙂
No can predict when this technology will be perfected. My guess is that in 20 or 30 years blindness will be corrected at the cellular level, DNA level. The defect in the cells in a blind person’s eyes will be fixed so the cells will regrow properly to provide vision.
A video about the Artificial Retina Project. There is also a video on the NYT page of the article were Barbara Campbell talks about what it is like to receive a artificial retina.
NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/health/research/27eye.html?_r=2&hpw
Burst of Technology Helps Blind to See
Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight.
Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York City, where she lives and works, Ms. Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something. Anything.
Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on.
She is beginning an intensive three-year research project involving electrodes surgically implanted in her eye, a camera on the bridge of her nose and a video processor strapped to her waist.
The project, involving patients in the United States, Mexico and Europe, is part of a burst of recent research aimed at one of science’s most-sought-after holy grails: making the blind see.
Some of the 37 other participants further along in the project can differentiate plates from cups, tell grass from sidewalk, sort white socks from dark, distinguish doors and windows, identify large letters of the alphabet, and see where people are, albeit not details about them.
Linda Morfoot, 65, of Long Beach, Calif., blind for 12 years, says she can now toss a ball into a basketball hoop, follow her nine grandchildren as they run around her living room and “see where the preacher is” in church.
“For someone who’s been totally blind, this is really remarkable,” said Andrew P. Mariani, a program director at the National Eye Institute. “They’re able to get some sort of vision.”
Scientists involved in the project, the artificial retina, say they have plans to develop the technology to allow people to read, write and recognize faces.
Advances in technology, genetics, brain science and biology are making a goal that long seemed out of reach — restoring sight — more feasible.
“For a long time, scientists and clinicians were very conservative, but you have to at some point get out of the laboratory and focus on getting clinical trials in actual humans,” said Timothy J. Schoen, director of science and preclinical development for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. Now “there’s a real push,” he said, because “we’ve got a lot of blind people walking around, and we’ve got to try to help them.”
More than 3.3 million Americans 40 and over, or about one in 28, are blind or have vision so poor that even with glasses, medicine or surgery, everyday tasks are difficult, according to the National Eye Institute, a federal agency. That number is expected to double in the next 30 years. Worldwide, about 160 million people are similarly affected.
“With an aging population, it’s obviously going to be an increasing problem,” said Michael D. Oberdorfer, who runs the visual neuroscience program for the National Eye Institute, which finances several sight-restoration projects, including the artificial retina. Wide-ranging research is important, he said, because different methods could help different causes of blindness.
The approaches include gene therapy, which has produced improved vision in people who are blind from one rare congenital disease. Stem cell research is considered promising, although far from producing results, and other studies involve a light-responding protein and retinal transplants.
Others are implanting electrodes in monkeys’ brains to see if directly stimulating visual areas might allow even people with no eye function to see.
And recently, Sharron Kay Thornton, 60, from Smithdale, Miss., blinded by a skin condition, regained sight in one eye after doctors at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine extracted a tooth (her eyetooth, actually), shaved it down and used it as a base for a plastic lens replacing her cornea.
It was the first time the procedure, modified osteo-keratoprosthesis, was performed in this country. The surgeon, Dr. Victor L. Perez, said it could help people with severely scarred corneas from chemical or combat injuries.
Other techniques focus on delaying blindness, including one involving a capsule implanted in the eye to release proteins that slow the decay of light-responding cells. And with BrainPort, a camera worn by a blind person captures images and transmits signals to electrodes slipped onto the tongue, causing tingling sensations that a person can learn to decipher as the location and movement of objects.
Ms. Campbell’s artificial retina works similarly, except it produces the sensation of sight, not tingling on the tongue. Developed by Dr. Mark S. Humayun, a retinal surgeon at the University of Southern California, it drew on cochlear implants for the deaf and is partly financed by a cochlear implant maker.
It is so far being used in people with retinitis pigmentosa, in which photoreceptor cells, which take in light, deteriorate.
Gerald J. Chader, chief scientific officer at the University of Southern California’s Doheny Retinal Institute, where Dr. Humayun works, said it should also work for severe cases of age-related macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss in older people.
With the artificial retina, a sheet of electrodes is implanted in the eye. The person wears glasses with a tiny camera, which captures images that the belt-pack video processor translates into patterns of light and dark, like the “pixelized image we see on a stadium scoreboard,” said Jessy D. Dorn, a research scientist at Second
Sight Medical Products, which produces the device, collaborating with the Department of Energy. (Other research teams are developing similar devices.)
The video processor directs each electrode to transmit signals representing an object’s contours, brightness and contrast, which pulse, along optic neurons into the brain.
Currently, “it’s a very crude image,” Dr. Dorn said, because the implant has only 60 electrodes; many people see flashes or patches of light.
Brian Mech, Second Sight’s vice president for business development, said the company was seeking federal approval to market the 60-electrode version, which would cost up to $100,000 and might be covered by insurance. Also planned are 200- and 1,000-electrode versions; the higher number might provide enough resolution for reading. (Dr. Mech said a maximum electrode number would eventually be reached because if they are packed too densely, retinal tissue could be burned.)
“Every subject has received some sort of visual input,” he said. “There are people who aren’t extremely impressed with the results, and other people who are.” Second Sight is studying what affects results, including whether practice or disease characteristics influence the brain’s ability to relearn how to process visual signals.
People choose when to use the device by turning their camera on. Dean Lloyd, 68, a Palo Alto, Calif., lawyer, was “pretty disappointed” when he started in 2007, but since his implant was adjusted so more electrodes responded, is “a lot more excited about it,” he said. He uses it constantly, seeing “borders and boundaries” and flashes from highly reflective objects, like glass, water or eyes.
With Ms. Morfoot’s earlier 16-electrode version, which registers objects as horizontal lines, she climbed the Eiffel Tower and “could see all the lights of the city,” she said. “I can see my hand when I’m writing. At Little League games, I can see where the catcher, batter and umpire are.”
Kathy Blake, 58, of Fountain Valley, Calif., said she mainly wanted to help advance research. But she uses it to sort laundry, notice cars and people, and on the Fourth of July, to “see all the fireworks,” she said.
Ms. Campbell, a vocational rehabilitation counselor for New York’s Commission for the Blind and Visually Handicapped, has long been cheerfully self-sufficient, traveling widely from her fourth-floor walk-up, going to the theater, babysitting for her niece in North Carolina.
But little things rankle, like not knowing if clothes are stained and needing help shopping for greeting cards. Everything is a “gray haze — like being in a cloud,” she said. The device will not make her “see like I used to see,” she said. “But it’s going to be more than what I have. It’s not just for me — it’s for so many other people that will follow me.”
Ms. Campbell’s “realistic view of her vision” and willingness to practice are a plus, said Aries Arditi, senior fellow in vision science at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit agency overseeing her weekly training, which includes practice moving her head so the camera captures images and interpreting light as objects.
“In 20 years, people will think it’s primitive, like the difference between a Model T and a Ferrari,” said Dr. Lucian
Del Priore, an ophthalmology surgeon at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, who implanted Ms. Campbell’s electrodes. “But the fact is, the Model T came first.”
Ms. Campbell would especially like to see colors, but, for now, any color would be random flashes, Dr. Arditi said.
But she saw circular lights at a restaurant, part of a light installation at an art exhibition. “There’s a lot to learn,” she said. Still, “I’m, like, really seeing this.”
8 comments
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September 28, 2009 at 7:41 am
Indian Lake Papa
I am thankful for “good” vision! I wear glasses but have no complaints.
September 29, 2009 at 12:35 am
edfromct
I have been wearing glasses since I was in my 30’s. I thought about getting contact lens, mostly for vanity reason. Now that I am older vanity is one character flaw I have had some success dealing with.
September 29, 2009 at 1:50 am
lovewillbringustogether
Helping someone who has been blind since birth see for the first time is an amazing work and one that truly could revolutionise a person’s world ( and world ‘view’) 😉
The part about using they ‘eyetooth’ to grow a cornea overlay was interesting if a little weird.
Recently on TV i saw how two Aussie doctors are doing something very similar but without the ‘yuk’ factor of extracting someone’s tooth as a base.
They take cells from a person’s eye, treat them for ten days and then spread them on the inside of a special contact that sits over the damaged cornea and the treated cells regrow a healthy cornea tissue over the damaged cells restoring the patient’s sight using their only own cells.
Once the corneal cells have regrown fully the contact can be discarded takes just a few days)
Another Aussie company is in the final stages of developing a new drug delivery system and treatment for diabetic and age-related macula degeneration that has the potential to reverse the damage to sight caused when the macula ( the part of the retina that deals with fine focus needed to read, see faces etc) is damaged. The early trials seem very promising.
Now if only someone could find a way to cure our short-sightedness caused through our ignorance as effectively we may actually be getting somewhere. 😉
<B
September 29, 2009 at 7:08 pm
edfromct
Science can only provide us with tools. How we us them is up to us. The only scientific answer to ignorance may be extinction. 🙂
The biggest breakthroughs in healing our bodies will be when 1) we discover the purpose of each gene in a strand of DNA, and 2) we find the exact mechanism by which genes are turned on or off when cells reproduce.
I read some cancer research, don’t remember where, that suggest a molecule from outside the genome adheres to a section on a gene and turns it off, or on, when the cell reproduces. A healthy cell reproduces itself as an unhealthy cancerous cell. Remove this molecule and the unhealthy cell reproduces as a healthy one.
I think there is reasonable chance of my living long enough to see a cure for cancer. I doubt I would see a cure for ingnorance if I lived to be 1,000.
September 30, 2009 at 2:59 am
lovewillbringustogether
i had believed that science tries to eliminate ignorance through the provision of knowledge – how naive i once used to be 😉
your understanding of that type of cancer seems quite feasible to me – there are many many different forms (causes) of cancer though.
and for me the BIGGEST break-through in healing our bodies will be once scientists eventually fully understand that dissection of anything down to it’s basic components (that science is able to measure and detect) will NEVER enable them to heal or create a whole human being – just one isolated part of it – and that isolated part is in fact connected to and affects and is affected by every other part of the whole organism at the same time. The whole body is what is ‘ill’, not the ‘part’.
‘Fixing’ just one thing (like turning a single gene ‘on’ or ‘off’ is never going to heal the whole human body).
A body is NOT a watch – detecting a defective part and replacing it with a functioning one is not going to ‘work’ the same in a human as it does for a watch – but science seems incapable of understanding or accepting that simple fact.
One more of my reasons for ‘abandoning’ my faith in science alone.
<B
October 1, 2009 at 2:14 am
edfromct
Once we learn exactely what each gene does, and learn how to identify every defective gene that is not reproducing it’s self the way it’s suppose to, we can then examine a whole body for defective genes. We can repair the whole body.
This will only work on illnesses that have a genetic component. We know that some mental illnesses have a genetic component. It might be true that all mental illness can be treated at the DNA level, even depression.
If you believe in illness of the spirit, medical science will not help not there.
Unless you believe that faith healing can cure illnesses, all illnesses, I am not sure how both the body and spirit could be treated at one time.
October 2, 2009 at 1:17 am
lovewillbringustogether
With respect Sir 🙂
you are wandering down the same blind alley the science gurus do.
we are BORN with our genes and fortunately the majority of us are born healthy.
Subsequent to this our health is directly affected by EVERY subsequent incident we live through, both physical and mental. Some things our genes may predispose us to but because of the unbelievable complexity of the living being no ONE factor alone determines if we become ‘ill’ or unhealthy, rather it is a range of individual factors that combine to an end result or level of ‘wellness’.
The physical and mental factors are themselves PRE-determined by the spiritual world (a world ‘above’ this one) so adjusting something physical such as a single gene is never going to bring us back to a state of total well-being, albeit it just might be possible to temporarily relieve one symptom of our unwellness.
Where is my evidence for any of this?
In my observations of the world i live in that includes the spiritual – something science is incapable of detecting or appreciating it seems?
And in the wisdom of wiser men than me who have preceded me.
and then there is the unimaginable to some concept that maybe – just maybe – illness is something we are supposed to experience so as to learn something very important about oursleves and our life.
Faith Healing or spiritual healing is often done more ( or SOUGHT more) for the benefit of the physical body than the spiritual one – something i personally am not in favour of.
<B
October 2, 2009 at 5:40 pm
edfromct
My perception is that our different systems of belief result from our different experiences. You have either personally ecountered the spiritual world, or you have develop confidence in what other people who say they have, say about it.
I agree that if there is a spiritual world, an illness of the spirit can only be cured by something of that world.
I don’t believe in the spiritual world because I don’t believe I have ever interacted with it. It seems to me the only way we can have a high degree of confidence that this world does exist is if we personally encounter it.
I have a high degree of confidence in the process of science because, given enough education, and the right technology, I can re-perform the same experiments that were used to validate a theory scientifically.
I don’t believe, develop a high degree of confidence in, any idea solely because someone else says they experienced it. Millions of people have claim to have experienced something, but the historical record shows that millions of people have been wrong, mislead.
Even in science theories that were found to have been valid in the past, must be revised or discarded, when new observations, tested by new technology, proves there were inaccurate.
My perception is that the majority, perhaps all, of the people who have religious faith, at least the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have a very negative view of mankind, and the future of our world is bleak. Atheist see mankind as a successful species, and the future will continue to get better.
Where we disagree it is because of our very different views of mankind and the world, based on our experiences.