“It is a major achievement from a scientific point of view, and most importantly for blind people,” said Lucie Pellissier, a neuroscientist at the University of Tours in France who was not involved in the study.ĭr. When the goggle sent signals to his retina, it activated parts of the brain involved in vision. When the scientists set out either two or three tumblers in front of the volunteer, he managed to count them correctly 12 out of 19 times.ĭuring some of the trials, the volunteer wore a cap with electrodes that could detect brain activity through his scalp. They discovered that he could reach out and touch a notebook sitting on a table, but had less luck with a smaller box of staples. When the pandemic subsided in France over the summer, the scientists managed to bring him into their lab for more training and tests. After years of preparation for the study, it was now stuck in limbo. Unfortunately, they only managed to train one volunteer before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the project. They would then train the volunteers to use the goggles. Their plan was to inject gene-bearing viruses into one eye of each blind volunteer, then wait several months for the ganglion cells to grow optogenetic proteins. Sahel and their colleagues were ready to try it out on people. “The brain has to learn a new language,” said Botond Roska, an ophthalmologist at the University of Basel and a co-author of the new study.Īfter testing their gene therapy and goggles on monkeys, Dr. Still, it was an open question whether blind people could learn to use this information to recognize objects. With each jump, many pixels would change light levels. Our eyes naturally dart around in tiny movements many times a second.
The researchers reasoned that this strategy might be able to create images in the brain. The goggles then send a pulse of amber light from that pixel into the eye. They created goggles that scan their field of view thousands of times a second and register any pixels in which the light changes. Next, the researchers invented a special device to transform visual information from the external world into amber light that could be recognized by the ganglion cells. But the scientists could not beam amplified light into the eye, because the glare would destroy the delicate tissue of the retina.
Boyden and others were not sensitive enough to produce an image from ordinary light entering the eye. Sahel and his colleagues recognized that the optogenetic proteins created by Dr. “But if optogenetics proves itself in the clinic, that would be extremely exciting.”ĭr. “So far, I’ve thought of optogenetics as a tool for scientists primarily, since it’s being used by thousands of people to study the brain,” he said. who helped pioneer the field of optogenetics, the quest to use these proteins to cure blindness took him by surprise. After all, they reasoned, retinal cells are nerves as well - an extension of the brain, in other words.įor Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist at M.I.T.
Sahel and other researchers wondered if they could use optogenetics to add light-sensitive proteins to cells in the retina. The method has enabled them to discover the circuitry underlying many kinds of behavior.ĭr. By inserting a tiny light into the animal’s brain, they could switch a certain type of brain cell on or off with the flick of a switch. Originally, researchers developed this technique, called optogenetics, as a way to probe the workings of the brain. The viruses infected certain types of brain cells, which then used the new gene to build light-sensitive channels.
Blind eyes how to#
In the early 2000s, neuroscientists figured out how to install some of these proteins into the brain cells of mice and other lab animals by injecting viruses carrying their genes. The scientists are taking advantage of proteins derived from algae and other microbes that can make any nerve cell sensitive to light.
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