Here comes the bionic eye, the best hope yet of restoring sight to the blind:
Profoundly blind people could get their best shot yet of restored vision with a more advanced “bionic eye”, researchers have announced.
Trials of the new retinal prosthesis will begin shortly, following the success of a prototype that has enabled six blind people to see again. The prototypes were fitted in 2002 to patients who had lost their sight entirely.
Within a few weeks all could detect light, identify objects and even perceive motion again. For one patient, this was the first time he had seen anything in half a century, after his sight was destroyed by retinitis pigmentosa, a virus that attacks retinal cells.
“We hoped they might get some sense of light and dark, but it’s really amazing how much they can see –how the brain is able to fill in the gaps,” says Mark Humayun, who carried out the implant surgery and developed the device with colleagues at Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California in the US.
3 comments
That’s Clarke’s Law (named after SF author Arthur C. Clarke, who first stated it): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
It amazes me, when I really stop and think about it, what we can do today.
A few hundred years ago, the word for the technology we see every day now would have been “magic.”
Well, now that NBC is doing Bionic Woman again…
http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah4054.shtml