Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys 197
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."
curing blindness (Score:1, Insightful)
Impossible to imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism (Score:4, Insightful)
What about those crazy women with 4 color receptors [tomes.biz]. They are real life mutants! Are we going to get some gene therapy like that?
I'm not sure I would want that.
All color movies and photographs up now are recorded for a audience of tricromats. Watching movies, seeing your family pictures, browsing the internet etc would probably look poor to tetracromats.
Re:biotech rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
Shockingly enough, people are willing to take larger risks to solve more serious problems, and for most of the people who object to GM crops, some previously incurable disease is a much larger problem than food supply, which is already good and solved if you have the money.
Re:Impossible to imagine (Score:3, Insightful)
Gene therapy is really the only actual proper cure for genetic defects know to man. And I think in retrospect, we will see it as one of the greatest inventions ever.
I mean imagine the possibilities, if you can change any genetics in your body at will!
Sure, as always, there will be downsides, and there will be a "early alpha" phase. But what we get far surpasses anything bad! And besides: Who will try to stop every human on the planet form doing research in that area or using that knowledge? ^^
The first thing that I will do, is add the "can't get fat" mutation that my brother has. :D
Re:Cerebral achromatopsia (Score:5, Insightful)
That is so cool. I love that some people don't even realize they're seeing grey. They can still name colors perfectly fine (they can pick out the "blue flavored" gatorates in the supermarket at a glance), but they don't have the experience of color available to their consciousness. This sort of deconstruction of consciousness's functions is, IMO, the strongest evidence against Cartesian dualism.
This reminds me of an experiment Bill Nye did. He wore a pair of goggles that flipped his vision upside-down. After a few days (I think) of headaches he completely got used to it and was able to function normally with it upside down. I think I remember him saying that it didn't seem upside down to him, and when they took off the goggles at the end the world seemed upside down again. The really fascinating part was that there wasn't a moment of "flipping" during the experiment: the upside-down image became his expected norm. In other words, the optic nerves don't correspond directly to some raster format where they're tied directly into our Video In consciousness jack. They're interpreted as needed and presented to our consciousness experience post-processing.
And the simple experiment didn't prove this but I suspect that there's no relative relation between optic nerves either. Like they're just haphazardly bundled together and shipped off to the brain, and the brain's processing adaptively grows to sort and make sense of the random signals. So I suspect that if you sever the optic nerve and connect the nerves randomly your brain will eventually be able to just interpret the new signals as the norm like Bill Nye did.
The reason I suspect that is because of the really cool electronic sensing technology that's been developed in the last few decades. I think I've read something like they can just send signals into nerves (obviously with sensible modulation/frequency/amplitude) and make the signals vary in some way based on the external world and after awhile patients are able to sense it naturally. Like audio signals to the eardrums and such.
Oh yeah I found it. This [slashdot.org]. By just shocking areas of the tongue a blind patient can develop a kind of sight. If the top left pixel is dark you shock the top left area, etc. Again, I think that you could completely mix up all of the inputs and after awhile it would be perfectly natural.
Think of feeling with your hand. A priori you have no idea which nerves in that thick bundle of nerves correspond to a particular finger. But by observing and noticing that when you twitch a certain way a particular finger moves and when you touch something you get an input only on particular nerves you eventually build up an intuitive grasp of which nerve is which (handled transparently of course). The problem is complex and we see side effects all the time. I'm sure everyone's had the experience of being in a weird position with their arms or legs twisted up and you can't really tell which limb is which. You may experimentally try to move a particualar leg that you see and move the wrong one!
This whole field is fascinating
most scientists considered impossible (Score:1, Insightful)
The best science is the science that prove to "most scientists considered impossible" to be possible.
Keep it up mad sciences! You rule!
You know what they say: (Score:4, Insightful)
"Monkey see, monkey blue"
Re:Cerebral achromatopsia (Score:3, Insightful)
"That is so cool. I love that some people don't even realize they're seeing grey."
I really don't think that you've read enough, or else that you have failed to understand what you have read.
I have both red and green color deficiency. My world is not gray. I see gray, as a distinct color, and I can see many shades of grey.
Instead of seeing gray where you see a shade of green, I see green. I am unable to distinguish very many shades of green - they sort of blend together. Where you might see 12 different colors in the grass, I may see one or two, but, it's all green. No gray, just green.
Early to middle spring is an awesome time for me, especially on a brightly lit day right after a rain. I look into the forest, and I can see a variety of colors that are visible to me at no other time. The different species of trees actually look DIFFERENT. There is no way in hell that I can name the colors, I can't describe them, but the forest actually looks green and alive, as it does at no other time. I suppose that it is entirely due to water droplets diffracting the light bouncing off the trees. But, again, as the light fades, or as the water dries off the vegetation, the leaves don't gray out for me - they just become a more uniform, more dull "green".
Red is very similar, but the effects are much less noticeable - probably because there is no place in nature that red just overwhelms everything else. Maroon and related colors tend to fade toward black for me, unless brightly lit.
Oddly though, I am unable to pick a bright red flower out of a field of green. That was one of the first hints that I was "color blind" as a child. Mother and I would be riding along, she says, "Oh, what beautiful roses!" and point. I would search and search, and never find that stupid rose bush.
Again - there was no gray spot in the field of green - those little red spots just blended into green.
Bahhh - I know that I've failed to explain what I see. Some day, you try explaining color to someone who has been blind from birth. You'll get the idea.