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."
Next step: Tetrachromatism (Score:3, Interesting)
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 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)
Cerebral achromatopsia (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not go infra-red? From the article..
Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. âoeUltimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,â he said. âoeNot only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.â
âoeThis study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,â continued Williams.
Aye. A story deserving of being /.
Re:biotech rocks (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd wait until they find a way to make it work without injecting the viruses into your eyes. I haven't been following gene therapy or viral transfection, I'm assuming there's still the problem that these viruses still insert their genes into your genome at random, potentially interrupting, say retinoblastoma [wikipedia.org]. I think if that happened you'd be many times more likely to develop the cancer the protein is named after [wikipedia.org].
Re:We prefer to be called "Chromatically Challenge (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:biotech rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cerebral achromatopsia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cerebral achromatopsia (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cerebral achromatopsia (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some nature paintings from color-blind people. Those are very enlightening, they don't look like nature at all for non-color blind people like me.
Re:Next step: Tetrachromatism (Score:3, Interesting)
> First of all, do you think tetrachromats know they perceive colors differently?
Actually, yes. I read about an interview with a British woman who's believed to be a genuine tetrachromat. One thing that came up was the fact that color photographs and TV never look "right" to her. Prior to learning about tetrachromaticy, she always just thought she was "picky".
The 20-bit example is a good one. I'm actually trichromanomalous. In terms that make sense to most Slashdotters, most people with statistically normal color perception have roughly 17-bit green, 16-bit red, and 15-bit blue fidelity. I'm missing a red bit. The result is that I made it to my mid-20s before ever finding out there was officially anything wrong. Up to then, I just thought I had bad taste in colors. It turns out, my taste is as good as everyone else's... there's just a slightly wider range of reds that I think look good with a given mixture of blue and green than most. If I take a Munsell color test (the one where you have little cylinders that vary by a subtle fraction of a shade and have to be quickly arranged without scrutiny), I screw up the last two in the red-green series about 50% of the time... they both look like grayish peachy-beige. It happens because the frequency of my main red peak is slightly higher (and closer to my green peak) than 99.9% of the population's. In other words, I'm part of the group that's worse than 99.9%, but within the best 99.99%.
I'll never mistake a red traffic light for a green one, but I'm paralyzed with fear anytime I have to make decisions about color. The hardest part about remodeling my living room wasn't replacing the drywall, rewiring the entertainment wiring, or the custom moulding... it was picking the damn shades of off-white for the walls, ceiling, and trim. I agonized over it for weeks, driven by mortal fear that I'd accidentally pick a subtly brownish-beige that was too pink, or a subtly creamy-white that was too green. For subtly-anomalous trichromats, beige is a deadly minefield of potential embarrassments.