Out of the Darkness: Science’s Fight Against Blindness

September 29, 2009

blind The dream is as old as any of our written scriptures. In the Gospel of John, for example, the blind man who claims to have had his sight restored by Jesus, famously says, “One thing I do know, I was blind but now I see!” One of the Pharisees questioning the man expresses grave doubt that such a miracle could ever occur and says, “Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.”

It’s one of the holy grails on modern scientific research, and it is an idea that has stirred human curiosity and imagination for many thousands of years: restoring sight to the blind. Through the ages this has been nothing more than a distant dream, or perhaps the blessed miracle performed by an all-powerful God, but now in recent years there has been a burst of activity in this amazing field of research and a mind-boggling set of advances that promise one day to restore sight to those who today cannot see.

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 a federal agency, the National Eye Institute.

This number is expected to double in the next 30 years with the aging of the American population. Older persons are subject to various degenerative conditions, particularly retinitis pigmentosa, in which photoreceptor cells simply deteriorate, and macular degeneration, a ceaseless narrowing of a person’s field of vision, and the leading cause of vision loss for those 60 and above. Worldwide, it is estimated that about 160 million people are affected by a variety of these diseases and others that lead to blindness.

Today, new and advancing treatment approaches include gene therapy, which has produced improved vision in people who are blind from a rare congenital disease; stem cell research, which is considered promising, although far from producing results; and other studies involving a light-responding protein and new retinal transplants.

Other approaches are implanting electrodes in monkeys to see if directly stimulating visual areas of the brain might allow even people with no eye function to see.

Many of these new techniques focus on delaying blindness, including one approach that involves a capsule implanted in the eye to release proteins that slow the decay of light-responding cells. One advance called BrainPort, is a camera worn by a blind person that 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.

As one researcher, Timothy J. Schoen, director of science and preclinical development for the Foundation Fighting Blindness, said recently in an article in the NY Times, “now there’s a real push, we’ve got a lot of blind people walking around, and we’ve got to try to help them.”

In one advance, an artificial retina, actually a sheet of electrodes, is implanted in the eye. In this approach, the patient wears glasses with a tiny camera that captures images that a belt-pack video processor translates into patterns of light and dark, similar to the pixel images we see on a stadium scoreboard. 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.

Pretty amazing stuff! It’s obvious that there will be many wrong turns as scientists and researchers head down this road, but the steady drumbeat of progress can clearly be heard on the many fronts on which this work is advancing.

And perhaps one day, before too much longer, more people will come to speak those powerful words, “I was blind but now I see!”

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