Blind mice see again......

Researchers have restored sight to blind laboratory mice by using gene therapy. The new treatment, published online June 24 in Science, may one day allow some people with retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable genetic eye disease, to read, drive and navigate a room.

Ah finally some science worthwhile! Its good to see that there are people out there that still want to help people that are in need. Sorry for the cynicism but I get tired of inane fantasies like creating robots and mating with machines. This I won't dispute.


(edit for spelling)

[edit on 7/4/2010 by The Endtime Warrior]

reply to post by JTpirate

Howdy JT! You might consider including some source links and snippet quotes with your posts, so we can dig in and give some informed feedback.

Blind Mice See Again
www.sciencenews.org...

Some patients also lose daylight vision and go blind completely, because the color-sensing cone cells of their inner retinas slowly degenerate. But the disease doesn’t kill cone cells immediately; it first makes them nonresponsive to light. That means there is a window of time where the cone receptors are still there, but not functioning.
So scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, attempted to reanimate diseased cone cells in mice. Using a virus already approved for human gene therapy, the researchers inserted a gene from a light-sensitive bacterium, Natronomonas pharaonis, into cone-cell DNA.
The gene is a blueprint for proteins that form passageways in cell membranes. When stimulated by light, those proteins open up and let negatively charged ions into the cell. When inserted in the mouse cell membranes, these proteins helped mimic the normal activity of healthy cones.
Not only did the restored cone cells respond to light, but they also sent signals to the brain so the mice could see.
“What was really astounding is that these cells that were blind for a while were still connected to the rest of the circuit,” says neurobiologist Botond Roska, who led the study.
But unlike healthy cone cells, the restored cone cells could not adapt to different light levels. The cells responded best to bright yellow light similar to sunlight at the beach, Roska says. In order for human patients to see in dimmer light, researchers would have to develop special glasses with light-sensing cameras to adjust the intensity of light projected to the patients’ eyes, he says.

www.medicalnewstoday.com...

Thanks for bringin' this onboard though, some hopeful advances in medicine for sure! This stuff amazes me!

Peace

[edit on 4-7-2010 by speculativeoptimist]

That farmer's wife is really going to regret chopping off their tails now that they can see again.