Its true. After 8 years of being legally blind, a team of wizard doctors removed the black cataract in my left eye and did a vitrectomy on it as well. This was back in 1992. There's a new wizard in town and her name is Sheila Nirenberg, a neuroscientist.
The code that may treat blindness.
As you look at this page, your eyes are doing a remarkable thing.
A stream of light from the words and pictures is bouncing into the eyeball and falling onto photoreceptor cells on the retina. This visual information is passed on to output cells and then transmitted to the brain as a kind of code, where it is reconstructed to make up the letters in this sentence you are reading right now.
Degenerative eye diseases, however, can wreak havoc on this process, says neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Medical College at Cornell University. When they damage the retina, the image in front of you never gets further than the eyeball; the chain is broken.
That’s what makes the technology that Nirenberg has built rather remarkable. She has found a way to transmit a visual code directly to the brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. In other words, she can help the blind see again.
In the video above, she explains how her technology works and the eureka moment that started it all.
Click the link to view the BBC video.
From her TEDMED Talk, 2011, with another short explanation of her work.