eyesight

Lab mice, perk up your fuzzy little ears. You are not the only species that struggles through mazes in the name of science. Here, it's an eight-year-old boy who can't see too well. But don't feel bad, in the second video he aces the test when he's allowed to use his eye that's been treated with gene therapy. This procedure is one of the few successful applications of gene therapy, a technique that people once thought would cure nearly all ills, but problems getting the genes into the body's cells has plagued the field every step of the way.

20/20 vision is no longer enough to function in this world. In the latest trend in laser eye surgeries, people are tailoring their eyesight to suit their lifestyle or profession, hoping to give themselves an edge in their respective fields.

Need better long-range vision for some friendly night-time sniping from half a mile away? Tweak it. Want one eye adjusted for distance and the other for reading? Tweak it.

A few colorblind squirrel monkeys in ophthalmology professor Jay Neitz's lab at the University of Washington, Seattle have received an early Christmas gift: gene therapy has restored their ability to see red and green. Neitz and his colleagues say that the achievement provides hope for treating vision disorders in human adults as well.

Researchers at the University of Florida claim to be the first to use targeted gene manipulation to take adult stem cells and change them into another kind of cell completely. They changed the stem cells, from bone marrow in this instance, into retinal cells. These retinal cells, when injected into blind mice, helped cure their blindness.

For long-distance trips, the seeing-eye dog might soon be replaced by the seeing-eye car. Researchers on Virginia Tech's Blind Driver Team, with funding from the National Federation of the Blind, might soon give blind people the ability to do something they never thought possible: drive. The prototype "car" is actually a buggy equipped with lasers that judge the surrounding terrain.

Researchers in Australia have come up with an outwardly simple but incredibly ingenious way of curing blindness caused by corneal damage: Take everyday contact lenses, already used by millions (including me), and infuse them with a patient's own stem cells. After wearing them for about 2 weeks, test subjects reported a seemingly miraculous restoration of sight. Is it that easy?