What if you woke up one day and couldn’t see? What if you were walking down the street and suddenly the world went dark? No longer could you see the green leaves on trees or the puffs of pollution from trucks driving by, a baby reaching for your hand, or a cashier giving you change. So much of what we consider integral to everyday life would be lost without our eyesight.
Although many people never struggle with their eyesight, some wear glasses for most of their lives, others are born blind, and still others lose their eyesight through a progressive degenerative process. Retinal degenerative disorders are a group of conditions that can impact all people ranging from the very young to the elderly, from those living in America to those living in Africa and any other country, as they are universally impacting disorders. Some examples include Leber congenital amaurosis, a rare genetic disorder, and retinitis pigmetosa.
Retinitis pigmetosa (RP) is a type of vision loss that is inherited genetically and is due to the death of rod and cone cells located in the retina. Rod and cone cells are the light receptor cells in the eye that allow for the processing of visual information by stimulating neuronal responses in the brain. Around 1.5 million people around the world are afflicted with RP, including a 68 year old man from Minnesota, Allen Zderad, who began experiencing vision problems 20 years ago. He was suffering from RP and began to slowly lose his eyesight due to the degeneration of his rod and cone cells. As the disease progressed, Zderad prepared for the worse, never dreaming that he would one day be able to see his beloved wife of nearly 50 years ever again.
February 4, 2015, brought a shining light to Zderad’s dark world. For the first time in a decade, Zderad was able to see due to the development of the Bionic Eye. With time and therapy, blurred light and dark images will eventually become clear and decipherable, even if they never become as clear as the images provided by healthy eyesight.
The Bionic Eye was invented by Dr. Mark Humayun who works for the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. He claims that what motivated him to begin working on such an invention was his grandmother falling victim to vision loss. Humayun recalled that a device allowing deaf patients to hear had just been invented, and that this same stimulation of the ear could electrically apply to the eyes.
The way the Bionic Eye actually works is quite complicated, employing the science behind electrical currents and the like. The system functions through the use of a battery and a video unit. The camera ‘sees’ an image in the form of light and dark pixels and transfers that image to the video unit which converts it into electrical pulses that represent ‘light’ and ‘dark’ in such a way that the brain could recognize. These pulses are transmitted to a receiver that is placed underneath the person’s skin, which is then connected, via wires, to electrodes on the back of the person’s eye. These electrodes act as the rod and cone cells, detecting the light and then subsequently sending the signal to the brain via the same pathway employed by people who are able to see normally.
The reason why this last step can be accomplished through the same pathway employed naturally in a healthy person is because people suffering from this disease do not suffer from optic nerve damage, which severs the connection between the eye and brain, but rather suffer only from cell death. Thus, the artificial replacement of those cells still allows the machinery behind the eye to operate and convert electrical signals into images.
As a result, this new medical technology has provided individuals, such as Zderad, with a ‘new set of eyes’ that they can use despite the gradual degeneration of their own and in some cases, for other forms of sight loss, such as in macular degeneration.