Tag: Gene Therapy

Wired Science and Singularity Hub both covered the recent publication in Nature of a study demonstrating curing color blindness in monkeys using gene therapy that allowed two squirrel monkeys to produce a protein that allowed them to see reds and greens.

Wired’s Brandon Keim wrote,

At first, the two monkeys behaved no differently than before. Though quick to earn a grape juice reward by picking out blue and yellow dots from a background of gray dots on a computer screen, they banged the screen randomly when presented with green or red dots.

But after five months, something clicked. The monkeys picked out red and green, again and again. At the biological level, Neitz can’t say precisely what happened — the monkeys, named Sam and Dalton, are alive and healthy, their brains unscanned and undissected — but their actions left no doubt.

[Jay] Neitz thinks the monkeys’ brains didn’t grow new neural circuits. “That’s the way we were thinking about neural plasticity before,” he said. Instead, their brains may have reconfigured themselves, “learning how to use the same old circuits in a new way when the information coming over the lines changed.”

And, of course, once you start talking about curing genetic defects, the possibility of creating genetic enhancements is ultimately on the table as well.

[David] Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. “Ultimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,” he said. “Not only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.”

“This study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,” continued Williams.

No word on the possibility of x-ray or heat vision.