The Threee Blind Mice cannot see anything in the "Shrek" films. Could a new scientific discovery change that?
(Credit: Dreamworks Animation)
A cure for blindness could be brewing at a Cornell University laboratory.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York say they have successfully decoded the brain signals that allow mice to see. Using this information with a new type of prosthetic retina, they were able to restore vision in mice.
Next up, the researchers say they've cracked the code of a monkey retina, which is nearly identical to that of a human. If the prosthesis works on monkeys too, the researchers think they may eventually be able to help people who've lost their eyesight.
"It's an exciting time," Sheila Nirenberg, a computational neuroscientist in the department of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell, said in a statement. "We can make blind mouse retinas see, and we're moving as fast as we can to do the same in humans."
The findings were published in the August 13 online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
For the study, scientists first had to decode the process that allows the retina to proce... [Read more]
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