Science Marches On

Solar Cell Implant May Restore Some Sight for the Blind

CHICAGO-Ophthalmologists at Rush University Medical Center implanted Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR) microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The implant is a silicon microchip 2mm in diameter and one-thousandth of an inch thick, less than the thickness of a human hair.

Four patients had surgery Tuesday, January 25. The fifth patient is scheduled for a later date.

OK, so it's not a bionic eye (for those of you my age that remember "The Six Million Dollar Man"), but it does seem to be showing some promise. And you have to start somewhere, right? This technology seems to require a healthy optic nerve and a retina that, while damaged, still retains some functionality; so it's not going to be restoring sight to people blind from birth or anything like that, but still...

And in other news....

The creator of Dolly the sheep has been granted a license to clone human embryos for medical research.

Boy, I bet the fundies will be up in arms about this one. A quick skim of the comments collected by the BBC show a pretty broad range of responses, although it was sort of a surprise to me that the two I saw from this side of the pond were in favor. I guess the mouth-breathers watching "The 700 Club" and Faux News don't have a habit of tuning in to the BBC, but I'm sure they'll be hearing about it soon enough. My personal favorite among the comments I read though was the one from the guy that argued that all life had a right to develop -- he used the example of "every seed is a potential tree" or some such claptrap -- I wonder if he thinks of that philosophy every time he sits down to eat his steak or chicken or piece of broccoli, for that matter. Oh, wait, I forgot the universal hidden codicil -- "except where it impacts my life."