As you look at this page, your eyes are doing a remarkable thing.
A stream of light from the words and pictures is bouncing into the
eyeball and falling onto photoreceptor cells on the retina. This visual
information is passed on to output cells and then transmitted to the brain as a
kind of code, where it is reconstructed to make up the letters in this sentence
you are reading right now.
Degenerative eye diseases, however, can wreak havoc on this process,
says neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Medical College at Cornell
University. When they damage the retina, the image in front of you never gets
further than the eyeball; the chain is broken.
That’s what makes the technology that Nirenberg has built rather
remarkable. She has found a way to transmit a visual code directly to the
brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. In other words, she can help the
blind see again.
In the video above, she explains how her technology works, the eureka
moment that started it all, and the emotional impact on blind patients using it
for the first time.
Watch and read more from our series The Genius Behind: the most amazing and
sometimes little known technological and scientific breakthroughs of modern
times, and the innovative minds behind them.
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