It seems more like an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man than real life, but doctors have been working on artificial eyes that could one day restore sight to people with certain types of blindness.
In their quest for the perfect way to connect micro-electronic implants directly to the visual centre of the brain, researchers are finding that only gold wires can be used.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., have been working for the past 30 years on a way to help people who have lost their vision but whose eyes still have neural circuitry that can be connected to the brain, where visual images are processed. In essence, the concept hinges on placing a tiny camera in the eye socket and connecting it to the brain.
The camera will take the place of the retina’s photoreceptors — cells known as rods and cones.
The development of miniature electrodes to connect with tiny brain neurons has taken 15 years. One of the problems has been connecting the electrodes within the brain to leads that were soft and flexible enough to accommodate the brain’s movement in the skull. So far, the best solution has been iridium electrodes, which are hard enough to penetrate the brain without chemically reacting to it, and leads of soft and flexible gold wires.
Recipients would be those who are blind as a result of retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited, degenerative disease that affects more than 1 million people worldwide. The others are those with macular degeneration. These two diseases are responsible for about one-quarter of all blindness.
The preceding appeared in Gold News, published by the Washington, D.C.-based Gold Institute.
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