I was sitting in the nurse’s office, trying to figure out what the numbers were. Card after card of these random dots of color were put in front of me. Everyone else thought it was the easiest test they had ever taken, but I was lost. More than being lost, I was and still am colorblind. Yes, I see colors. One of the most common misunderstandings is that people with colorblindness see in black and white. But, that is not the case. I am able to see colors but have a hard time differentiating between them especially when they are put in the random jumble as they are at the doctor’s office.
Now, I have hope that one day I could be free of this colorblindness. Doctors at the University of Washington have enabled two colorblind monkeys to see red and green for the first time. After injecting the monkeys’ eyes with viruses carrying a gene which makes L-opsin, one of three proteins which are released when color-detecting cones are hit by different wavelengths of light, the monkeys were able to distinguish between red and green colors. Though it took the monkeys five months to stop banging randomly on the screen and instead distinguish between the colors, the results are incredibly promising. While this development is exciting it could even lead to curing blindness and other manipulations of the retina.
More than just being able to enhance the eye, this successful experiment demonstrates that gene therapy is ready to push itself to the forefront of the medical world. Though we must always be careful when balancing the risks and the rewards and also always keeping the patients’ best interest at heart, there is cause for hope with continued successes such as these with gene therapy.
Though I am not willing to go into a clinical trial at this moment for this treatment because I am not that adversely affected by being colorblind, it would be very interesting to see colors as everyone else does. Even with all of the problems gene therapy has had over the last few years with extremely unfortunate deaths, there does appear to be light at the end of the tunnel.
Website relevant to my post:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/colortherapy/
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It's incredibly refreshing to come across an advancement in medical science that is so uncontroversial. The application of gene therapy has long been a source of heated debate, given how new and relatively untested of an area of medicine it is, as well as how dangerous much of the testing is. In this case, though, there is nothing but positivity (with the possible exception of the injection into the eye, which seems kind of nasty). While some may worry about the slippery slope that gene therapy poses, this clearly falls into the category of treatment rather than simply enhancement, could be made readily available, and would provide definite improvement of the quality of life without reducing or compromising the humanity of those who opt to partake of it. Optimistic reports like these are often buried under more sensationalist and controversy-stimulating medical news items. That the scientific community can still, in some cases, be a force for small and simple human betterment, without raising concerns about what is "better" or what it is to be "human." One gets tired of constantly vacillating back and forth, buffeted by forces and agendas on all sides. I give this new technology my full support.
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