Watch neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg talk about how she wants to treat some types of blindness, by hooking into the optic nerve and sending signals from a camera directly to the brain.
For more on how to do this without surgery--with only an injection and special glasses!--watch the Q&A beginning at 3 minutes.
Read the article that explains that Nirenberg's team used gene therapy to add a special protein to specific cells in the eyes of blind mice, to make them responsive to light. Next, a pair of glasses containing a tiny video camera and computer used a math recipe (algorithm) to turn images into mini light flashes, which the glasses were equipped to shine into the eye. Then the blind mice could see!
