Injection of light-sensitive proteins restores blind man’s vision

After 40 years of blindness, a 58-year-old man can once again see images and moving objects, thanks to an injection of light-sensitive proteins into his retina. The trial is the first successful clinical test of a technique called optogenetics, which uses flashes of light to control gene expression and neuron firing. In this case, the person’s damaged photoreceptor cells were supplanted by light-sensitive bacterial proteins, delivered by a virus into cells on his retina. Special goggles simplified incoming visual information from the real world into monochromatic images, to make it more easily detected by the bacterial proteins.