LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Researcher Dr. Doctor Sheila Nirenberg has enabled laboratory mice to see well enough to track squirrels as well as distinguish a baby's face. Nirenberg envisions a day when blind people around the world will wear Geordi La Forge visors.

The New York-based neuroscientist has arrived at a non-surgical technique that uses high-tech glasses embedded with tiny video camera and a computer chip to restore sight. She says that the visors could be tested on humans within two years, restoring sight to the millions of people around the world suffering from blindness due to degenerative eye diseases.

Degenerative eye disease is often caused by infections that damage certain parts of the retina used by the eye to detect light and the neural pathways that attach to the retina. The cells within the retina that communicate with the brain, ganglion cells, are usually left intact. The visors bypass damaged cells and sends the encoded visual information directly to the brain.

Nirenberg was able to decipher the code of neural pulses that the mouse brain forms into images, using a two-path approach that includes a prosthetic device that produces the code plus gene therapy that activates the ganglion cells. She said, "It's just an injection into the eye."

Placed onto a chip and combined with a mini projector, the chip converts the images into electrical impulses and then the projector transforms those pulses into light that is able stimulate proteins inside the ganglion cells.

The information then travels up to the brain where the brain recognizes the data as a sharp image. Nirenberg has worked out the code needed for a monkey retina, which is almost identical to the human retina, giving hope that this invention will have practical applications to the world's blind population.

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