Sheila Nirenberg: A prosthetic eye to treat blindness

http://www.ted.com At TEDMED, Sheila Nirenberg shows a bold way to create sight in people with certain kinds of blindness: by hooking into the optic nerve and sending signals from a camera direct to the brain.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate

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  Science & Technology

[salutemeorsh00tme]

Wow what a tough crowd, i don't think they understood the gravity of what Nirenberg actually managed to do. She cracked the code of electrical impulses that body parts (not just the eyes) use to communicate with the brain. The difference between the standard and the experimental eye was like night and day. Forget about prosthetic eyes, this is is an extraordinary breakthrough for the prosthetics field in general. Well done indeed.

[James Lacy]

"I'm not sure if 'cool' is the right word"

Yes, it is. Giving sight to the blind is a pretty good fit for the word 'cool'.

[MarkSKristensen]

now that´s a HUGE step towards real life Nerve Gear!

SAO IS COMMING!

in the "near" future.

[LectronCircuits]

Folks, this is huge. Some day, if your eyeballs are hosed, your eyesight need not be hosed. Awesome!

[StaticXCC]

Sheila's work on this is super important and will be a massive help to the blind. I'm also starting to imagine other applications for this technology. If Shiela and her team nail this down, couldn't we then take this work to start creating Virtual Reality that we can only dream of now? I can only hope...

[David Kreuter]

Where are the PDFs? Where are the equations?

[DjBumzBeats]

She's a rockstar!

[latte123]

Agreed, saluteme - a very tough crowd!.

These people have just seen a future Nobel prizewinner in medicine. I'm surprised that they don't seem to realise the MASSIVE significance of Nirenberg's work!

I've seen the results of the current so-called "state-of-the-art" retina prostheses, and they are JUNK compared to this!

It's like comparing a kid's trolley to a Lamborghini.

[salutemeorsh00tme]

Sounds like you're just looking for something to take offense towards; obviously Nirenberg had help (who doesn't?), I didn't say otherwise.

Maybe in light of the crowd's knowledge, her accomplishment was not all that amazing, but a variety of people, most of whom are not experts in the field attend TED talks.

And truthfully, it is naive to think that a single person or group of few won't get the bulk of the credit for any discovery, regardless of how many other people may have been involved.

[twistedbass15]

You must have a very low standard.

While your comment is good for you, it could be much much better.

[labobo]

You must have a very low standard.

While this is good for the blind, it could be much much better.