Artificial Retinas

Is this not amazing?

From Future Brief

In the mid-1980s, neu­rooph­thal­mol­o­gist Joseph Riz­zo III was research­ing reti­nal trans­plants to restore blind people’s vision. One day, remov­ing a lab animal’s reti­na, a tis­sue-thin mem­brane that lines the back of the eyeball’s inte­ri­or, he had an epiphany. ‘The moment I made the cut, I said to myself, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’’ Riz­zo recounts. He real­ized he was cut­ting nerve con­nec­tions that are actu­al­ly spared in many forms of blindness…Rizzo con­ceived of a reti­nal prosthesis—an implant that would take a wire­less sig­nal from a video cam­era, bypass the light recep­tors, and stim­u­late the healthy nerve cells direct­ly to feed the image to the brain.”  Read more at MIT’s Tech­nol­o­gy Review.