This is from "USA TODAY" Wednesday, 12/22/99 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ WONDER IS ONE OF MANY LOOKING INTO VISION CHIPS By Aimee Phan and Dan Vergano of USA Today Years of creativity brought singer/songwriter Stevie Wonder a Kennedy center Honor on Sunday. But part of the attention he earned came from an announcement he made last week in Detroit. Wonder Said he's considering surgery to restore his vision with a highly experimental procedure that would implant electronic chips into his eyes. Although Wonder has down played the idea since that announcement, he wouldn't be the only one interested in such a procedure. "Vision loss has truly become a massive epidemic with the aging of the baby boomers," says Gerald Chader of the Foundation Fighting Blindness in Hunt Valley, Md. The foundation estimates that 6 million people nation-wide suffer from genetically inherited diseases that affect the retinal cells. The new hope for vision repair is the use of retinal chips, a high-tech approach to replacing damaged eye cells with computer chips. In the works for 10 years, this "bionic eye" has become the focus of intense research by groups in Germany, Japan and the USA. "People once thought this was pie in the sky, but it's looking much better now," Chader says. Surgically implanted on the retina's surface, the chip would imitate the function of deteriorated photoreceptor cells, which would normally accept light stimuli and convert them into electrical responses. The camera, perched on a pair of glasses, would transmit visual information to the chip via radio signals. Inside the chip, those radio waves would be converted into an electrical signal and transmitted to nerve cells behind the retina. From there, the electrical signal would travel along the optic nerve to the brain, in theory, creating sight. It was a tough sell. "It was a crazy idea," says Eugene de Juan, an iphthalmology professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. "Some thought it sounded like science fiction, but others were hopeful." A colleague of his, Mark Jumayun, has consulted with Wonder about his sight. "After a lifetime of blindness, the singer's brain might not be able to process a signal from the optic nerve, regardless of the chip's capabilities," Chader says. One of the biggest experimental concerns remains the risk of damaging the retina's delicate tissue. "The retina is like a wet piece of Kleenex," Chader says. "Just imagine putting a little plastic conductor with a piece of metal tacked onto it. The retina could shred to pieces." For the last year, the de Juan group has tested the safety and efficacy of the chip on human patients affected with a retinal degenerative disease. Researchers inserted a chip into the retinas of 15 people for 15 minutes. The subjects reported they were able to perceive basic visual images of shapes, color and light. "It was very encouraging," de Juan says. "We now know that the retina could tolerate the implantation of the devices and that the patients could have primitive forms of vision." Two weeks ago, researchers at Harvard reported tentative success with their own chips implanted temporarily in people suffering severe vision loss. People in those trials were shown a series of circles transmitted to the chips. "We're talking about seeing rough forms and outlines, door and couches," Chader says. While he hopes the chips continue to make progress, he cautions against overexuberance. "This is at the stage well before human clinical trials." Picture which accompanies article: "Bionic Eyesight" Picture shows a pair of glasses with a tiny round thing right in the middle of the lens. A wire goes from the round thing to a very small antenna ( appears to be about an inch long, and thin as a straight pin with a round ball also very small on top) sticking out from the top of the glasses' frame, from which radio waves are radiating outward. Caption reads: " 1. Miniature cameras mounted on glasses capture images and send them out on radio waves." Next picture shows a cutaway of the eye, with the square chip sitting right on the retina and with waves radiating to the optic nerve. Caption reads: "2. Embedded in the eye, just atop the retina, the chip picks up the radio waves." Last picture is just a close up of the chip which is square like an ordinary silicon chip. Caption reads: "3. Converting the radio waves to electrical impulses, the chip passes the signal along to the optic nerve. The optic nerve transmits the electrical signal to vision centers in the brain, where, in theory, the brain interprets the camera pictures as sight." VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List. To join or leave the list, send a message to [log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations. VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html