News Color blindness cure?

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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/09/16/colorblind-monkey.html

Scientists have cured monkeys of colorblindness, against expections. It seems that the same method might also work for humans.
Any thoughts? And for others who are colorblind, would you be willing to try the cure if it was available?

One thing that would concern me is the following:
People who have surgery to repair sight lost in childhood often report that their new vision is confusing and disorienting, he says. Adding color could prove to be similar.
However, those who are colorblind already understand color to some degree, so maybe it wouldn't be quite so difficult to comprehend the new signals that the brain would receive.
 
Well, as a person who is color blind, sure, I'd consider a 'cure', but there is the brain-side to consider. Vision is fully developed in the earlier years of life. By the time one is 5 years of age, it's difficult to make repairs to vision because by that age, the brain has adjusted. For example, you and I see double when we cross our eyes, but a person born cross eyed (by about the age of 5), the brain has worked out the overlapped area (where stereo vision happens), and has 'shut off' or 'ignores' visual data coming from other parts of the eyes. If one were to 'fix' a cross eyed person in adulthood, the would have good alignment, but the brain would be confused. I'm not too sure this would be as much of an issue as one who is color blind. Most people don't seem to fully understand color blindness, but it can be likened to the tint being out of whack. I don't believe the brain really makes any sort of adjustment based on poor transmission of color, so, if one were 'cured' of color blindness, I suppose things might seem out of whack, but not confusing or disorienting. I might consider doing it once it was done for a while, and there seemed to be no ill effects from doing it, but if not, It's not really a big deal. I'm not really 'blind' to particular colors, I can see red, green, and blue just fine, but the reds and blues that I see are not as strong as the greens, so I can live with it as it's not really ever a problem. Also, what's involved with the procedure? I'd be more inclined to do it if some eye drops cured it rather than some form of surgery as well, so it's a difficult question to answer without more data.

On a side note, color blindness is almost exclusively a male vision disorder. Ten percent of the male population, about 600 million men, are color blind, whereas only about 1 in 1 million women (only about 6000 people world wide!), are afflicted with it. My eye doctor once told me that typically, an eye doctor MIGHT encounter a woman who is color blind maybe once in their career. At the time we talked about it, he had been an eye doctor for over 25 years and had yet to have a female patient with color blindness.
 
There may be extra disorientation for people who are born blind (or colorblind), because they have no mental reference at all for the repaired vision--their brains never learned the tricks of visual perception during the period when it is easiest due to the plasticity of the infant brain. Imagine if you will, that you had a treatment to add a fourth kind of cone cell to your retina, one that would let you see UVA wavelength light (which most birds and many insects can see, but mammals can not). You would have no mental reference for the sensation of the new color.
 
Imagine if you will, that you had a treatment to add a fourth kind of cone cell to your retina, one that would let you see UVA wavelength light (which most birds and many insects can see, but mammals can not). You would have no mental reference for the sensation of the new color.

Which leads to the interesting philosophical question: What does UV light look like? :P
 
I agree with SpaceNut. I'm also colorblind and I don't really think it would be disorienting, because I know that there are colors out there that I can't detect. It's not a big thing, I just don't match clothes very well. I'd definitely consider doing this if it were cheap, like maybe a few hundred dollars, maximum. But really, I don't think it's that big of a deal to go out demanding that I be cured in the moment.

It certainly is interesting that they pulled it off. Colorblindness is a genetic thing, and to be able to cure genetic defects is a really big step for biological sciences. We may be getting that much closer to finding cures for Down syndrome, which would definitely be great.
 
Gene therapy?
I thought it was still on the far side of science fiction.

From what i read, the cost will be one injection and 20% risk of cancer as a side effect, not quite a developed cure.

About imagining a color you never seen before - try thinking what say, UV looks like. As familiar colors sprung to mind, dismiss them one by one. At some point nothing is left, except for some rather weird impression, which might be an unimaginable color (or just the brain's way of low-level cursing).
 
Yikes, I didn't see the part about the cancer risk. I'm still not sure if I would ever try it. I would have to see what other people thought about it before I would try it. Maybe us colorblind folk wouldn't like being overwhelmed by vivid color. XD
 
I read in the Chicago Tribune several years ago, about a corrective contact lens. Apparently, it is slightly tinted (in the example given, red), and then over time, the brain learns to adjust to the extra color, at which point you can remove the lenses.

---------- Post added at 04:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:02 PM ----------

Also, I showed a link similar to this in the IRC the other day, so for you non-colorblind people, a brief look into the world of being colorblind.

Check it out

Also, I wouldn't really care either way if there were a cure. At least in my experience, the issues raised by not seeing "normally" are quite minor (the worst I had to do was arrange electrical resistors, which involves reading colored bands, but I got help doing that). Doesn't really make a difference either way to me.
 
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Oh wow. I didn't see that cancer side effect. I'll hold off then, until they get that worked out better. Still really interesting, I think
 
I don't see anything about cancer in the article...What exactly does it say?
 
I don't see anything about cancer in the article...What exactly does it say?
Sorry, i did some assumptions on insufficient data.

The article says that the monkeys were treated by a virus-based gene therapy. One way is to use a retrovirus, which on human trials for curing a kind of genetic immunodeficiency resulted in 20% of the subjects getting leukemia.
There are other viral options without this drawback, and the article does not specify which one was used.
 
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