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The promise of vision

Washington: Electrodes inserted in the brain may point the way to restoring sight lost to eye disease or trauma, research at the Harvard Medical School involving monkeys has shown. The work is still in its very early stages.

While researchers have worked on developing implants for the eye's retina, John S. Pezaris and R. Clay Reid turned their attention to a portion of the thalamus that relays signals from the retina to the brain's visual cortex.

They were able to get the brains of the monkeys to register a point of light by sending a signal down the electrodes — even though no actual light was visible. "We don't know what it looked like because we can't really ask them," Mr. Pezaris said. "But there definitely was something." — AP

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