Led by Jeffrey Gross, PhD, the E. Ronald Salvitti Chair in Ophthalmology Research and the director of the Louis J. Fox Center for Vision Restoration, researchers are studying an unlikely creature to understand vision loss in humans: zebrafish. A major focus area for the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is the regeneration of the retinal pigment epithelium and retina. Epitheli-what? So, what is the retinal pigment epithelium? The retinal pigment epithelium, or RPE, spans the entire back of the eye and functions to maintain the health of the light-sensing photoreceptor cells of the retina;

Included below is a translated segment by Kalevi Rantanen published in Helsingin Sanomat, the largest subscription newspaper in Finland, on February 20, 2020. In the future, the blind can see light when video is sent directly to the brain. Eyes, and even the optic nerve, can be bypassed by optogenetics, where images are produced by light. Professor Stephen Macknik of New York’s Downstate University assures us that implantation will soon be done on the optic cortex, that is, directly on the brain. The Macknik team has developed a brain implant called Observ. It is based on optogenetics, which combines optics