A New Vision

Neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg’s breakthrough neural code is restoring sight in humans and expanding visual capabilities in computing, but some of her academic peers would like to see more transparency in her data.

- By Ruth Reader

On the eighth night of Hanukkah last year, Barry Honig saw light. He could see the shape of the menorah, the flames like fuzzy buds at the top of long sticks.

Honig hadn’t been able to see a menorah for 20 years. In his younger years, he could discern a brunette from a blonde or see the sun shimmering on a lake. But by his thirties, his ability to see detail had started to fade.

He was born with a retinal disorder called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). Inside his eyes, photoreceptors, the cells responsible for translating light, were dying off. It was as though someone had put a dimmer switch on his whole field of vision and dialed it way down.

In the spring of 2020, a friend mentioned a neurologist named Sheila Nirenberg, who was running a clinical trial that might restore vision in people with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), the greater category of disorders that LCA falls within. Honig emailed Nirenberg immediately.

Within minutes, Nirenberg replied: “What is your eye condition? Have you ever seen? Do you have sight? How much can you see?”

“We had a whole email conversation on this Saturday night!” Honig says.

Nirenberg sent him to an ophthalmologist for preliminary tests, then met with him to conduct a baseline evaluation. On September 3, 2020, Honig received an eye injection with a light-sensitive protein and became the second person in Nirenberg’s clinical trial. Three months later, at home, Honig saw the light emanating from the menorah.