Gene therapy of the human retina levels of light. What follows often is the death of cone cells, responsible for color vision and acuity, at light levels present during the day. Loss of cones leads to full blindness as early as five years old, but may not onset until many years later. There have been multiple hypotheses about how the lack of rod cells can lead to the death of cone cells. Pinpointing a mechanism for RP is difficult because there are more than 39 genetic loci and genes correlated with this disease. In an effort to find the cause of RP, there have been different
Retina in "Retina der Wirbelthiere" ("The Retina of Vertebrates"). George Wald, Haldan Keffer Hartline, and Ragnar Granit won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their scientific research on the retina. A recent University of Pennsylvania study calculated that the approximate bandwidth of human retinas is 8.75 megabits per second, whereas a guinea pig's retinal transfer rate is 875 kilobits per second. MacLaren & Pearson and colleagues at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, in 2006, showed that photoreceptor cells could be transplanted successfully in the mouse retina if donor cells were at a critical developmental