“Futurism” isn’t really an adequate label for ‘The Woman With the Bionic Eye’ because Rose Eveleth‘s fascinating piece for The Atlantic shows that the long-imagined future where sight can be restored electronically has actually arrived.1
Fran Fulton, a woman fully blinded by retinitis pigmentosa for 10 years, has regained vision via electrodes implanted in her eyeball:
What’s the experience like?
“When they ‘turned me on’ so to speak it was absolutely the most breathtaking experience,” she says. “I was just so overwhelmed and so excited, my heart started beating so fast I had to put my hand on my chest because I thought it was going to pop.”
Her story–and the description of the technology which enables it–made me shake my head in awe at what human beings are now able to accomplish with our accumulated scientific knowledge.
- So… viva “Now-ism”, I suppose. [↩]