Colour blindness corrected by gene therapy : Nature News
Male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind. They are missing one of the opsins. A group at UW added a gene for the opsin to a virus, squirted it into the retinas of two male monkeys, and after about 5 months they were able to perform discrimination tasks that required seeing red and green dots. The effect seems to be stable for these two monkeys.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47396/title/Monkeys_get_full_color_vision
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47396/title/Monkeys_get_full_color_vision
I’ve always wondered how colour blindness can be determined. Isn’t colour something we are taught through association? It seems beyond my understanding that anyone could even say for certain that a monkey would be colour blind or that injecting a gene could suddenly be cured.
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They sidestep the problem of other minds, defining things operationally in terms of what can be behaviorally discriminated. If someone can't discriminate red from green color chips, then they are red-green color blind.
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