Scientists have made blind mice see clearly again in a breakthrough that offers hope to millions.
 

The creatures’ vision was good enough to distinguish a baby’s face, see many of the details of a scene in a park and track a moving image.
 

The technique, using high-tech spectacles containing a tiny camera rather than surgery, could be tested on people for the first time in just one to two years.

 

 

Sheila Nirenberg, the neuroscientist who is honing the technique, says the ultimate hope is the blind will be able to ‘see patterned images, see faces, walk through the supermarket and pick out a box of cereal, recognise their children’.
 

‘This has all been thrilling,’ she said.  
 

‘I can’t wait to get started on bringing this approach to patients.’
 

But there are few treatments and no cure for the condition which makes it difficult or impossible to carry out everyday tasks such as reading, driving and watching television.
 

Scientists have already created implantable chips that restore some vision. 
 

But Dr Nirenberg says that her technique produces a much clearer picture. In fact, vision is close to normal.
 

When we look at something, light falls on cells in the retina, the ‘film’ at the back of the eye and is converted into electrical signals which are sent to the brain for processing into images.
 

The electrical signals are encoded, with the pattern for a dog, for instance, being different to that for a cat or a baby.
 

In age-related macular degeneration, the retinal cells that pick up light die off, leading to less information being passed to the brain and vision deteriorating.
 

Dr Nirenberg has found a way of bypassing these cells and sending the encoded information directly to the brain.
 

Crucially, she has also worked out how to accurately encode the information.  
 

This results in much clearer images that existing devices that simply concentrate on gathering the light and sending the data to the brain.

 

 

The researchers hope the bionic eye will lead to spectacles that could replace a healthy retina (top example) with an artificial electronic encoder one (bottom)

 

The first beneficiaries are likely to be sufferers of age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the elderly.
 

It affects some 500,000 Britons and the figure is expected to treble in the next 25 years as the population ages.