What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - When Your Retina Needs a Software Update
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Second Sight restored partial vision to hundreds of patients around the world through retinal implants. Then, on the verge of bankruptcy, they abandoned the project. Now, over 300 patients with Second Sight technology in their bodies are asking: what will happen to us?
Guest: Eliza Strickland, senior editor at IEEE Spectrum
Host: Lizzie O'Leary
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Transcript
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| 1:24.7 | Our hearing is a man named Larry Hester seeing for the first time in 33 years. |
| 1:30.3 | He's in a medical office surrounded by doctors and his family and he's wearing a special pair of |
| 1:39.7 | glasses and staring at a bright light. This video was shot in 2014 roughly a month after Hester had |
| 1:46.8 | a device surgically implanted in his eye by a surgeon at Duke. A device that allowed him to see |
| 1:53.2 | light and differentiate it from darkness. It was incredible. It was bright and it was significant. |
| 2:03.6 | And I just had to take a deep breath. It really was a revolutionary technology and when it came out |
| 2:11.2 | there were a lot of stories written about these remarkable emotional moments. |
| 2:17.0 | That's journalist Eliza Strickland. She's a senior editor at the Tech Magazine iTriplee Spectrum. |
| 2:23.0 | It was really seen as something of a miracle even though the vision was very crude, |
| 2:27.9 | just the fact that humanity had built a gadget that could restore any kind of sight was I think |
| 2:34.4 | a really powerful idea. Powerful enough that hundreds of patients like Larry Hester went on to |
... |
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