BLINDNESS vs CALIFORNIA STEM CELL PROGRAM: Disease-a-week …

BLINDNESS vs. THE CALIFORNIA STEM CELL PROGRAM: Disease-a-week Challenge #6

by Don C. Reed

When I was ten I fell on a bamboo stick, which penetrated my right eye. The doctor taped a patch over it and said that was all he could do, we would just have to wait and see. What did that mean? Losing one eye did not sound too bad, like a pirate in the movies, but what if I lost the other one too? To no longer read comic books, or watch expressions change on a persons face, or see the colors of the sky? I experimented with being blind, blindfolding myself with tied-together gymsocks, stumbling around the room.

In time I recovered partial vision (20/400), meaning I could see at twenty feet what others see at 400. With corrective lenses, all is wellbut I will never take vision for granted again.

Do you know the Saturday Night Live comedian Will Forte? The humorist was friends with another standup comedian, Dennis Rickman, Ph.D.. Rickmans day job was in medical research: trying to use stem cells to defeat blindness. Forte helped Rickman raise $10,000 to start a program called SCIfEyes (Stem Cell Initiative for Eyes) at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

http://dukeeyecenter.duke.edu/...

I spoke to Dr. Rickman and his wife, Dr. Catherine Bowes Rickman, a recognized authority on Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), the most common form of adult blindness in Western society.

Dennis Rickman advocated the ethical use of both adult and embryonic stem cells for scientific research-- and had a very good reason for doing so.

In 1995, Dennis Rickman had been diagnosed with leukemia

After a two-year search, a young woman in Germany was found with bone marrow like Rickmans; she shared her stem cells with him.

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BLINDNESS vs CALIFORNIA STEM CELL PROGRAM: Disease-a-week ...