About a year ago, a colleague put me in touch with a Boston-based venture capitalist who was interested in a new method for restoring vision to the blind that was under development at Cornell University. I did some cursory research about the technology and wrote a brief report about what I learned. I really didn’t understand the front end of the technology – how the research team was able to acquire and manage a useful visual signal that could be converted into sight by the brain, but since the back end involved the use of gene therapy, which I was very interested in, I began a file to collect information about this technology. Then, about a month ago, I learned that Dr. Sheila Nirenberg, the team leader, would be giving a presentation about her technology at an Optogenetics Conference that was being held in the Boston area. I contacted the symposium director and obtained an invitation to sit in on Dr. Nirenberg’s talk. On May 1st, I went to the conference, met Dr. Nirenberg, listened ...