1 BIONIC EYES OF THE FUTURE It’s 6 00 a m It’s 6 00 a m Your talking alarm clock wakes you up You feel for the off button and press it Then you roll out of bed and get ready for school Even though you’re blind you can walk around your home quickly and easily Everything’s always in the same place But away from home you walk slowly holding a long white cane With it you feel for objects around you When the school bus arrives you find the bus steps with your cane and climb aboard As you ride you think about a new technology your parents told you about It’s an implant that could help blind people see You daydream about what that might be like One year later you’ve had the implant surgery Now you wear glasses Your glasses hold a tiny camera and computer The computer turns the camera’s images into electronic signals It sends the signals to a computer chip attached to your brain
In 2014 there were nearly 300 million visually impaired people around the world Your brain reads the signals and lets you know what is around you You can see The shapes you see are kind of fuzzy Everything looks black and white But you don’t need your cane anymore You can see well enough to walk without it
2 ELECTRICITY IN MEDICINE A world where blind people can see may seem far-fetched But bionic eyes already exist Their invention is the latest step in a long journey of discovery That journey began centuries ago Benjamin Franklin lived in the 1700s He was one of the founders of the United States Franklin was also a scientist He wanted to know more about electricity In the 1750s Franklin did many experiments with electricity Franklin and other scientists explored electricity throughout the late 1700s and the 1800s They studied how it affects humans They applied electricity to various body parts Scientists used electricity to treat everything from toothaches to sore throats In 1874 scientists started electrifying living human brains to try to cure various illnesses The first to do this was US scientist Roberts Bartholow Then in 1918 two German surgeons stimulated a patient’s visual cortex with electricity The electricity made the patient see dots of light called phosphenes
Franklin's experiments with electricity led him to invent the lightning rod
