Weekly Dose of Optimism #167

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday!

Even AWS breaking the internet couldn’t stop another ridiculously packed week. The doc that Aman and Sehaj prepared had a whopping twenty-one stories competing for just five spots (and a bonus or two).

The winners were blindness cures, quantum leaps, bio models, and a new state capacity fund. I’ve included some of the ones that we left on the cutting room floor at the end of the email.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) People with blindness can read again after retinal implant

Nature re: Science Corp’s PRIMA; Video from Abundance Institute

The clinical trial, which is described today in The New England Journal of Medicine¹, involved 38 people with advanced AMD whose retinas had degenerated severely. One year after device implantation, 80% of participants had gained a clinically meaningful improvement in their vision.

Restoring sight to the blind is Bible-level miracle stuff, and this week, humans did just that.

A team of researchers published results of a study using Science Corporation’s PRIMA Visual Prosthesis to attempt to restore sight in legally blind adults. The PRIMA system, detailed in a recent New England Journal of Medicine study, involves a tiny wireless retinal implant, thinner than a human hair and surgically placed under the retina, paired with camera-equipped smart glasses.

The technology targets patients