New story in Science and Health from Time: How Whales Can Teach Us to Be Better Humans How Whales Can Teach Us to Be Better Humans

For the last 23 years, I’ve traveled around the world as a wildlife photographer and photojournalist.

The pandemic ground all that to a halt. Like most of us, I was home for more than a year. In that time, I reflected on what I’ve learned during those two-plus decades of non-stop travel.

My last trip, which ended in March 2020, was part of a three-year project photographing whales that focused on their culture and behaviors.

I came away with a striking observation. Genetically identical species of whales behave differently depending on where they live—much like humans. They form clans with unique dialects or languages. They develop cultural food preferences. They showcase special parenting techniques. They even hold singing competitions.
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More importantly, they pass on these ancestral traditions to their calves. Not only are they teaching their children survival skills—they’re passing on their culture.

I also saw these sentient, highly intelligent animals display other typically human behaviors. They have personalities and celebrate their identity. Some whale species give their calves names and greet each other when they meet. They show love, empathy, and grief.

Family is immensely important to them. Within orca families, individuals live nearly five times longer if grandmothers are present.

Take sperm whales. These animals are shy and gentle—quite counter to their popular portrayal in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. They roam the open ocean and spend most of their lives in the deep sea, searching for squid to feed on. They may spend much of their day in solitude. But they also have families led by the older, wiser females of the group.

These whales are especially challenging to study. But spend enough time with them, and you’ll see them occasionally gather as a family to socialize near the surface. I’ve been privileged to be in the water with them during these times. What I saw can only be described as love. They roll around together, rubbing against one another, gently biting and playing. They close their eyes and delight in each other’s company.

Brian SkerryA family unit of sperm whales socializing underwater off the island of Faial in the Azores.

For an animal that spends most of its life in a three-dimensional liquid void, rarely touching anything, I imagine that these moments are pure joy. Although their lives in the ocean are difficult, they’ve learned to make time for each other. This alone must bring them bliss.

Perhaps my favorite observation took place in the Canadian Arctic with beluga whales. This population of belugas spends its winters in total darkness in the waters near Greenland. In the summer, when it is light 24 hours a day, they swim hundreds of miles through the Northwest Passage to reach their summer playground. It’s near land, where the water is shallow and slightly warmer. To produce images in these conditions, my team and I had to design and build new, remote cameras that I placed underwater before the whales arrived.

The photographic results exceeded our wildest expectations. But one aspect of their lives was a complete surprise—they play games with little rocks. In this shallow, three-foot-deep water, belugas will occasionally pick up pebbles with their mouths. They’ll carry them around for a while, and then drop them. Another whale then swims by to pick the pebble up again.

Ever since I captured these images, I’ve thought often about these polar whales living far away, at the top of the Earth. Their daily lives are busy and challenging. They have to catch food and take care of their young. They deal with social situations, where no doubt conflicts occur. And they have to face predators and serious threats every day. Yet they still make time to play. They find a perfect pebble and carry it around because it makes them happy. How wonderful is that?

We can see ourselves in these creatures. Humans also speak different languages, enjoy different foods, and pass down family traditions.

But perhaps most strikingly, we also rely on one other. The moments we spend with our loved ones are often the most treasured and meaningful in our lives. Just as belugas do, in between the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, it’s essential for us to make time for other things—things that bring joy.

In other words, every now and then, each of us should pause our days and find that perfect pebble. My guess is that decades from now, they’ll be what we cherish the most.

New story in Science and Health from Time: What Meghan and Harry’s New Daughter Needs to Know About Being a Second-Born What Meghan and Harry’s New Daughter Needs to Know About Being a Second-Born

Lilibet ‘Lili’ Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, the new daughter of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, was born on Friday, June 4, weighing in at a healthy 7 lbs., 11 oz and, according to a statement issued by the parents, “both mother and child are healthy and well, and settling in at home.”

So all good for the second child of two people who are arguably the most glamorous couple in the world, right? Well, maybe not. There’s that whole second child thing to deal with, and whether you’re glam or not, royal or not, rich or poor, boy or girl, globally famous or entirely anonymous, that can present particular challenges. As I wrote in both my book The Sibling Effect and in a 2007 TIME magazine cover story, the dice of life are loaded in favor of first borns in ways they simply aren’t for any siblings who come along later.
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First-borns are over represented at Ivy League colleges, in the halls of Congress, in CEO suites, even in the early astronaut corps. They tend to earn more than later borns, enjoy better health throughout their lives—likely as a result of parents finding health care dollars being stretched tighter and tighter as more children come along—and even have a three-point IQ advantage over second borns, according to one study out of Norway (that brain-power edge is thought to come from first borns becoming better masters of skills as they mentor younger siblings).

First borns also tend to be more conservative and family oriented than later-borns. And why not? They’re born into a system in which they’re the sole princeling or princess—more or less literally, in the case of the U.K. royal family, but mostly metaphorically for the rest of us. But still, they inherit the sweet deal as the prime child, and consciously or not, devote their lives to maintaining that privileged post.

Second and later borns are much more invested in upending the system. Research has shown that they are likelier to be risk-takers—skydivers and bungee jumpers as opposed to skiers and polo players. Even when siblings play the same sport, younger ones are likelier to take the higher-risk positions—baseball catchers instead of outfielders, football tackles instead of kickers. Younger siblings are disproportionately represented among artists, too, and are likelier to be gamble-it-all entrepreneurs as opposed to following more traditional, climb-the-trellis routes to the C-suites of an existing organization.

Sibling combat plays another big part of the big-sib, little-sib dynamic. Here too, royals or not, Archie and Lilibet could be due for some rough times together. One study out of the University of Illinois I cited in The Sibling Effect found that during a 45-minute play session, the average pair of children in the three- to seven-year-old age group engage in more than 2.5 conflicts. That’s 3.5 every hour, or one every 17 minutes. A related Canadian study focused on siblings from two to four years old, finding that hostilities among that age group break out an astonishing 6.3 times per hour—one fight every 9.5 minutes.

The advantage in this playroom warfare ought to go to the older—and typically physically bigger—sibling, but that’s not always the case. Younger siblings, research shows, deploy what are known as “low-power strategies,” developing a better ability to read other people’s visual and tonal cues and intuit what they’re thinking—the better to duck a punch before it comes their way. They also tend to be funnier, which matters a lot. As I observed in my book, it’s awfully hard to resist the charms of someone who can make you laugh, and families abound with stories of last-borns who are the clowns of the brood. Birth-order scholars observe that some of history’s great satirists—Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain—were among the youngest members of large families, a pattern that continues today. Stephen Colbert, who yields to no one in his ability to get a laugh, often points out that he’s the last of 11 children.

What Lilibet has to watch out for are some of younger children’s less adaptive traits. History is rife with little siblings of world leaders getting themselves into all kinds of scrapes—take, for instance, the serial scandals of Roger Clinton, Donald Nixon and Billy Carter, little brothers of U.S. presidents Bill, Richard and Jimmy, respectively. Prince Harry himself, little brother to heir to the throne Prince William, had his own series of embarrassments—boozing, pot-smoking, wearing a Nazi uniform at a costume party, and wearing nothing at all in a notorious picture snapped while he was playing pool with friends in a Las Vegas hotel room.

None of this means that baby Lili and toddler Archie are doomed to face all of these challenges. Meghan’s and Harry’s decision to step back from royal life means the children may be exposed to less glare from the press—especially the toxic kind that contributed to the mixed-race, British-American family’s decision to decamp to the U.S.—as well as from the constant public ceremonies and all of the other force multipliers of psychic stress. But the science of birth order is the science of birth order, and the studies are the studies. So welcome to the world, little Lili. Your advantages will be considerable; your challenges will be common to all little siblings. May you make the most of the first, and may you deftly navigate the second.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Why Jeff Bezos Should Be Applauded for Going to Space Why Jeff Bezos Should Be Applauded for Going to Space

Give Jeff Bezos this: the guy knows how to make the most out of semi-retirement. On July 5, the richest man in the world will step down as Amazon CEO to focus more of his energy on his two other major properties: The Washington Post and Blue Origin, a rocket company and SpaceX rival. On July 20—just 15 days after he gets his gold watch and, not incidentally, 52 years to the day after Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon—Bezos is set to go to space himself, joining five other people aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft on its inaugural crewed flight.
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And you know what? Bravo for Bezos.

Is the fight a stunt—an exercise in exhibitionism for a man worth north of $170 billion who builds his own rocket ships and can jolly well climb aboard one if he wants? Maybe. In a year in which the world’s true heroes have been the health care workers fighting on the front lines of the worst pandemic in a century, should we care about a little hop to suborbital space? Maybe not.

Still, space is hard, the physics can be brutal—you try pulling the g-forces astronauts endure—and the machines can and do blow up. But with private companies like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and more working to build an entirely new industry in space tourism, and with consumers opening their wallets to buy seats on the rockets, somebody has to go first, and Bezos—give him props—is stepping forward.

“To see the Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth,” Bezos said in an Instagram post. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”

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A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)

Bezos’ brother Mark, a senior vice president at the New York-based charity Robin Hood, will also be on board, as will four others—one of whom will be chosen via online auction; the bidding currently stands at $2.8 million. The flight they take will be short, thrilling and, depending on your view of these things, scary.

I had a chance to climb inside a mockup of a New Shepard on the Blue Origin factory floor in Kent, Wash. in 2019. Even for the most risk-averse people—and I count myself among them—it’s hard not to want to take it for a spin. The cockpit is a circular pod with half a dozen couches arranged around the periphery, each with a window significantly larger than the little portholes on commercial airliners. The headroom is considerable, with ample space above the couches in which to unbuckle and float during the brief weightless portion of the trip.

The flight that Bezos and, eventually, a whole clientele of Blue Origin customers will take begins with a launch atop the 18 m (59-ft.) New Shepard rocket from the company’s site southeast of El Paso, Texas. Two minutes into the flight, the rocket reaches Mach 3—or three times the speed of sound—and the crew will feel a force of 3 Gs. One minute later, as the New Shepard approaches the 100 km (62 mi) altitude mark—the commonly accepted boundary of space—the crew capsule will separate from the rocket. At that point, weightlessness will begin, and the crew will unbuckle and float freely around the cockpit. At the four-minute mark, the capsule will reach the peak of its parabolic flight and then begin to descend back into the atmosphere. Shortly after—having experienced about three minutes of zero-g—the crew will rebuckle and the capsule will descend by parachute while the booster touches down softly on a landing pad about 3.2 km from the launch site. The capsule lands not far away. The entire mission duration? Just 11 minutes.

Blue Origin has worked hard to eliminate as much risk from the exercise as possible. The New Shepard had its 15th successful test flight in April, and a suborbital mission is about the safest flight profile a spacecraft can fly—a simple up and down lob shot. But there’s still the giant fuel tanks filled with explosive liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the supersonic velocities the rocket reaches and the fact that lob shots—simple as they are—sometimes wind up making holes in the ground.

Bezos is willing to take those chances before he asks the same of the passengers he hopes will be queuing up behind him. Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic, has not yet flown on one of his own company’s space vehicles, though he plans to later this year. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has never flown aboard one of his company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, and was quite frank about that when I spoke to him back in 2012, saying that his considerable responsibilities on Earth—not least as head of both SpaceX and Tesla—make that a potentially imprudent risk.

Bezos, who will become executive chairman of Amazon’s board after he leaves the CEO job, has considerable responsibilities too, but he’s going anyway. Flying fast is fun. Flying first is brave. The mission planned for July 20 may well be just a billionaire’s indulgence. But if so, it’s being flown by a billionaire showing more than a little integrity.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The U.S. Government’s Long-Awaited UFO Report Is Here. Its Findings? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The U.S. Government’s Long-Awaited UFO Report Is Here. Its Findings? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The U.S. Navy pilots flying maneuvers in their F/A-18 Super Hornets in 2015 did not have to wait for yesterday’s leak of the classified government report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)—better known as UFOs—to know that they were seeing things they could not explain outside their windscreens. The objects were, yes, saucer-shaped, and they were bobbing, darting and changing directions with a speed and nimbleness that no known technology could manage.

“Look at that thing, dude!” one pilot shouted. “Oh my gosh. There’s a whole fleet of them. They’re going against the wind! The wind’s 120 knots [135 mph] west!”
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Cockpit cameras captured what the crew was seeing, and in 2020, the Pentagon declassified the footage. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about what the crew saw that day was how unremarkable it was becoming. In the past 20 years, military pilots have made more than 120 sightings of objects with no apparent signs of conventional propulsion—no exhaust or contrails, and certainly no wings or fins.

In 2007, Congress established the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program Task Force, championed by then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid, charging the intelligence department with determining if the objects really are extraterrestrial in origin or—perhaps worse—advanced military technology being developed by China, Russia or other potential foes.

That program shut down for lack of funding in 2012. But the work resumed last year, when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that also required the Pentagon to continue investigating UAPs and release its findings to the public. That release is tentatively set for later this month, but the New York Times published a copy yesterday, and the conclusions are just enough to intrigue everyone and satisfy no one: There is no evidence that the UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin, but nor can that possibility be ruled out.

The report says definitively that the objects are not American military craft, but pointedly does not discount the possibility that they could belong to another earthly nation. Both Russia and China are known to be experimenting with hypersonic technology—vehicles and weapons that can move at five times the speed of sound or faster—and certainly the velocity of the objects seen by American pilots would be consistent with that kind of engineering. But the suddenness with which the objects change directions would—or at least should—cause g-forces that would rip them (or their inhabitants) apart, and the length of time some of them remain aloft goes beyond what conventional fuel technology could support.

“These things would be out there all day,” one pilot told the Times. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.” Other objects sighted have done other extraordinary things, including diving from the air into the ocean and back out, once again at seemingly fatal speeds.

Those kinds of so-far inexplicable abilities have caught the attention of a lot of people who normally keep their distance from what could be seen as fringe beliefs.

“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” former President Barack Obama said May 17 on The Late Late Show with James Corden. During her presidential campaign in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about any classified data that might exist on UAPs and how she would handle it as President. “I want to open the files as much as we can,” she said. “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is also on the record as wanting more information on UAPs.

But others with deep expertise in space-related matters are simply not persuaded that there is anything otherworldly to be found from investigating the UAP sightings.

“As Carl Sagan said some time ago, extraordinary claims require for their validation extraordinary evidence,” John Logsdon, founder and longtime director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an email to TIME. “Apparently the government report says that there is no such evidence. So I continue to be agnostic about these phenomena, leaning strongly to thinking they are, one way or the other, of human origin.”

In the event that’s indeed the case, Logsdon believes that whatever the government learns will likely remain the government’s business. “If these observations are indeed related to highly classified national security activity,” he said, “I would not expect their origin to be revealed in an unclassified government report.”

More information will surely be forthcoming when the full report drops before the end of the month. But if Logsdon’s right, best to expect the unidentified aerial phenomena to remain unidentified.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Start of Hurricane Season Brings Anxieties to Central America, Still Reeling From Last Year’s Disasters The Start of Hurricane Season Brings Anxieties to Central America, Still Reeling From Last Year’s Disasters

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.

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Tuesday was the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season, but across swaths of Central America, thousands of people still haven’t recovered from the last one. Last November, back-to-back hurricanes pummeled millions of people across the region, destroying infrastructure and cropland, and leveling thousands of homes. In regions of Honduras and Nicaragua, many of those displaced by Hurricanes Eta and Iota—Category 4 storms that hit within two weeks of each other in November—are still living in fragile temporary shelters, contending with a spike in COVID-19 cases and associated deaths in a region where less than 1% of the population has been vaccinated against the virus.
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And unfinished recovery efforts from the last disaster have made communities there more vulnerable to what may be coming next. For instance, rivers around San Pedro Sula in Honduras flooded their banks during the November hurricanes, and in many cases, water control systems haven’t been restored. That means even a smaller rainfall event could much more easily unleash disastrous flooding again.

And more rain is almost certainly on its way: Forecasters are predicting an above-average hurricane season this year, with between 13 and 20 named storms potentially forming. Last year, a record-breaking hurricane season saw 30 named storms in the Atlantic, the most ever, in the fifth consecutive year of above-average hurricane activity.

Climate change may at least partly account for that trend. Over the past hundred years, the surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean have risen, a phenomenon linked to climate change and humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Warmer waters tend to form storms with higher wind speeds and more rainfall, a trend that is likely to become more pronounced as the climate continues to grow warmer in coming years.

People living in the path of hurricanes and other powerful storms strong enough to merit naming by the meteorological authorities have seen the effects of those climate forces firsthand—and in some cases, have also suffered from a lack of local environmental mitigation measures, which could perhaps have lessened the severity of the disaster. In Honduras, for instance, massive deforestation has left many areas in the mountainous country more vulnerable to flooding and landslides. Climate refugees may soon be on their way, with observers predicting that the new devastation, unseen since Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras and Nicaragua more than 20 years ago, may bring tides of migrants to wealthier countries like the United States.

Adaptation strategies may be able to lessen some of the blows. Early warning systems in Nicaragua, for instance, enabled local authorities to begin evacuating vulnerable areas days before last November’s hurricanes made landfall, and the country reported just a fraction of the fatalities that resulted from a previous major hurricane about a decade earlier. Experts have suggested that homes be moved away from hillsides that could collapse in rainstorms, and that local populations should be relocated away from low-lying coastal areas. Also proposed would be to switch crops in flood-prone areas to more resistant species. Rice, for example, could survive flooding, while native maize cannot.

But those initiatives haven’t always been at the top of the agenda in regions beset by debt and widespread poverty. In the meantime, relief organizations are already planning for this new world of climate-worsened disasters. The International Red Cross, for instance, said in its 2021 global plan that climate change has prompted an “urgent” need to scale up humanitarian work to meet “unprecedented needs,” with the organization attempting to triple the size of its emergency disaster-relief fund in the next four years. At Project HOPE, relief organizers say that a warming climate is having a substantial effect on their work, with the organization expanding its emergency response teams and recruiting more volunteers in order to deploy to multiple disasters at a time. “Both the scale and the frequency of the disasters that we’re responding to are like nothing we’ve seen in our past,” says Project HOPE Americas Regional Director Andrea Dunne-Sosa. “It’s not only anticipated. It’s been happening.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: 8 Questions with Theoretical Physicist Carlo Rovelli—Including Quantum, Cats and Why We Should Forget About Time 8 Questions with Theoretical Physicist Carlo Rovelli—Including Quantum, Cats and Why We Should Forget About Time

The United Kingdom didn’t think much about particles or waves or quantum nonsense when it blew up Helgoland in 1947. It only knew that there were thousands of tons of World War II armaments to dispose of and the little island in the North Sea made a perfect place. The explosion was the largest non-nuclear blast of its time, and it came just 22 years after a much smaller, quieter detonation took place on the same island—when a young German physicist named Werner Heisenberg completed the equations that provided humanity’s first glimpse into the hallucinatory world of quantum physics. Close to a century later, that early revelation is being explained with uncanny insight and lyrical grace by best-selling author and theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, aptly named Helgoland. Rovelli explores such head-spinning notions as the reason observing an event determines its outcome, why time doesn’t really exist, and how it feels to devote your life to a science that even Albert Einstein described as “witchery.”

You write that you never would have been a physicist except that when you were registering for college classes, the line at the physics desk was shortest. Is that really the way you picked the discipline that would define your life?

Not entirely. I had a restless youth; I did not even want to go to the university. I wanted to take my backpack and go wandering around the world. But what happened is that I had a little Italian motorbike and I lent it to a friend, and the police stopped him and found some marijuana, some hashish. My lawyer said it was not a good moment to leave the country, so I enrolled in school. I was fascinated by large questions about philosophy, but when I started studying physics I really fell in love with it, and I also discovered, to my surprise, that it was good at it. My friends would ask me, “Can you understand these things and can you explain them?” And I said, “Well, actually, I do understand them.”

That would put you in unique company. You quote no less a physicist than the late Richard Feynman as saying that nobody understands quantum physics and yet you also write that quantum has never been wrong. How can you reconcile those two ideas?

Quantum physics is a fantastic machine that allows us to predict what’s going to happen in physical systems when they interact with something else. But if we take it as a description of what happens when a system is not interacting, it forces us to make implausible statements. A particle opens up and becomes a wave that spreads and goes through two holes at the same time and Schrodinger’s cat is alive and also dead. Quantum theory lets you say, ‘Well I put this ingredient in and that could come out.’ But if you look for an actual description of what goes on in the world, it doesn’t seem to make sense.

Does quantum science have any respect for linear time as we think of it, with a beginning, middle, end?

From Einstein’s relativity we know that our common notion of time is an approximation. It’s not bad, it’s just not good for thinking about galaxies and atoms—it’s only good for thinking about our daily life. There is a quantum strangeness to time so the interval between two events can mean a quantum superposition of two times taking place at once. The best way is to forget about the idea that there is a spatial time at all.

Do you ever find it frustrating to be working in a field that even Albert Einstein described as “an idea of real witchery”?

Let me put it this way: Some people went into science because they were attracted by the idea that they could know something with a high degree of certainty. I was attracted by science for the opposite reason. I’m fascinated by what we don’t know beyond this boundary, this side of the hill. I find that the burning core of science.

You point out that it drives you a little bit crazy the way people misuse the term quantum. If you could sit the world down and explain to them in a few sentences what quantum is, what would you say?

Quantum physics can be summarized by three discoveries. One is that things don’t happen according to exact equations, but only to the probability of them happening. The second is discreteness: for instance, we think of light as a continuous wave, but if we look in detail, it’s actually photons. Quantum is like pointillism—a world made up of little dots. And the third, the controversial one, is that all objects have properties only insofar as they relate to other objects.

One of the most head snapping ideas of quantum mechanics is that we affect the outcome of an experiment by observing it. But why does the universe care if we’re watching or not?

I think that this is the key confusion about quantum. There’s actually nothing special about me as an observer. The quantum system has properties only with respect to some system interacting with it. I happen to be a human being who takes notes of what I see. But it doesn’t matter that I have a subjective experience. I’m just a physical system like anything else.

You have said that you like to smell books before you buy them. How come?

I have an emotional relation with books and I need the paper to be nice. There was a biography of Schrodinger which I disliked, but I didn’t know why. And then I realized that the book had a bad smell. It was used, and it probably belonged to somebody who smoked.

In one of the more charming observations in your book, you say that as a quantum physicist you are really a simple mechanic. What did you mean by that?

I’m not the person who thinks that science is a fundamental explanation of everything. As a scientist, especially one who looks at one side of things, I should not make the mistake of thinking that that’s the overall picture. And so I’m a little mechanic. I think scientists should be humble and not think they’re the masters of today’s knowledge.

New story in Science and Health from Time: A Blind Patient Regained Partial Sight in a Breakthrough Study, Offering Hope to Millions A Blind Patient Regained Partial Sight in a Breakthrough Study, Offering Hope to Millions

The darkness descends slowly for people with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a degenerative eye disease that affects 2 million people worldwide. The condition is typically diagnosed in childhood or adolescence, but it can take until middle age before a person’s vision has deteriorated severely enough that they are fully or effectively blind. When the lights finally do go out, however, they stay out.

Or that’s the way things used to be. In a breakthrough study published today in Nature Medicine, investigators report a relatively simple yet remarkably effective way to restore partial vision to RP patients—one that, with further study, may soon have wide application.

The key lies in the rod-shaped photoreceptors that principally govern peripheral vision and the cone-shaped receptors that give us our central view of the world. In people with RP, mutations in more than 70 genes cause slow deterioration of the rods, leading to tunnel vision, and later the cones, leading to blindness. Light still streams into the eye through the unaffected lens, and that light could still make its way to the brain via the optic nerve. But the retina, which lies between the two, no longer works.

A team of researchers, led by Dr. José-Alain Sahel, professor of ophthalmology at Sorbonne University and the University of Pittsburgh, however, thought they might have a way to bring the retina back into the game: ChrimsonR, a protein that opens electrical channels in neurons and makes them reactive to light. The trick was finding a way to deliver the protein—and the answer was to genetically manipulate a harmless adenovirus so that it carried ChrimsonR; the virus was then injected into the fluid-filled portion of the eye behind the lens.

“The ChrimsonR sparks electrical activity,” says Sahel. “It transforms the cells and makes them able to absorb light, though it takes a while—about four months—for the cells to take up the virus and the protein with it.”

Nonhuman primate studies showed that the technique did not harm the eye, and also helped the researchers establish the proper dose of Chrimson4 to sensitize the retinal cells. For the human trial, Sahel and his team worked with a 58-year-old man who had been diagnosed with RP 40 years earlier and whose vision was limited to rudimentary light perception. They treated the poorer functioning of his two eyes—in order to spare the marginally healthier one if anything went wrong with the experiment—and injected it with a single dose of the altered virus.

Assuming the experiment worked, the next steps would not be nearly so simple as waiting the required four months or so until the man’s vision simply returned in the treated eye. ChrimsonR is not remotely sufficient to restore the exquisitely complex interplay of rods and cones that give healthy eyes their rich, colorful, three-dimensional view of the world. Rather, it sensitizes cells mostly in the amber spectrum, making shapes and shadows discernible at that color frequency. What’s more, a healthy retina reacts in real time to the amount and intensity of light striking it, becoming more reactive in low-light conditions and less reactive in bright light, to prevent damage to retinal cells. To see at all through the treated eye, the patient needs to wear a pair of goggles that shifts incoming light to the amber spectrum and regulates it to a safe intensity.

“The eye needs a lot of light, but there is the danger that it could be a toxic level,” says Sahel. “Without the goggles it could be like the patient looking directly into the sun.”

While waiting for the ChrimsonR to take effect, members of Sahel’s team worked with the patient, training him with the goggles and running tests to see if he could distinguish objects placed on a table, point to them, count them, and pick them up. Over repeated trials, there were no results—until finally, as Sahel recalls it, he got a call from one of his team members with a simple message: “He sees.”

At right around the four-month mark, the subject began achieving remarkable results on all of the lab tests. And in the months since that breakthrough, he has become able to navigate his world in new ways: he can detect the crosswalk at an intersection and count the number of white stripes demarcating it; perceive objects like a plate, a mug and a phone; spot a piece of furniture in a room and see a door in a corridor. “He can also,” adds Sahel, “detect where people are.”

Sahel believes the results will be long-lasting, or even close to permanent. “We think this could last at least 10 years or it could be for a lifetime,” he says. “If not, we can always go back and re-inject.”

As to whether the treatment is ready for practical application beyond the one patient, Sahel says the answer is “a small yes and a big no.” The small yes is that the work was merely a feasibility study (but by any measure, it succeeded spectacularly). The big no is that a great deal more research must be conducted to learn more about dosing levels, to improve both the goggles and the training patients go through to use them, and to figure out when in the course of a person’s RP is the right time to begin the treatment—Sahel notes that for now, at least the procedure is only for people with very advanced disease. “People with RP can retain central vision for many years,” he says. “You always have to weigh the benefit versus the risk.”