Donald McPherson, Ph.D., Chief Scientist of EnChroma, talks about a pair of glasses that can help the colorblind better see colors.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in September 2016.
Tell us a little bit about how the EnChroma glasses came to be.
Donald McPherson: I’m an aficionado of ultimate Frisbee and in about the mid-nineties I was playing at a tournament in Santa Cruz, California and I was wearing a pair of glasses I made for laser surgery. When I say made them I actually designed the glass melted it and had them ground in to lenses. It came to my attention that the surgeons were stealing the glasses and using them as sunglasses. I was like I should try that and I loved them. One of the things that I noticed immediately is they made the world very vibrant. It saturated certain colors. My friend borrowed my glasses and I didn’t know it but he was color blind and he said something to the effect of; oh my God I can see the cones. He was referring to the bright florescent orange marker cones that define the playing field. I was like, what are you talking about? He said, I’m color blind. Being curious and a scientist I started thinking about it and I did about six months of research and realized there was something to it. I wrote some grants to the National Institute of Health and got funded and we did clinical studies at UC Berkley and UC Davis and then had follow on studies. That’s how it all started was just something happening and me being curious about it. Probably for the first five years I was kind of pinching myself, is this real? Because I couldn’t really get my mind around how it worked but I now know that it’s real and it works.
What is your reaction when you see the impact it’s making on people’s lives?
Dr. McPherson: Well there’s been this overwhelming response of people who are wearing the glasses, I guess you could call them testimonials, that have been online and people are just having the most phenomenal experiences. I have been very proud and excited to see so many people step forward and present how they feel about the glasses. Because you know color is such a huge part of our lives and for people who have normal color vision they don’t really think about it. It’s a huge part of someone’s life if they don’t have it and then they see it, so it’s been wonderful for me just to see something that I was instrumental in developing turn in to such a powerful tool for people.
How does it work?
Donald McPherson: Okay to explain how the glasses work I have to do a little bit of explanation of how normal color vision works and then what’s abnormal in the color deficient eye. The way it works is that you imagine just like a camera or a TV there are three primaries that are sensitive to blue, green and red light. Well in our eyes we have these structures, there are photo pigments but people call them cones that are sensitive to blue, red and green light. Now the way that information is taken and processed is interesting. To figure out how bright something is it just takes a signal from the three and add them together. Now to figure out how whether something is blue or yellow it subtracts the difference between the blue and the green plus red signal. That’s normal in everybody. Now for the red to determine how red or green something is it subtracts the difference between the signal to the red cone and the signal to the green cone. That’s how you get that initial information and at the neural level it’s processed through mechanisms, which basically is a very fast way to analyze the color. That’s for a normal person. Now somebody that’s color deficient the only thing that’s different is all the wiring is correct, all the neural mechanisms are correct, is that one of the photo pigments, the red one or the green one, instead of being here and here are like that. They’re overlapped. Now when you do the math you say red minus green you don’t get the right number. In fact what you end up with typically is everything from green to red appears kind of muddy. Khaki, brown, tan, pale green, washed out gray in some cases. The glasses work by going in and selectively carving out, filtering out some of the spectrum where that overlap is occurring; effectively pushing the responses of the two photo pigments back away from each other again. Here’s normal, here’s the color deficient, our filter comes in and moves it back in to more of a normal position. Now you’re sending in more accurate information to the brain and those neural mechanisms which have been dormant their entire life are suddenly activated. It’s like, oh that signal is the red strawberry and that signal is the strawberry leaf. It can make that call more accurately whereas before it was just one color
Is there anything that I haven’t asked that you think should be part of the story?
Donald McPherson: After working in this field for a number of years I’ve come to the conclusion that the area that needs the most emphasis and would help society the greatest is if we could get awareness that students, children, boys and girls in school who are color deficient need some sort of an assistance and the glasses can help them. We also know that there is some neural plasticity so the earlier you get it into use at a primary school level the greater chances are that the person will adapt to and understand this new color information. A huge amount of information is color coded and students who are color deficient don’t volunteer that information. They just suffer, they don’t follow the instructions, they don’t have the full reward of a teacher and the information that’s being given and they just stay silent. In fact it can be so severe that some students are classified as having a learning disability and put in to special classes and they’re just color deficient. I believe this is the focus and what we need to do, not just from EnChroma but there needs to be a wider awareness that this is happening and it’s addressable. If the country is claiming that it’s going to be the best and promote the best and the brightest students we have to not ignore the eight percent of boys and a half a percent of women who are color blind. They have to be given the opportunity to have a learning experience just like everybody else.
That’s an area where EnChroma is going to push a little harder?
Donald McPherson: Yes it is. To that end I have developed a contact lens version of the eyewear. For the indoor product it’s very mild, you can think of it as like braces for the teeth. It doesn’t have as much punch as the outdoor product but it’s subtle and it does work. If you have dark eyes and you’re wearing these contact lenses no one would even know that you had anything on. It wouldn’t be this stigmatization like you’re wearing glasses all day in class. I think that’s the way to address it.
Does that go to clinical trials next or how does that work?
Donald McPherson: Because contact lenses are in contact with the body, hence the name, they go through a much more rigorous and extensive approval process through the FDA. We have to get a finished product and start testing on that.
END OF INTERVIEW
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