Before Misty’s mom passed away, shortly after her eye surgery, mother and daughter shared a special time.

RPE65 is crucial for the visual cycle in mammals. When light hits sensitive pigments in the retina, it launches a series of reactions that make sight possible. Everyone has brief moments when this process falters—for instance, after the eye is overwhelmed by a camera flash. In healthy eyes, these moments are fleeting. But people who have two defective copies of RPE65 don’t react to light properly. Over time, the light-sensing cells—the rods and cones—die off, causing their vision to disappear.

Diagnosis: LCA-RPE65

Video contains multiple chloroform KOs, muliple gas KOs, multiple electric KOs, butt spankings, limp play, and an over-the-shoulder carries. Video contains male/female fighting, multiple chloroform KOs, injection KO, multiple sleeping gas KO, multiple electric KOs, gas mask KO, over the shoulder carry, butt spankings, and limp play.

Creed was Berrocal's first Luxturna patient. As a pediatric retina specialist, Berrocal said Spark sought her out in the fall of 2017. To date, she's performed a dozen surgeries, all of which have yielded positive results. It's still almost like a new kid every day, like a new baby that sees something new," his mother said. A sky-high price tag The couple accomplished all this while raising three children, now grown. Their house is still decorated with the kids’ art, along with Ma-guire’s paintings of cows. Their oldest child, Sarah Maguire, is 32 and a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins, where she’s tweaking the genes of mosquitoes to make them dislike the smell of humans. She recalls a fairly normal childhood, despite having “really quirky” parents. “My dad would come home and start dancing with the dogs like Pee-wee Herman,” she says. When she brought insect research home on a visit last year, Bennett eagerly equipped a bathroom with a humidifier and heater to keep the bugs alive. By 2007, it was time to try the procedure on people. The medical community was still reeling from the 1999 death of teenager Jesse Gelsinger in an unrelated gene therapy study at Penn. Starting this new research was risky. But Gelsinger had been treated for a metabolic liver disease, and the eye had certain advantages: It was easy to access, and only a small area of tissue, not the entire organ, needed to receive the gene. Plus, doctors could try the therapy in one eye before moving on to the second. (They didn’t expect an issue with patients making antibodies to the virus, since eyes are largely shielded from the body’s immune response.) Dr. Robert A. Sisk of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center did find the right problem and he sent a sample of Misty’s blood off to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was genetically diagnosed with LCA-RPE65.Running out from the house, Misty’s mom thought chlorine had gotten in her daughter’s eyes, while Misty initially felt angry, a little betrayed, that the stars in the sky didn’t look at all like the five-pointed ones she’d seen in drawings. Babbage never received enough funding to complete the Analytical Engine, and Lovelace’s notes were forgotten. But in 1953, her notes were republished in a book about digital computing that showed how computers work by following patterns. It turns out that long before the first computer was invented, Lovelace had come up with the idea for a computer language.