Senses Month: The Science of Sight

Recently the headlines have been awash with stories about how our data are being used or abused by companies. Facebook is currently under fire for sharing up to 87 million users’ data with Cambridge Analytica, which has opened a conversation about personal data and what is and is not acceptable. Georgia Mills spoke to tech guru and angel investor Peter Cowley. First off Georgia asked Peter why our personal data is so valuable to social media companies...

Peter - Well, I’ll give you some figures: last year Facebook actually cost 20 billion dollars to run. Where’s that money coming from? In fact, they made a lot of profit out of that as well. That money is not coming from us as users, it’s coming from advertisers, so the advertisers are paying to put something onto Facebook which we can then consume. The numbers are huge because apparently Facebook’s got over 2 million users and a 100 billion ‘clicks’ per year. It’s only about 50 cents they get for each click but, at the same time, they’ve got to deliver the adverts that the advertiser wants to get to us. On Facebook, although I don’t seem to notice the adverts, 1 in every 5 posts is an advert, unlike on Twitter where it’s 1 in every 10.

Georgia - Right. So where as I might see an add on the train station or something like this, when you’re using our data you can really target it at people who you think might be more likely to buy your product?

Peter - That makes the click or the eyeball worth more.

Georgia - Facebook’s been at the centre of this debate but is it just them storing up lots and lots of personal data?

Peter - Not at all! The data might be different but, of course, Amazon is doing it; they’re suggesting you buy stuff. Google’s definitely doing it with the advertising, Microsoft’s doing it, Apple’s doing it and, on top of that although not in quite the same way, the banks, the Government, the NHS, insurance companies, everybody’s storing data on us.

Georgia - How well do they really know us then?

Peter - They know where we’ve logged in so that they can do some security. If somebody else logs into your Facebook account they’ll tell you etc., or Google, and they know your interests. You can check your preferences where I think we’ve both done. In my case it’s tech, finance, food, films, education but also, for some strange reason, I’m interested in basketball, which I’m clearly not! And, I think we’ll share this, I’m interested in the police; I’m not quite sure why.

Georgia - Yes, that came up on mine too. Facebook has this option where you can go in and see what it thinks you like and that’s how it uses the information to target ads at you. And yes, some of it was pretty straightforward; it knows I like horror films, video games and ukuleles - it know I like them. But it also said I like ‘reality’, which is an interesting one - a bit surreal. Plumbing, simply the word ‘pint’ and the rings of Saturn, which I really enjoyed. I think that might have something to do with my job as a science producer. Oh yeah, and’ play doh’ as well, so I don’t know how it got that idea.

Peter - It was nothing like as specific for me but because my tastes are somewhat different, I suspect. There’s a saying that we are the product of the tech giants, not customers of theirs. The customers are the advertisers and we’re the product, and they’re selling us which actually, if you look at it, is correct. But it’s not just the tech giants who are doing that because pay TV channels are, magazines, newspapers. They're selling the facts and what’s advertised so that’s what's advertised say in the Financial Times would be different from what’s advertised in the Sun, so it’s not just the tech giants doing it. It’s a way of targeting advertising.

Georgia - When this story broke there seemed to be quite a lot of surprise but as someone who works in the tech industry, what would your thoughts; were you surprised by this development?

Peter - I was surprised that Facebook had allowed the data to be harvested in that way. And, in fact, although it’s not quite an apology I don’t think, Zuckerberg did mention that and it has put some new rules in place to hopefully ensure, we’ll wait and see whether it works, that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. I suspect that’s really difficult to police though.

Georgia - There’s questions of overturning democracy and things like that being being thrown around, but on a person level is it necessary a bad thing to have your data used like this?

Peter - It depends how it’s used. It depends on whether you trust the person that’s used and whether the people who are using the data are respecting your data. There will be good things and this as been covered on the programme before, our medical data sufficiently anonymised should end up with us having more specific treatment, or even specific drugs if necessary. Because medical treatment is a statistical chance of something happening based on your age, your sex, your location, etc., so that data will be very powerful.

But there’s a lot of things that could be connected with ‘big brother.’ The one that people talk about is if the insurance company detects you’re going to the doctor more, therefore your health insurance might go up. So yes and no; very specific to the data.

Georgia - What can an individual do about this?

Peter - Well, the extreme is to go completely off the grid so to only the old fashioned feature phones, not to have a smartphone, not to have an email address and everything but modern life doesn’t allow that. How do you buy a plane ticket if you’re completely off grid? The government's putting more and more services online like renewing your car tax.

The next thing is to come of social network of course, and I think a lot of people probably have done that. But there are advantages in doing that as well in terms of keeping in touch. What you should do, definitely, is regularly check your privacy setting on any of these, which you can do, they do allow that. Whether they give enough privacy setting, I don’t know.

There’s a new EU law coming in next month called the General Data Protection Regulations, which is pushing some of this responsibility onto the companies.

Georgia - Do you think the conversation that are being had now will lead to genuine change in the tech industry and in social media groups?

Peter - Absolutely! There are four stakeholders here: the users i.e. us, the advertisers, the platforms like Facebook etc., the regulatory governments, and there’s a lot going on. My crystal ball isn’t good enough to tell you what it’s going to be like in five years time, but there is change happening.

Strokes occur when a part of the brain stops receiving oxygen, due to either a clot or a damaged blood vessel, which causes that area to effectively die. They are one of the leading causes of death in the UK, but even if someone survives a stroke the effects can be severe, they can cause problems in speech, movement and memory, depending on where the ‘hole’ in the brain is. Recovery is a slow process, but now a paper is out in Science that has announced promising results of a drug designed to increase the speed of recovery and this has been tested in both mice and primates. Georgia Mills spoke to Professor Nick Ward, at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and UCL, who was not involved in the study, about why getting better from stroke is so difficult.

Nick - In terms of recovery, the ‘hole’ itself in the brain doesn’t fill in. People don’t recover by generating lots of new brain cells, they recover because the brain has the capacity for what we call ‘plasticity’ so, in other words, reorganising to improve function and that can lead to improvement in the ability of the person to do things that they weren't able to do before.

Georgia - Right, so it’s kind of flexibility?

Nick - Yeah. What we call plasticity, so a change in the structure of the brain that leads to an improvement in function over a period of time.

Georgia - Tell me about this new paper then; what have they done?

Nick - We just mentioned the fact that plasticity is an important idea when we come to think about recovery from stroke. Most of recovery is going to take place because of some kind of behavioural intervention so, in other words, if you have a problem with moving you need to practice the moving, usually with the help of a physiotherapist or an occupational therapist. If you have a problem with communicating you’ll work with a speech language therapist. You usually require hundreds or thousands of hours in order to try and recover.

Now, in heath services around the world, we’re struggling to deliver that kind of dose of therapy and so the idea behind the science of recovery is that it might be possible to somehow improve the potential for plasticity in the brain so that the same amount of therapy is going to have a bigger effect. In this paper they’ve looked at a drug which is changing the potential for plasticity and it does that by increasing ampa receptors. Ampa receptors are important for regulating what we call ‘inhibition’ or ‘excitation’ in the brain. If there was a little bit less inhibition and a bit more excitation, the brain will be more plastic, so for the same amount of training you should have a bigger effect. They use this drug in animal models of stroke to see what the effect was on a rehabilitation training regime.

Georgia - What did they find?

Nick - They were able to speed up the rate of recovery in animals who were treated with the drug. What they did, which is relatively unusual, was that they moved the experiment into primates. Three monkeys didn’t receive the drug and three did, and they found that the improvements in performance on an arm reaching task improved in the treated group. Most of the work that gets done in this field is done in the rodent model, and what they argued was if we’re going to translate it into something that works in humans, then we need a model that’s a bit closer to humans.

In terms of the general approach, in other words using drugs or some kind of intervention that increases the potential for plasticity, I think that it’s important to say that this idea has been around for a long time, you really need to couple training with the drug. The drug by itself, which might change brain state, is not the thing that leads to recovery, it’s training itself, so it might maximise the effects of training.

Georgia - As someone who’s a specialist in this field and a looking at this paper, how hopeful or you or how much significance would you attribute to it?

Nick - I’ve always been hopeful that we’ll be able to take one of the many drugs that have been studied in this field and understand how to use them. But one would temper that enthusiasm with the fact that we haven’t really been able to deliver enough, or a high enough dose of rehabilitation to patients and this applies not just to the UK, but this goes throughout the world generally. The training that you require in order to get better, the rehabilitation training, is really insufficient - we're delivery tiny tiny doses. The worry that we have is that even if you come along with a drug like this, if you maximise the effects of not very much, you still have not very much. So what we really have to fix first is systems that are going to deliver big enough doses of therapy that are going to make a difference to patients.

A part of the back of the eye called the retina is a crucial part of the visual system, it's here that light is converted to the electrical signals which are sent up to the brain. Issues with the retina can have severe consequences, and one such condition involves degeneration of the macula part of the retina, which can lead to the loss of central vision. Now scientists have implanted retinal tissue from stem cells into a small number of patients with age-related macular degeneration, and who’s sight has been restored. Pete Coffey from UCL’s Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital spoke to Katie Haylor. First off Katie asked Pete to explain what the retina actually is...

Pete - We call it the neural retina, which is at the back of the eye which is a multilayered, thin piece of tissue, which, essentially, contains the light-sensitive cells plus the connecting cells which then take that information to the brain.

Katie - What are these light-sensitive cells?

Pete - The rods and cones. The rods deal with what’s called scotopic vision which is night vision, low level vision, and the cones deal with bright, colour vision. As Kez said, there’s an area in the retina which accounts for 10% of the whole of the back of the eye, which the macular region. It’s about 6mm in diameter and that contains the high contrast, the colour vision, the cone receptors which allow us to read, drive, recognise faces.

Katie - Once light hits the retina it gets converted into electrical signals which shoot on up the optic nerve. How does that conversion process happen?

Pete - There’s a number of events which occur. The light sensitive component, the cones, actually have packets of chemicals at the tips of those cells, which we call outer segments which contain the chemicals, the aldehydes which use chemical processes to convert light into electrical activity. That activation is then linked to the cell which then takes it into the brain via one more cell, which is called the bipolar and then its connection to the ganglion cell which takes that information and presents it to the rest of the brain.

Katie - We mentioned age-related macular degeneration; it’s one example of what can go wrong with the retina, so what exactly is it and who gets it.

Pete - People over the age of 65, and it’s the layer of cells which give nutrients to the seeing part of the eye, the neural retina, that die. There’s about 30% of people over the age of 65/70 will have some form of age-related macular degeneration. There are two forms: dry and wet. The distinction is the wet form is due to blood that appears at the back of the eye as well, which is rapid. That is the only treatable form of the disease, but that only counts for 10% of the clinical population - 90% is untreatable. There’s checks on whether you smoke; smoking can increase the rate of the disease. There’s some nutrients which can be given but, basically, the only form which is treatable is the wet form.

Katie - Tell us about your work on treating AMD, because this involves stem cells, doesn’t it?

Pete - It does. In age-related macular degeneration those cells which support the seeing part, the neural retina, die. There’s a number of reasons why that occurs but, effectively, because those cells die the seeing part of the eye no longer has the nutrients, etc. and therefore, over time, it itself dies. What we’ve engineered is making those eye cells, those support cells which are called retinal pigment epithelium, and we put them back in exactly the same format as they are at the back of the eye. So they’re in a single layer, on a carpet of cells, which we’ve surgically then implanted into the back of the eyes of those patients, and they’ve been there now for nearly 2½ years.

Katie - That does not sound like an easy process, so what was involved in creating these cells from these stem cells?

Pete - Actually, it is an easy process. I get very embarrassed about that particular position, because most people who are trying to make a specific cell from a stem cell have gone through a very difficult process, so people who are trying to make cells for Parkinson’s disease, or heart cells, or liver cells. Literally, all we have to do is take one component out of the fluid in which we keep cells and that’s just one component. It’s called basic fibroblast growth factor and then the cells spontaneously make the eye cells that we want.

Katie - Oh brilliant!

Pete - So actually it’s quite easy. Anyone could do it so to speak. Although it did take us a bit of time to realise that!

Katie - How many people did you put these cells into?

Pete - We’ve only put them in two patients but there’s been a lot of preclinical work to make sure that if we put those cells back, we are going to see a difference. They’re reading again, which wasn’t possible. They couldn’t even see the book before we did the operation.

Katie - Lastly, what could this mean for AMD sufferers in the future? Do you think this could be cost-effective enough to use in thousands of people in the future?

Pete - Yeah. There’s 700,000 patients who suffer from AMD. Not all of those would be treatable with this particular therapeutic, but a good 10% of them could be. I mean, that’s till a big number, you know, that’s 70,000 patients. We believe that we can produce enough of these patches to treat that type of a clinical population and the cost would be a huge saving to the NHS, and not maintaining people but actually giving them some sight back. This is probably one of the first studies which has actually shown that regeneration, in terms of stem cell regenerative medicine, is feasible and does have some efficacy.

Most of us, hopefully, have two eyes. But way back in our evolutionary past we may have had even more. Now some reptiles still have this third eye, it’s called the pineal organ, and is a dot on the top of the head that responds to light. Now, scientists have found an extinct lizard with a fourth eye, something that hasn’t been seen in a land dwelling animal before. So what is this eye, and what does it change about our understanding of eye evolution? Georgia Mills spoke to paleontologist Krister Smith from Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany...

Krister - This lizard belongs to a lineage which entered North America about 56 million years ago, and went extinct there around 34 million years ago. It was a monitor lizard; it would have been active, intelligent, and carnivorous, and well over one metre long. And what greatly surprised us is that it appears to have four eyes rather than the usual three.

Georgia - When you say eyes, I picture a normal human eye. I’m guessing they’re not like that so what were they like, and what did they do?

Krister - They would have appeared to us rather different than out lateral eyes, but in another sense they are, anatomically speaking, well-developed eyes. Your lateral eyes are, in fact, part of your brain and the same here applies to the pineal organs. They are outgrowth of the same part of the brain and, in lizards at least, they acquire a ball-like shape with a lens-like layer, and a cornea, and a retina-like like layer and, in that sense, they are eyes. They also perceive light and they’re indicated on the top of the head by a pale spot, which allows the skin to transmit light to the eye.

Georgia - What about this fourth eye, does that exist in anything around today?

Krister - There is, in fact, only one small group of vertebrates today which have four eyes, and those are the lampreys. They’re jawless fish, so they’re fairly distantly related to us or to any of the bony fish that we’re familiar with, or even to sharks. But, like the lizards, their additional eyes are indicated on the top of the head by a pale spot.

Georgia - Do we know what it’s for?

Krister - It’s a remarkable thing that after some 150 years of study, there’s still a great deal to be learned about the functions of the pineal organs in organisms outside of mammals. They have a number of functions just like in mammals. They tend to help regulate the daily cycles, but in lower vertebrates where the pineal organs form additional eyes, they have other functions as well. There is evidence that they are able to use short wavelength light, in particular the polarisation of short wavelength blue light coming from the sky to orient themselves geographically.

Georgia - This sounds really really useful. Why don’t I still have this pineal eye on top of my head?

Krister - One thing that we know is that an additional eye on the top of the head regressed inside the skull like it is in mammals today. In a great number of lineages independently, just thinking about the land vertebrates, it’s gone as a third eye in many amphibians, in mammals, in turtles, crocodiles, bird; it’s gone, and we don’t really know why.

Georgia - Right. We knew about this third eye before, but you’ve found that the fourth eye was in reptiles, which we didn’t expect. What was the evidence for it; how do you know this was indeed the fourth eye you’re looking at?

Krister - We compared the typical third eye with this new hole that we found, that is ultimately what lead us to our study in this particular part of the brain. We had not just a single hole on the top of the head but rather two holes, which is very unusual, and the first thing that we did, of course, was to examine other specimens to make sure that it’s not simply some strange malformation in a single specimen and, in fact, it does occur in others as well. It seems to have appeared somewhere between 52 and 49 million years ago, and there’s a limited number of structures in that part of the head that could possibly account for this extra hole. So we examined them and came to the conclusion that the pineal organ was really the only explanation.

Georgia - What does your finding tell us about these organs evolved?

Krister - There’s much more dynamism in the evolution of these organs than we have previously given them credit for. We used to think that it was a very simple story: we have a pineal eye and it regresses into the brain in many lineages in parallel; however, we can now say that it’s much more complicated than that. The third eye in lizards is not the same as the third eye in other vertebrates and this leads us to to another point: if in lizards, the parapineal took the place of the pineal, then we have no idea when this happened. Every living member of land vertebrates, we know that our ancestors, the ancestors of mammals had a third eye, but we don’t know which organ it was.