Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn’t mince words: It is fantastic technology and a lousy company
, he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. She said, Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off
, he remembers. She said, By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.
These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.
Abandoning the Argus II technology—and the people who use it—might have made short-term financial sense for Second Sight, but it’s a decision that could come back to bite the merged company if it does decide to commercialize a brain implant, believes Doerr.
Who’s going to swallow their marketing for the Orion?
he says. Doerr is glad he has Second Sight’s technology in his retina instead of his brain tissue. If it has to come out, it’s going to be bothersome
, he says, [but] nobody is messing with my brain.
Eliza Strickland & Mark HarrisExciting that technology to partially restore vision to blind people is in development and slowly becoming mainstream. The article exposes quite well the downsides of relying solely on private companies in this field: despite innovating and delivering a product with clear benefits to its customers, the small market size and high costs can make the business side unsustainable. Similar questions apply to other startups, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink; if at some point in the future Musk loses interest or lacks funding to continue research, what happens to the enthusiasts who might have gotten their skull drilled for one of his implants?
I think in this case it would be better to have a public-private partnership, with governments partially subsidizing the costs in exchange for joint ownership of the resulting patents (assuming it’s possible, I’m not that familiar with their convoluted rules). That way, in case the company goes bankrupt, or simply pivots to other fields, the government can continue supporting the patients or contract a different private company for replacement parts or software upgrades.
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