Re: Color blindness

From: KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 01:47:26 MDT


It appears as if David Lubkin <lubkin@unreasonable.com> wrote:
|
|On the island of Pingelap, 12% of the population is totally color-blind.
|They make excellent night fishermen, but they are not considered suitable
|mates by non-achromats. They can't read normal-sized print, or even
|reliably pick berries.

<AHA>
Would total colour blindness imply totally non-functional cones in the eye?
</AHA>

So it seems. A PudMed (MEDLINE) search found:

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Complete achromatopsia is a rare, autosomal recessive disorder
characterized by photophobia, low visual acuity, nystagmus
and a total inability to distinguish colours. In this disease, cone
photoreceptors, the retinal sensory neurons mediating colour
vision, seem viable but fail to generate an electrical response to
light.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

"Genetic basis of total colourblindness among the Pingelapese islanders."
Sundin OH, Yang JM, Li Y, Zhu D, Hurd JN, Mitchell TN, Silva ED, Maumenee IH

<URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10888875&dopt=Abstract>



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