Listen. I have perfect vision.
Humble brag. I know. Is it going to last forever? I sure hope so. But genes and probability tell me otherwise.
What struck me recently is how many people have poor vision. I realized it at a work dinner a couple months ago. Apparently I'm the outlier in the group. Everyone either has contacts or glasses. And no, Tommy, I'm not talking about the blue-light glasses you used to wear out to the bars in college because "girls like it." We're talkin' prescriptions, baby.
But the difference between needing your iPhone flashlight to read the menu at dinner — you know who you are — and having no vision at all is like the difference between a Toyota Prius and a Porsche 911. Same family — cars — but they couldn’t be farther apart.
Globally, at least 2.2 billion people are walking around with some kind of vision impairment. The Toyota Prius. But more than 5 million of them have geographic atrophy (GA), caused by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which more than 200 million people have worldwide. The Porsche 911.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with contacts or minor surgery. This is an issue where the center of your vision dies, and the edges keep working. You’ll get the idea below.
Source - Malik Eye Care
Enter Science Corporation. A company giving autonomy back to those who had lost it. And last Wednesday, European regulators cleared them to start selling a chip that goes behind your retina.
Okay but how
Science’s device is called PRIMA, which comes in two parts: one that goes inside your eye and the other on your face.
Part 1 — a 2×2 mm chip that's half the thickness of a human hair, implanted in the back of the eye. Specifically, the dead zone area of the eye. The chip is layered with pixels that are, quite literally, tiny solar cells. Those cells convert light into electricity. And that electricity is the signal the brain needs for vision.
We've now covered (a) Reflect Orbital, beaming light to Earth for a slew of use cases, (b) Exowatt, using sunlight to heat bricks for stored energy, and (c) Starcloud, sending data centers to space to capture sunlight. Now we've got a company using that same light to power & restore your vision. What a time to be alive.
Part 2 — a pair of glasses with a camera hanging off the side. The camera runs constantly — like your boy who keeps you on edge by wearing his Ray Ban Meta glasses everywhere — and projects what it sees onto the chip as near-infrared light. The chip converts that projection into electrical pulses, which stimulate the retinal cells and fire down the optic nerve.
Your peripheral vision remains as is. Still as clear as you're seeing now. But the PRIMA fills in the middle.
Not too bad of a system considering the alternative — not being able to see.
The guy who started it
Max Hodak. Once again, just your run-of-the-mill guy.
Programming at five or six. Working full-time in California while attending Duke for school and research. Wait, what? Surely I got the series of events wrong here, right? How can someone attend college in NC and work full-time in California? Well, you average 128,550 miles flown a year for two years for your commute. Anything to say, Zach?
After graduating in 2012, Max started Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory, and ran it for five years. Then in 2016 he helped start Neuralink, arguably the most famous brain-computer interface company on earth, with Elon and seven others. He was president from day one through early 2021.
Then he left. That April, he started Science.
And if you want to know what kind of person we're dealing with here, his personal site describes him as "a general intelligence living in San Francisco." Might have to give that intro a whirl sometime. He'll also tell you one of the essential goals of our generation is to understand the physics of consciousness and engineer experience directly, and that he's looking forward to "a world more bits than atoms."
Cool. Normal Sunday reading.
Max and his team are builders, innovators, and scientists pushing the boundaries of neurotech. He’s been focused on it his entire adult life. Research while an undergraduate at Duke, Neuralink, and now Science.
Restoring sight has to be one of the hardest problems in medicine. But Max seems like exactly the guy to take the hardest problems in medicine head-on. Their actual goal? To "restore and extend life by transcending the limits of biology." Yep, count me in.
The honest take
Restoring vision is (a) hard and (b) expensive. Before PRIMA, four other retinal implants had been approved in Europe, from three companies. All three are gone. Dissolved, liquidated, closed shop. Did they fail because of bad science? No. They ran out of money.
The PRIMA tech is early too. Black and white, dots, and a ramp-up period to learn how to use it. But let's be clear — early isn't bad. It's necessary.
Of the 32 patients who made it a full year in the PRIMA clinical study, 26 showed meaningful improvement in their vision. One of them completed a 300-page book and mailed it to the team. Readers are leaders, as my mom would say. Not too shabby for a 2×2 chip.
And technology advances. Remember the portable CD player? Bulky to carry around. Capped at the 15 songs on the album. 25 years later, every song ever recorded fits in my pocket (though Bob Seger’s music is all I need right now).
And unlike many companies of the past, this time there's money. Science closed a $230M Series C in March to commercialize PRIMA, putting them near half a billion in total funding. Nobody in the graveyard of prior companies was funded close to that.
No doubt, the tech will get better. Whether Science is still around in twenty years to service the chip under your retina — that's the big question.
If they pull this off
Vision for those losing it. Not slowing it down. Restoring it.
And that's one third of the plan. Science describes what they're building as devices to restore vision, cognition, and mobility. Vision is just the first on the list.
And not only are they building in-house devices to combat the above, but they're selling their components and infrastructure to other neurotech companies, under their Science Foundry program. So some of what they build may end up in devices that aren't theirs. They're not just building the devices; they're building the supply chain underneath everyone else's.
Which means if this works, Science isn't just the company that restored sight for people. They're the company everyone else in neurotech is buying parts from. That's a much bigger platform than a chip in your eye.
Want to work out there?
Science is hiring — Alameda, CA, a chip foundry in Durham, NC, and a clinical office in Paris.
Fair warning on the application. For some of their core roles, they've introduced a new interview process. Including a take-home problem plus a statement explaining why you're an outlier. Suggested examples? Winning the Math Olympiad, Formula SAE, the Drone Racing League, or running a successful company.
Not your run-of-the-mill process. But then again, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill company.
Open roles — science.xyz
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