Jay Neitz

Jay Neitz
Residence	Seattle, Washington
Nationality	American
Fields	Color Vision Neuroscience Molecular Genetics Psychology Psychophysics
Institutions	University of Washington Medical College of Wisconsin
Alma mater	University of California, Santa Barbara

Jay Neitz is professor of ophthalmology and a color vision researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in the United States.

According to Jay Neitz, each of the three standard color-detecting cone cells in the retina – blue, green and red—can pick up about 100 different gradations of color. But, he says, the brain can combine those variations exponentially, multiplying each new variety of cone by 100, so that the average human trichromat can distinguish about one million different hues.

This means that a monochromat can see 100 different colors, a dichromat can see 10,000 different colors, a trichromat can see 1,000,000 different colors, a tetrachromat can see 100,000,000 different colors, and a pentachromat can see 10,000,000,000 different colors.

Neitz and his wife, Maureen Neitz, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington began training in 1999 two dichromatic squirrel monkeys. After five months of gene therapy treatment, the monkeys began to acquire trichromatic color vision. They say this almost seemed to suddenly occur overnight. After that, they spent a year and a half to test the monkeys' ability to discern 16 hues.

According to Gerald H. Jacobs, Ph.D., a research professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research, this means that color blindness can be cured. "This is also another example of how utterly plastic the visual system is to change," Jacobs said. "The nervous system can extract information from alterations to photopigments and make use of it almost instantaneously."

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