Seeing Red

[rinue]

"One project I’m very excited about relates to human color vision. About 8 percent of males have inherited red-green color blindness. This is caused by hereditary abnormalities in color sensitive pigments of the retinal cones in the back of the eyes, which are actually part of the brain. Our laboratory found that one-half of males with normal color vision had the amino acid alanine in their red pigment, while the other half all carried the amino acid serine, at the same site. This finding means that the same exact red color is perceived as a different type of red, depending on a person’s genetic makeup."

-Arno Motulsky, geneticist, in an interview with the New York Times