Addison man seeks ‘artificial vision’ Ex-lobsterman’s nonprofit foundation raises funds for new blindness research

ADDISON – Phillip Farren Sr. knows he can’t replace his eyes, but he hopes that he and some of Maine’s 18,000 other blind people can regain their sight.

Last June, Farren created the Gift of Sight Foundation, a nonprofit organization to raise money for medical research to prevent or reverse blindness.

Now, the 63-year-old former lobsterman is learning everything he can about “artificial vision” by contacting researchers around the country, including eye centers in Boston and Utah.

Farren has been visually impaired since 1977, when he lost an eye to infection. He has been totally blind since March 1988, when his second eye was removed after he developed a life-threatening infection after a cornea transplant.

“Here’s a gentleman with no eyes, but he still has vision centers in his brain,” said Dr. William Bromley, a retired ophthalmologist who is a longtime friend of Farren’s and a member of the foundation’s board.

The question to which artificial-vision researchers seek an answer is whether there are ways to produce some sort of visual phenomenon in brain vision centers, Bromley said.

Medical science is already using cochlear implants with the deaf as a way to stimulate the auditory centers in the brain, he said.

“Phillip has been searching all avenues, not only for himself, but for others,” Bromley said. “Not only is he working with his foundation and those contributors, but he is also exploring ways that he can help or contribute.”

The Gift of Sight Foundation raised $5,000 from walkathons in Addison and Ellsworth last summer and fall, and some of that money has gone to support Bromley’s own research into open-angle glaucoma, the most common form of glaucoma.

Bromley said the disease is prevalent among blacks. In that population, the disease tends to begin at an earlier age and is more severe and more difficult to treat, he said.

He became acutely aware of the problem of blinding glaucoma in the African population and the common familial association of the disease during a volunteer mission to that continent in 1977, he said.

While in Africa, he met Ebenezer K. Obeng-Nyarkoh, who was an administrator of a general ophthalmology clinic in Ghana, he said.

Working with Obeng-Nyarkoh – who is pursuing a degree in international affairs at the University of Maine – Bromley has returned to Ghana twice to collect blood samples for DNA analysis as part of a research project with the nonprofit Center for Human Genetics in Bar Harbor.

Bromley’s latest trip in January was very successful, he said, because he and Obeng-Nyarkoh were able to gather the additional samples they needed.

The material has been sent to the University of Michigan’s Kellogg Eye Center in Ann Arbor for analysis. The Kellogg Center and the Center for Human Genetics are partners in the project.

“We’re hoping they will be able to find genetic clues relating to this blinding disease,” Bromley said Monday.

Meanwhile, Farren is continuing his own research and preparing for the next Gift of Sight Foundation fund-raiser.

On March 9, the foundation will sponsor a Pee Wee basketball tournament for boys and girls teams from Beals, Jonesport, Jonesboro and Addison. The event at the Daniel C. Merritt School in Addison begins at 9 a.m. and admission is $2 a person.