Mary Ann Franco, now 70 years old, lost here eyesight in 1995 when a car accident damaged her spine. More than two decades after the initial injury, she fell in her home and injured her neck, sending her to the hospital once again to seek treatment for pain in her arm and back. After doctors decided to perform surgery on her back to alleviate her pain, they happened to cure her blindness. It is suspected that her first injury caused a lack of blood flow to the brain that controls eyesight, and this operation restored it. Interestingly, Franco has been colour blind since birth, but the operation seems to have fixed that problem, too.

The spinal cords running down our spines carry a bundle of nerve tissue and other cells from the base of the b ...