A personal post today… I’m color blind, and admitting to that often results in people asking how a color blind person can be a “science visualizer” or (as is the case now) a “director of science visualization.” My reply usually has to do with experiencing the subjectivity of seeing early on and blah, blah, blah. I won’t subject you to that right now.

Instead I simply want to quote a couple of sentences from an interview with Arno Motulsky that appears in today’s Science Times: “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.”

Ha! So there, you “color seeing” people! You “normal color vision” types! You don’t see an absolute “red” any more than I do.

(Thanks, BTW, to Declan McCullagh, who doesn’t know I cribbed his image above. I need to write and ask him for permission…)