A breakthrough in medicine is giving eyesight to the blind.

Scientists used cutting-edge therapy to treat six young blind people.

Doctors used a needle the width of two eyelashes to put a virus in the back of the patients' eye.

The virus carried a healthy copy of the defective gene, which they hoped would heal the diseased cells.

So far the results are promising.

Once-blind subjects successfully navigated a mobility course and could see more letters on an eye chart after the surgery.

The results from the two landmark studies are in Monday’s New England Journal of Medicine