In 2015 the band X Ambassadors released a music video for their song, "Renegades" that features people with physical challenges doing extraordinary things. This really touched a chord, because it is what I hope for all of my patients. We made a video for a contest X Ambassadors ran on Twitter, and although we never actually entered the contest we were able to show it to the band when they played in Des Moines, Iowa. Casey Harris, the band's keyboard player, is blind from Senior Loken syndrome, a type of Leber Congenital Amaurosis which afflicts a number of our patients and is one of the disorders we do research on. Below you can watch this video, which is our homage to their original (you can see the original, too, via the link we provide). In our video two brothers, Reece and Ryder, who both have LCA, get a tour through our laboratories where DNA is extracted and amplified by the polymerase chain reaction for diagnosis and study, to our GMP facility in which everyone must wear a sterile "bunny suit" and travel through airlocks into the rooms where human grade gene therapy vectors and stem cells are made, to the many scientists, students, clinicians and basic science researchers going through their day, pledging to do all we can for Reece, Ryder, and everyone else who deals with genetic vision loss.
Virtual tour of our lab.
Link to the Renegades youtube video X Ambassadors: Renegades