When Professor Brendan Vote couldn't get a haircut during the height of COVID-19 restrictions, he was looking for a silver lining.
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Instead he found a blue one, deciding to dye and then shave his longer locks in support of making Australia's first dedicated ophthalmic gene therapy centre a Tasmanian reality.
The centre is the vision of the Tasmanian Eye Institute, which is raising funds to help build a multi-million dollar facility in Hobart.
Led by Professor Alex Hewitt, a world expert in genetic eye research, its aim is to find a cure for blindness using state of the art technology known as CRISPR.
The US researchers behind CRISPR - a tool used to detect and remove bad DNA from viruses - were recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Professor Vote, one of the directors of the Tasmanian Eye Institute and a colleague of Professor Hewitt, said in the right hands CRISPR could be used to save lives.
"Overall, if you collect genetics collectively, that probably accounts for the greatest cause for irreversible blindness," he said.
"The technology Alex will be using - it's a very precise way of editing bad genes, and then replacing them with good genes.
"Alex is a world expert in that space ... and this technology is all about helping the next generation."
Professor Vote has broken his fundraising journey into stages, which started with bleaching his hair when he reached $10,000.
On Wednesday he celebrated the milestone of raising $25,000 by dying his hair blue. When he reaches $50,000 he will shave it all off.
"I guess what I will look like for the immediate future depends on how quickly we can raise the money," he said. "When I bleached it I quickly started getting called Dr Emmett, or Malfoy."
With one in six people expected to develop a genetic eye disease in their lifetime, Professor Vote said it was an important cause he was proud to support - no matter what he looked like.
"For me it's about raising money and awareness for genetic eye disease. Because most of us would know someone who is impacted by it," he said.
"This will be a first for Australia - so that's important - but it's also a big deal to have something like this in Tassie.
"I think we need to be looking to attract people back to Tasmania for the future - it's always hard to get doctors here. And if we can cure blindness in the meantime, it's a win-win."
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