ABSTRACT
The phone call came in one May morning. My high school friend, pediatric ophthalmologist Dr. Irene Ludwig, was calling from the roadside in Tennessee. She had just returned from ophthalmology meetings where her colleague, also an ophthalmologist, Dr. Alan Chow, had stunned the ophthalmologic community with the invention of a silicone chip implant that brought back sight to those patients who were totally blind from retinitis pigmentosa. Irene had been keeping me posted on Dr. Chow’s research for about a decade, but all along it was too early to tell whether it would be of any help to me. Though the work was elegant and sophisticated, so much had to happen before it could even be tested in humans. However, this year the trials to evaluate its safety in humans showed it not only to be safe but that it also had tremendous ability to bring back sight in some individuals. She told me that patients may only be about five years away from such an operation and even suggested that I might be aggressive about entering the experimental trials.
