"When I talked to people about it, they said it couldn't be done..."
Dr. Patricia Bath
In nearly all circumstances, pointing a laser at your eye is a bad thing, but if you have cataracts it may just restore your sight. Cataracts are a leading cause of blindness. The disorder occurs when the part of the eye that focuses light—known, not surprisingly, as the lens—turns cloudy. This is a process that occurs in almost all of us if we live long enough. Unfortunately, currently there is no viable way to make a cloudy lens transparent again, and so ophthalmologists are forced to resort to other means to alleviate the problem.
The current method of dealing with a cataract is to remove the lens of the eye. One problem is that taking out the lens in its entirety requires a rather large incision into the eye in order to remove it. Ophthalmologists have long felt that it was more appropriate to find a method to break up the lens, which allows them to remove it through a smaller incision. This process, known as emulsification of the lens, was at one time done simply by grinding up the lens, but this method was subsequently replaced by a tool that transmits ultrasonic waves and uses sound energy to break up the lens. The resulting fragments are then vacuum-extracted from the eye.
All this may change with a tool invented by Dr. Patricia Bath (b. 1942). Dr. Bath postulated that lasers could be used to emulsify the lens of the eye as well, and she developed a model for a laser instrument to be used in removing cataracts. She received a patent for her invention in 1988. After much trial and error it turns out that Dr. Bath is correct, and her system may yet benefit cataract patients everywhere.
