Medicine: Bright Vision of the Future

A cure for myopia, lasers for cataracts, bifocal contact lenses

In his 1973 film Sleeper, Woody Allen awakens from a deep-freeze snooze and finds himself in the 22nd century, surrounded by doctors. Peering through his glasses, Allen locks eyes with a doctor who is similarly bespectacled. Svyatoslav Fyodorov, an eminent Soviet eye surgeon, saw the film while visiting New York, and was disturbed by this myopic vision of the future: "It's not logical, I thought. So I wondered how we could avoid wearing glasses." That concern led Fyodorov to develop a radical new treatment...

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