Resculpt Your Eyeballs

Our colleague and NHPR webmaster Brady Carlson is a regular online gumshoe, guiding us to fascinating finds online. Today: a new advance in eye surgery – tailor-made corneas.

It’s the latest milestone in our drive toward customizable everything – eyesight specifically designed for the individual patient’s life and career. If you’re an office worker, you might want better vision for staring at a computer screen. If you’re a sniper, you’ll want the eyes of a hawk. And if you’re a truck driver or fighter pilot, long-distance night vision would certainly be helpful.

New York eye surgeon Stephen Trokel recently operated on a leading soprano, who requested that her eyesight be corrected so that she could see the front row of the orchestra and read the music, and a catcher for the New York Yankees "whose vision was terrible and who needed to be able to see a ball coming out of the light at night."

Suprisingly, one surgeon says several U.S. presidential candidates have requested an alteration called "monovision": one eye designed for distance vision, the other for reading. I guess that beats squinting at the teleprompter.

The Times: Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual’s life and career

(Photo by DownTown Pictures via Flickr/Creative Commons)