The technology behind LASIK eye surgery was not developed by an eye doctor. It came out of a chemistry lab that made computer chips.
Rangaswamy Srinivasan studied how ultraviolet light acts on organic materials at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, work tied to the polymers used to etch circuits onto silicon. When ultraviolet excimer lasers became commercially available in 1980, Srinivasan and colleagues James Wynne and Samuel Blum began wondering whether the same beam could cut living tissue without burning it.
They needed something to test on. Hamburger from the cafeteria was too rough to read under a microscope. They talked about butterfly wings and goldfish tails.
Then Srinivasan looked down at his Thanksgiving dinner.
On Nov. 27, 1981, he carried a leftover turkey leg into the lab and fired ten-nanosecond pulses of ultraviolet light at the cartilage. The cut was clean. Wynne ran the control, hitting the same tissue with green laser light from a different laser, and got a charred crater.
That contrast was the discovery. The ultraviolet beam broke molecular bonds instead of cooking the tissue around them, leaving no heat damage at the edges — precise enough, it turned out, to reshape a human cornea. IBM filed a patent application in December 1982 and Srinivasan presented the work publicly at a laser conference in Baltimore in May 1983.
Two ophthalmologists, Stephen Trokel and Francis L'Esperance, were on the program at the same meeting.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
