It is time to innovate. Dr. Koplin urged the class to look into ophthalmology as an example. The human eye is like a camera. The lens is the camera, and retina is the film. At some point in time, the lens will become cloudy. When this obscures vision, it is referred to as a cataract. As innovators, it is our turn to cure cataracts.
Flashback to 2500 B.C, the bronze age. What can we do to mend a cataract?
Certainly, we can not take out the eyeball because it would ruin the person’s vision. We have to hack at that eye! This is known as “couching” after the French word couches, meaning to lay back. The surgeon essentially takes a stick and bangs at the eye and loosens the fibers that hold the lens in place, the zonules, until the lens falls backwards into the eye.
It is now the 1600s, and there are refined metallic instruments. What innovations of your cataract operation might you consider now?
This all seems really painful. Needles in the eye do not sound pleasant without the use of proper anesthetics. It is also extremely difficult to make sure that you can see the correct parts of the eye on such a minute scale. Up until now, you have been couching. It’s now the middle of the 18th century. Wow, time flies fast when you have fun innovating! Instead of pushing the lens to the back, it’s time to do something different.
Instead of pushing the lens to the back, you can take the cataract out of the eye. It’s 1748 and there are still no anesthetics. For the next 200 years, innovation was considerably slower. It’s not that nothing happened, but without other innovations coming together to support your vision of the future of cataract surgery, surgical outcomes will remain poor.
Time travel to the 1970s and you are faced with an explosion of possibilities. There is a biotechnology revolution beginning. Optical systems, computer evolution, polymer chemistry, pharmaceuticals, and convergent materials are being produced. The scene is set for the interdisciplinary processes needed to move you ahead. In the next 50 years, there were more innovations in cataract surgery than in the previous 5000 years!
That’s right, there is no need to stick a knife in the eye to pull out the cataract. What do you need to have a secure operation? The answer might be right under your nose!
Sutures, microscopes, and ultrasounds are all essential for this surgery to be successful. Once you are able to break up the lens you create phacoemulsfication, where the eye’s internal lens is liquified with a handheld ultrasound and aspirated from the eye. We have another problem, though. The answer to this question may lie above your head!
As a class, we were able to come up with a cure for cataracts! We are true innovators. However, we can probably keep coming up with more innovations and ideas. Innovation is everywhere. If you have an idea, Dr. Koplin urges us to write it down on a piece of paper and go for it!
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