To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Healio/Ocular Surgery News, we are looking back at major developments in ophthalmology. In this submission to the 40th anniversary collection on Healio/OSN, James J. Wynne, PhD, reflects on the discovery of laser refractive surgery.
On Nov. 27, 1981, the day after Thanksgiving, Dr. Rangaswamy Srinivasan brought Thanksgiving leftovers into the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he irradiated turkey cartilage with 10-nanosecond pulses of 193-nm light from an argon fluoride (ArF) excimer laser. This far-ultraviolet irradiation produced a clean-looking “incision,”