Eyes for the blind

Recently, a friend of mine told me that all the entries in my blog are negative. Well, just to prove that I'm also aware of the good things that happen in the world, here is a "happy" post about an article I read a while ago.

The responsible for this positive entry is a physics professor at Oxford University named Josh Silver. His idea, which dates back to 1985, is to make what are now known as adaptive glasses. The physics behind it: lenses that can be filled with a fluid and thus have varying strength (the fatter the lens, the more powerful it is). The motivation: make it affordable for millions of poor people in the world to be able to see.

The principle behind the idea is marvelously simple: you just take a normal pair of glasses and replace the lenses with two circular sacs which are filled with fluid. The amount of fluid that goes into them is controlled by two syringes which can be operated by the wearer of the glasses without the need of a qualified optician, thus reducing their cost immensely.

It has taken over 20 years for this idea to come to fruition. Now Silver, already retired, has embarked himself in the incredibly ambitious project of supplying the poor a billion of these adaptive glasses by 2020. Moreover, the project today is not only pen and paper: there already exist 30 000 such pairs  distributed over 15 countries, being the next target to send a million pairs to India. The project is in a few years to be upgraded to produce 100 million spectacles annually.

The consequences of such idea are well beyond just letting people see. Literacy rates are supposed to improve hugely and people will not have to retire because of poor eyesight. If coordinated with good development strategies, making people see can even change the economic situation of many  Third World countries (in Africa the ratio of people with eyesight problems to optometrists is 1000000:1, forcing most of them to retire at the early age of 35). However, life is not a bowl of cherries and mass producing these glasses is not going to be an easy task. Silver, who isn't making any profit out of it, wants to reach the target price of 1 dollar per pair. To do this, the rather heavy and bulgy model that now exists must be improved to a lighter and cheaper one to produce. Needless to say, although retired, Silver is working on it.

That such projects exist, that there are enthusiasts with such vision for a global good makes it still worth it to have hope in a world like the one we live in. I sincerely hope that Josh Silver succeeds in the task set before him, that is, of course, if it doesn't clash with US corporatist interests... only time will tell.