Invention giving sight to the world's poor

Joshua Silver started on a remarkable quest in 1985 -- provide vision for the world's poor that desperately needed glasses, but couldn't afford to eat, let alone pay for prescription lenses. It would take the physicist of Oxford's Department of Atomic and Laser Physics, over a decade to create a solution that is both cheap and easily adaptive -- allowing the curvature of the lenses to change without specialized knowledge or equipment. The solution: tough plastic lenses holding membranes containing fluid, which can be adjusted by adding or removing fluid using a syringe attached to the arms of the spectacles. To add or remove fluid, a dial is turned on the spectacles.

Already, 30,000 pairs of spectacles have been distributed in a trial to the poor in Africa and Asia. Silver has ambitions of helping the UN achieve its Vision 20/20 programme by distributing 1 million more next year and ramping up to 100 million per year in a few years. By 2020, there could be over a billion people with Silver's invention. Totally cool, unless it gets squashed by the established industry's self interest. Here's hoping it doesn't. And I think Silver deserves a Nobel for this invention.

Additional reading: WHO's Action Plan -- Prevention of avoidable blindness and visual impairment [PDF]