Patricia Bath Loves Giving the Gift of Sight

Growing up in Harlem after World War II could not have been easy. But Patricia Bath's parents were optimists. Her parents encouraged her to seek excitement and opportunity regardless of circumstances. They taught their children to believe in their dreams.

Father Rupert Bath regaled his daughter with stories of his travels as a merchant seaman. Her mother, Gladys, was of Black and Native American Cherokee ancestry. Between the two, they saw to it that their daughter would be able to attend college.

Bath showed remarkable aptitude beginning in high school. She was editor of the Charles Evans Hughes High School science paper and won science awards. At sixteen years of age, Bath attended a summer program offered by the National Science Foundation. There she devised a mathematical equation for predicting cancer cell growth. Her findings were used in a paper at an international conference in 1960.

As a result, Mademoiselle magazine named Bath a winner of the 1960 Merit Award. At that time, this was quite an achievement as the award was given to only ten young women who showed promise of great achievement.

Bath did not disappoint. She completed her high school education in two and a half years. She earned a B.A. from Hunter College, then an M.D. from Howard University.

She worked as an intern at Harlem Hospital and then did a fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University. These two experiences led Bath into the field of ophthalmology and to her invention.

Bath noticed a distinct difference in the patient populations of both hospitals. Many of the patients at Harlem Hospital were African-American and half of them were blind or visually impaired. The rate for blindness at Columbia Eye Clinic was much lower.

This finding inspired Bath to establish Community Ophthalmology as a new discipline in 1976. This program implemented the use of trained eyesight volunteers to visit senior centers, daycare centers and schools to test and screen for eye problems.

Bath also co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness (AIPB) that same year. A non-profit organization, AIPB is dedicated to the prevention of blindness. The mission of the organization is to protect, preserve and restore sight, an echo of Bath's own credo, the "right to sight."

The AIPB is founded on the principle that eyesight is a basic human right and eye care should be provided free if necessary for all humankind, regardless of race, nationality or economic status. [1]

Bath moved to Los Angeles in 1974 and had a daughter. She also joined the faculty at the University of California and the Charles R. Drew University as an assistant professor of surgery and ophthalmology. The following year, Bath became the first African-American woman surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center as well as the first woman faculty member at the UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute.

By 1981, Bath had learned a great deal about eyesight and the way cataracts affected a person's vision. Cataracts form in people's eye lenses, obstructing sight. Cataracts can eventually lead to blindness. They are most common in people over the age of sixty.

At the time, mechanical drill-like tools were used to grind away a cataract. Incisions in the eye had to be fairly large to accommodate the equipment.

With Bath's invention, using a laser to remove a cataract not only used a smaller incision (about 1 mm), but it also virtually vaporized the cataract as opposed to grinding it away. Bath's invention allowed cataracts to be removed in initial stages, as opposed to removal in secondary or more serious stages the mechanical equipment had to wait for.

"The ability to restore vision is the ultimate reward," said Bath. "It is a really great joy to remove eye patches the day after surgery and the patient can see again." [2]

Bath received Patent no. 4,744,360 for the "Apparatus for ablating and removing cataract lenses" May 17, 1988. She holds additional patents for the device in Japan, Canada and a number of countries in Europe. As of February 2009, the Laserphaco Probe was still awaiting Food and Drug Administration approval. [3]

After retiring from UCLA Medical Center, Bath was appointed an honorary medical staff member. She is an advocate of telemedicine which provides medical services worldwide. She has served as a consultant to an Internet firm, eBioCare.com.

Bath was elected to the Hunter College Hall of Fame in 1988 and named Howard University Pioneer in Academic Medicine in 1993.

"Believe in the power of truth," Bath has said. "Do not allow your mind to be imprisoned by majority thinking. Remember that the limits of science are not the limits of imagination." [4]

Sources:

[1] American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness (AIPB)
[2] TDP Newsletter
[3] Prototype, Lemelson Center Newsletter
[4] Innovative Lives
Famous Black Inventors
Lemelson-MIT Program, Inventor of the Week Archive