And Let There Be Light
A German inventor creates a contact lens that could give humans eyesight as acute as a cat's
By URSULA SAUTTER/BONN

It's the 24th century, and aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, Star Trek chief engineer Geordi LaForge scans the heavens by means of the sophisticated "prosthetic lenses" that give him superhuman vision. That may be science fiction, but we mere myopes of the 21st century may not have to wait 300 years before we can boldly see where no one has seen before. A new high-performance contact lens under development at the department for applied physics at the University of Heidelberg will not only correct ordinary vision defects but will enhance normal night vision as much as five times, making people's vision sharper than that of cats, owls--and Geordi LaForge.

Josef Bille, a 54-year-old physics professor, and his colleagues at the university hope that their ultra-customized vision aids will enable hunters to better spot their quarry at dawn, campers to pitch their tents at dusk without flashlights, drivers to make out the road ahead with more ease and persons suffering from night blindness to see in the dark. Theatergoers might also benefit: the lenses work best when the pupils are fully dilated, as when looking at a lighted stage from the depths of a dark auditorium. "Forget opera glasses," crows Bille; "they will no longer be necessary."

Bille and his team work with an optical instrument called an active mirror--a device used in astronomical telescopes to spot fledgling stars and far distant galaxies. Connected to a wave-front sensor which tracks and measures the course of a laser beam into the eye and back, the aluminum mirror detects the deficiencies of the cornea, the transparent membrane that covers the lens of the human eye. The highly precise data from the two instruments--which, Bille hopes, will one day be found at opticians all over the world--serve as a basis for the production of completely individualized contact lenses that correct and enhance vision so well that the wearer's sight is actually better than nature's perfect 20-20.

By day, Bille's contact lenses will focus rays of light so accurately on the retina that the image of a small leaf or the silhouette of a far distant tree will be formed with a sharpness that surpasses that of conventional vision aids by almost half a diopter--a unit of measure of the refractive power of the lens. At night, the lenses have an even greater potential. "Because the new lens--in contrast to the already existing ones--also works when it's dark and the pupil is wide open," says Bille, "lens wearers will be able to identify a face at a distance of 100 m"--80 m farther than they would normally be able to see. In his experiments night vision was enhanced by an even greater factor: in semi-darkness, test subjects could see up to 15 times better than without the lenses.

Those who stand to benefit most from Bille's work are the millions who suffer from deficiencies in night vision. Wearing super-lenses will put an end to nerve-wracking nighttime road trips where the highway ahead is shrouded in impenetrable darkness and the headlights of oncoming cars painfully dazzle the eyes. "Our lenses will increase traffic safety immensely," predicts Bille--not a small promise considering that accident rates can increase as much as two to three times in half-light and darkness.

It was high time that someone undertook to compensate the eye's evolutional inadequacies, some experts believe. Wolfgang Cagnolati, chairman of the Association of German Contact Lens Specialists, has nothing but praise for Bille's project. "I'm happy that people are now doing research in this field," he says. "It's a very positive approach." Although it remains to be seen exactly how much the image quality on the retina itself can be improved, Bille's "two-dimensional representation of the pupil," Cagnolati believes, "can allow us to detect and, eventually, correct optical aberrations of the eye."