By Alexandra Demetriou

Mark Humayun, MD, PhD, was recently featured on Trailblazers, an original podcast hosted by former CNN chairman and CEO Walter Isaacson. The Trailblazers podcast features leaders across society who have shaken up their fields, innovated in ways many would think impossible and charged forward to pioneer changes that excite the way our world operates. Isaacson, who has written best-selling books on innovators ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs, sat with Humayun to discuss his career as a world-renown ophthalmologist and inventor. The episode highlights the challenges and victories Humayun has encountered along his journey to reverse blindness and restore a glimmer of hope to vision loss patients living in complete darkness.

Isaacson opens the podcast episode, entitled “Eyesight: Vision’s Visionaries,” with the story of Humayun succeeding in his first attempt to use electrodes to stimulate vision during eye surgery. He recounts the miraculous moment in 1992 when Humayun confirmed that his patient, blind for 50 years, was able to see a small but encouraging flicker of light while lying on the operating table. That light, which his patient described as looking like “a candle far off in the distance on a dark night,” marked a turning point in Humayun’s career and a monumental step forward in the field of vision science.

Almost three decades later, Humayun continues to pioneer groundbreaking advancements in ophthalmology and vision restoration. Humayun is widely recognized for his invention of the world’s first artificial retina, which has restored partial vision to hundreds of patients who were previously completely blind. Humayun and his team continue working to surmount the challenges of recreating one of our most sophisticated senses using a network of electrodes, and their current studies are focused on increasing clarity and adding color vision to their artificial sight system. But perhaps the truest measure of Humayun’s success as a trailblazer lies in the most basic and human experiences his patients have regained thanks to their implants: patients often share stories of watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, appreciating the lights on a Christmas tree, or experiencing the joy of playing with their young grandchildren thanks to the gift of sight their implants have given them.

“Everyone said, ‘This cannot happen,’” Humayun explains on Trailblazers, referring to the many obstacles that complicate creating a bionic eye implant, such as the delicacy of the human retina and the challenge of developing an electrode array capable of creating signals that the human brain can discern as meaningful images. “This was actually science fiction,” Humayun surmises, “and we made it science reality.”

To listen to the full podcast episode, click here.