It is a great honor and privilege for me to introduce Professor Sohan Singh Hayreh as the 2003 recipient of the Mildred Weisenfeld award. Professor Hayreh does not need any introduction. However, allow me to illustrate some features of his exceptional career. Professor Hayreh was born in 1927 into a farming family in a remote Indian village. He attended local schools, and then his mother decided that he should go to medical school because there were no doctors in the area. He began his medical education at King Edward Medical College at Lahore, which is in current-day Pakistan. Unfortunately, the partition of India in 1947 forced him to leave Lahore and to go to the only other available medical college in his home state of Punjab, in Amritsar, from which he graduated and did his initial training in surgery because he wanted to be a general surgeon.
Because of financial hardships in the family, Sohan Hayreh then joined the Indian Army Medical Corps, where part of the time he worked as a general surgeon, which allowed him to support his parents and younger sisters and brothers. Since he was keen to pursue an academic and research career, he then accepted in 1955 the only available academic position, which happened to be in the Anatomy Department of the newly opened Medical College in Patiala in the Punjab. His first research project was intended to confirm the findings by François and Neetens of the existence of the “central artery of the optic nerve.” To his surprise, he found that the artery did not exist.
The crucial event in his career came in 1961, when he was awarded the highly prestigious Beit Memorial Research Fellowship in Medical Sciences at the University of London to investigate pathogenesis of optic disc edema when the intracranial pressure is elevated. The chances of getting this fellowship had seemed extremely small for an unknown researcher from India, especially because three former Beit Fellows had gone on to win Nobel Prizes. Nevertheless, he was selected and worked with Sir Stewart Duke-Elder at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University of London. The rest is history. He subsequently worked as a member of the academic staff of the University of London, the University of Edinburgh, and now, for the past 30 years, at the University of Iowa.
Sohan Hayreh is a clinical scientist. Since 1955, he has been actively involved in basic, experimental, and clinical research in ophthalmology. He has made many seminal observations dealing with the ocular circulation in health and disease, the optic disc and the optic nerve in health and disease, retinal and choroidal disorders, glaucomatous optic neuropathy, fundus changes in malignant arterial hypertension, ocular neovascularization, rheumatologic disorders of the eye, and nocturnal arterial hypotension. He was one of the pioneers in the field of fluorescein angiography. He has published more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals and more than 50 chapters in books, and he continues to conduct studies and to publish in the highest ranked ophthalmology journals, even at the age of 75 years. He often gives credit to his Scottish wife Shelagh for her editorial help. He has received many international honors and awards and has given several prestigious honorary lectures, including the Duke-Elder lecture of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, the von Sallmann lecture of the International Society for Eye Research, and the William Mackenzie lecture of the University of Glasgow (Scotland), to name a few. He was the guest of honor of the American Academy of Ophthalmology at its annual meeting in 2002.
Professor Hayreh’s major contributions to ophthalmology’s scientific community, however, have been not only the new findings he has discovered but also his ability to challenge and subsequently to alter conventional thinking on basic concepts of diseases and their treatment. As with many such innovators who challenge established thinking, Professor Hayreh’s ideas have sometimes been controversial, but the power of his intellect and his creativity have most often carried the day. It is because of his pioneering insights that ARVO is honoring Professor Sohan Singh Hayreh with the Mildred Weisenfeld award. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Hayreh, who will present the Weisenfeld award lecture.