Illustration by Kiki Ljung
Summary.
Since the late 1990s, more than 30 million people have benefited from a corrective eye surgery procedure called LASIK. Before the advent of LASIK, surgeons used a scalpel to cut into the cornea. Then, they reshaped it to improve a patient’s vision. This caused a lot of damage to surrounding eye tissues. Instead of a scalpel, LASIK uses a femtosecond laser, which emits powerful pulses of light for only a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second). Surgeons can make very precise cuts that do not cause any collateral damage.