EyeWorld Asia-Pacific June 2015 Issue

64 EWAP NEWS & OPINION June 2015 “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” For his tribute, Dr. Khaw quoted the famous inscription written by Christopher Wren, Jr., for his father, Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral: “If you seek his monument – look around you.” Of one of Prof. Lim’s great legacies, Dr. Tham said it has been “breathtaking to see what SNEC has achieved.” He added that while Prof. Lim’s legacy and achievements are storied, he will be best remembered by those who knew him for his “very special, often personal relationship to all of us.” “He will continue to lift our hearts for many generations to come,” he said. Also at the Opening Ceremony, Donald Tan, MD , Singapore, provided a comprehensive summary of the last 25 years of progress in corneal surgery and external diseases, including a brief look ahead into the future of the field in his SNEC 25th Anniversary Lecture on “Cornea Development in Singapore: The Path is Clear.” In his lecture, Dr. Tan introduced a new piezoelectric cornea knife (patent pending) he and his colleagues are currently developing. The device is a blunt dissector that he and his colleagues believe will be a game changer. Dr. Tan and his colleagues are also working on designing new antimicrobial molecules against ocular pathogens (AMOP) to address progressively increasing rates of antimicrobial resistance. Dr. Tan also paid tribute to Prof. Lim, saying that SNEC’s 25-year progress up to and including all the work he and his colleagues are currently doing “is truly his legacy.” The Opening Ceremony concluded with Singaporean pop singer Richard “Dick” Lee Peng Boon’s moving rendition of his song “Life Story,” accompanying a slide show that took the audience through Prof. Lim’s life. Mr. Lee said that when he was 21 years old, Prof. Lim saved his vision. Arthur Lim Memorial Symposium The SNEC 25th Anniversary International Meeting’s tripartite tribute to Prof. Arthur Lim concluded with the Arthur Lim Memorial Symposium in which distinguished experts spoke on topics that loosely reflected Prof. Lim’s “triple mission”: clinical care, education, and research. Sir Peng Tee Khaw, MD, U.K., discussed exciting prospects in glaucoma care, but first brought the audience back 25 years to show how much things have progressed. In the ’90s, he said, “we had a lot less” in terms of options for managing glaucoma. At the time, even the role of IOP in the disease was still being debated. Since then, major prospective studies such as the Ocular Hypertension Treatment Study (OHTS), the Early Manifest Glaucoma Trial (EMGT), and even the Normal-Tension Glaucoma Study (NTGS) have demonstrated the importance of controlling IOP. One interesting prospect for future glaucoma care Dr. Khaw briefly touched upon was his “energy theory” of glaucoma. Basically, Dr. Khaw and his colleages propose that the sustained rise in IOP in glaucoma results in retraction of fortified astrocytes, depriving retinal ganglion cells of their energy supply, subsequently resulting in axotomy. The possibility of “repowering” the optic nerve head, he said, through means yet to be determined, is an exciting prospect to explore for glaucoma management. On the second part of Prof. Lim’s triple mission, there could have been no better person to reflect on Prof. Lim’s legacy than J.F. (Barry) Cullen, FRCS, FRCSEd, Singapore. Back in 1986, Prof. Lim sought the help of Dr. Cullen—then Chairman of the Ophthalmic Committee of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh—to bring ophthalmology training and education to Singapore. Their work together, said Dr. Cullen, marked a milestone in academic training in Singapore. He had since remained closely involved in SNEC’s training program, until deciding it was time to retire and return to the United Kingdom this year. At the end of his talk, the audience, including residents and staff from SNEC, bid Dr. Cullen farewell with a standing ovation. Wallace S. Foulds, MD , Singapore, concluded the Memorial Symposium’s reflection of Prof. Lim’s triple mission with a consideration of ophthalmic research in the region. Dr. Foulds was Co-Director and Adviser of the Singapore Eye Research Insitute (SERI) in 2000, and currently serves as Senior Consultant Advisor. Successful clinical and basic research can generate new treatments and improve patient care, he said. While ophthalmic research is “rarely life-saving,” he said, sight-restoration remains a goal worth pursuing—something to remember when seeking grant support for your research proposal. The research being done at SERI, he said, runs the gamut from epidemiology, to the establishment of biomarkers, and “lots of omics”: genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, among others. In research, he subscribed to Karl Popper’s “black swan”—“only negative findings could be proved by observation”: A thousand white swans doesn’t mean all swans are white; observing just one black swan invalidates the positive SNEC - from page 63