Today's Crossword: End blindness, get millions in gold - the Greenberg promise

Over two billion people in the world have vision impairments, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Half those cases could be treated or prevented.

Click start to play today’s Crossword, which tests your knowledge of the inner workings of our eyes.

At age 20, American philanthropist Sanford Greenberg had just become blind. A misdiagnosed glaucoma caused his eyesight to fail when he was in his third year at Columbia University in New York, and he lost his vision completely in a matter of months. Greenberg was angry at the unfairness of it all and pledged he would do something about it in his lifetime.

And he didn’t stop for anything. According to a 2016 report in National Geographic, Greenberg ignored the suggestion of a social worker who thought he should quit school, and make cane-backed chairs in a program for the blind. Instead, his roommate, Art Garfunkel (one half of the Simon & Garfunkel folk rock duo) helped him get around campus and read his textbooks to him. Greenberg finished his bachelor’s degree at Columbia and went on to earn his doctorate at Harvard University in the US.

He then set up his first company, in the field of information processing, and a few years later, launched a systems analysis company that was a huge success. Greenberg’s work centred around his invention of an electronic device that compressed speech and sped up the words from recordings without distorting any sound. Since people speak only about half as fast as they read, he made the device to benefit people with visual impairments, who had no choice but to listen to taped speech at its rate of delivery. He received a patent for it in 1969 and licensed the device to major companies, like Sony and General Electric.

During this time, he was also selected as a Fellow and worked in the White House. In 1962, Greenberg married Sue, his childhood sweetheart from the sixth grade, to whom he is married still.

But even after achieving everything he set his mind to, Greenberg never forgot his promise. In 2012, he made good on it by announcing the Sanford and Sue Greenberg Prize to End Blindness: a reward of 3 million dollars in gold to the persons who contribute most to ending blindness by 2020.

When the year 2020 arrived, 13 doctors and researchers from nations around the world, including India and Japan, won the prize and shared in the reward. Some of the doctors have developed ground-breaking treatments using gene therapy, others are using stem cell techniques, while still others are providing free or affordable eye care in rural communities.

All of them have the same vision as Greenberg – to end blindness for good – and with the Greenberg Prize, they continue to blaze new paths in science, to one day make his dream a reality.

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