Curing the blind: Utah eye surgeon conquers cataracts, mountain peaks

SALT LAKE CITY — The postcard he sent from the airport in San Francisco went something like this: "Going to Tibet. Will call. Love, Geoff."

It was 1983, and Geoff Tabin had been named as a last-minute substitute to be part of the first climbing team to explore the east face of Everest. The postcard was the second-year medical student's way of telling Harvard he wouldn't be there when classes started.

It was a life-altering moment, as it probably has to be whenever someone tells a prestigious Ivy League school to wait.

Before that, Tabin might have become an orthopedic surgeon, another doctor saving the world one overweight jogger's knee at a time. But sometime between the airport in San Francisco and the top of the tallest peak on each of the seven continents, Tabin found a different calling: Put simply, he would cure the blind.

It is just before noon on a day in late winter, and Tabin is in between surgeries at the Moran Eye Center on Salt Lake City's east bench.

The corneal specialist is removing cataracts, a clouding of the eye's lens. Cataract removal surgery is common, quick and inexpensive in the United States.

In undeveloped nations, its absence is a death sentence.

"In Nepal they say, 'Your hair goes white, your eyes go white and you die,' " the 53-year-old Tabin says between slugs of coffee. "The term for a blind person is a 'mouth with no hands.' "

For some 40 million people in the developing world, the sun sets one day and never rises. In the darkness, they cannot see their own hands move in front of their faces. They become burdens on families struggling to survive in remote villages and squalid slums.

They are left to die.

And yet, of the 150 million visually impaired people worldwide, nearly 4 out of 5 could be cured with proper medical care, according to the World Health Organization. Most of those who could be cured are suffering from cataracts.

As Tabin traversed the globe for climbing excursions and humanitarian efforts, "there were so many things I watched people die from that would be so easy to treat in America," he said. "But the one absolute miracle was cataract surgery."

Perhaps mountain climbing and eye surgery have nothing in common, save for the intensity Tabin exhibits doing both.

"When I'm climbing, the whole world melts away. There's nothing but reaching that next hold," he said. "I get pretty focused when I'm doing surgery. The whole world melts away, and all that's there is the surgery."

The mountain always has been an escape for Tabin.

He grew up in Chicago, the son of a Manhattan Project physicist, and went on to graduate from Yale, earn a master's in philosophy from Oxford and a medical degree from Harvard.