Vision Quest.

Today's popular laser eye surgery is the product of a Colombian doctor's pioneering work.

MONDAY MORNING IN RAIN-SOAKED BOGOTA AND BUSINESS is as usual.

Dr. Jose Ignacio Barraquer Jr. has stretched back a patient's eyelids with a metal clamp. He peers through a microscope and slices away a sliver of cornea, the outer gelatinous layer of the human eye. He takes aim with a laser beam like a submarine captain sizing up his target through a periscope. Discharging several rounds of fine laser light onto the exposed surface, he then begins to "sculpt" the cornea into a kind of natural contact lens before returning the sliver to its original position, all without stitches. The whole ordeal lasts just 15 minutes and the patient is awake the whole time. Doctors in the trade refer to the procedure as the "flap and zap."

The formal name is Lasik, which stands for laser-assisted insitu keratomileusis, and it is the latest in corrective eye surgery. Patients undergoing the operation come out with near 20/20 vision and throw away their glasses and contact lenses.

This year alone, some 980,000 Lasik operations will be carried out in the United States alone. And although the surgery is not covered by health insurance, the number of annual Lasik operations is expected to grow to more than 2.5 million within five years. But while North America is now the fastest-growing laser eye-surgery market, Bogota's claim as home to the theory and technique underpinning Lasik has gone unchallenged ever since Barraquer's Spanish-born father, also called Jose Ignacio, settled in the Andean city in 1953.

When Dr. Barraquer Sr. carried out the world's first refractive surgery on humans in the mid-'60s, the technique--known as keratomileusis-was both complicated and risky, and took several hours to perform.

Hand carved. Barraquer Sr. would place his first patients under general anesthetic rather than the simpler topical variety used today. But then he had no choice: His pioneering method consisted of manually removing the patient's cornea, freezing it, and then shaping it on a prototype lathe that he designed himself.

The biggest problem at the beginning was that the lathe was set up in his house, three kilometers away from the operating theater "My father used to perform the first part of the operation and then, with the patient still under anesthetic, jump into his car, drive home to turn the frozen cornea and then return to reattach it to the patient," says Barraquer Jr. The operation also involved hand stitching the cornea back onto the eye.

The calculations for exactly how to sculpt the cornea were the result of the elder Barraquer's 20 years of painstaking research dating back to the 1940s. His work still forms the theoretical basis for Lasik surgery.

Today, powerful computers calculate how to shape the cornea. When Barraquer Sr. first began, he had to use scale drawings of 1000:1. He employed arithmetic tables and worked out the exact required thickness of the cornea with paper and a pencil.

The result of those groundbreaking years was the founding of the Barraquer Clinic, an impressive building in the north of Bogota, now run by Barraquer Jr and his sister, Dc Carmen, who also practices Lasik. The clinic's fame has attracted top sportsmen including the former British heavyweight boxing champion Frank Bruno. It is also a magnet for U.S. citizens who flock from Florida to spend the day and about $1,000 for the operation. In the United States, the price tag ranges from US$2,000 to $3,000 an eye.

Up close and personal. David Lawrence, a 28-year-old journalist from Maine, recently had the operation and now has 20/30 vision, much better than his previous 20/200. "People who have never worn glasses do not understand how the surgery transforms your life," he says. "For the first time ever, I could see the expressions on my girlfriend's face when we made love."

Despite Barraquer Sr.'s death last year, the clinic remains a world leader in refractive surgery, says Dc William de la Pena, chair at the University of Costa Rica's Department of Ophthalmology, though he admits that Barraquer Sr. is a hard act to follow in terms of pioneering. He says that ophthalmologists in many other countries refer complicated cases there, and U.S. doctors continue to find valuable training there. "It is without doubt one of the leading refractive surgery centers," he says.