Since this is Review’s AAO issue, it got me thinking: It’s hard to believe—the time has flown by like a femtosecond burst—but 2024 marks my 30th year attending the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting. This sparked a bunch of AAO memories ...

Back then, I was a wide-eyed junior editor on Review, barely able to spell “capsulorhexis,” trying to absorb as much information as I could. In one of the first sessions I walked into Houston’s Jack Holladay, MD, was up on stage dissecting a complex optics equation. I broke out into a cold sweat—I was told there’d be no math—but stuck it out anyway. I may not have ever gotten the equation, but I did get a lot of great topics and insights from Dr. Holladay over the years, many of them at the AAO.

Another time, I met with renowned surgeon Theo Seiler to learn more about his corneal collagen cross-linking technique. Near the end of our conversation, he joked, “You’ve got the most German name ever—‘Valtuh Beet-kah’  [pronounced like a true German]—but don’t speak German.” I was going to counter by saying I actually took German in high school and college, but I didn’t think that would help my case.

Attending 30 years’ worth of meetings also puts you in a position to see therapies come and go, and then come again—usually in the presbyopia and hyperopia treatment realms. A treatment will fail, but another company will pick it up, put a new shade of lipstick on the pig and trot it out several years later under a new name. Surgeons are like, “Isn’t that the same pig we kicked out in 2003?”  To this, the pig pivots and waddles out. See you in seven years.

But, there were a lot of groundbreaking technologies and techniques that were discussed at the meeting as well over three decades: PRK; LASIK; multifocal IOLs; optical biometry; prostaglandins; toric lenses; tons of phaco techniques; MIGS; and the femtosecond laser, just to name a few. It was exciting to be on the ground floor of all of them.

And, as everyone knows, though the meeting itself is great, a lot of memorable moments happen outside the convention center, in the downtime out in the host city. At my first AAO, which was in San Francisco, a friend and I wandered onto the set of the movie “Nine Months,” near where Hugh Grant’s and Jeff Goldblum’s characters were comisserating about Grant’s character’s impending fatherhood. A petite, feisty security guard corralled us and moved us back to an acceptable distance. We joked around, asking her to pose for a photo as if she were kicking us off the set, and I recall she said I had a “Forrest Gump thing going on” with the way I spoke. When you’re a young guy in his 20s, you don’t particularly want to be compared with Forrest Gump, but I guess it’s better than nothing.  

So if you’re at this year’s AAO and you see a guy with a really German name who reminds you of Forrest Gump, be sure to say, “Guten Tag!” 

(Take that, Dr. Seiler.)

— Walter Bethke
Editor in Chief