Donor Enlists Top Scientists and Philanthropists to End Blindness

On December 14, in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, a $3 million gift will go to the scientist who has done the most to end blindness. That the ceremony is taking place at that venerable institution is thanks to the donor’s longtime friend and neighbor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The philanthropist is Sanford (Sandy) Greenberg, an inventor, entrepreneur, businessman, and investor who suddenly lost his sight to glaucoma during his junior year at Columbia University. Sandy and his wife, Sue, have created the $3 million Sanford and Susan Greenberg Prize to End Blindness with a sweeping goal: not to cure a disease or prevent one but to end blindness once and for all.

Sandy is a polymath with an “endless hunger for ideas,” he writes in his just-published memoir Hello Darkness, My Old Friend. He learned much about philanthropy from his dear friend, the late David Rockefeller. One example: Make anonymous gifts to deserving young people.

He started a number of technology enterprises despite having little academic background in science — just high-school chemistry, college physics, and “home tutorials — me to me — so I could better understand how to live sightless in a rapidly changing world,” he says. “And, really, things just blossomed from there.”

His mission to end blindness has evolved over the years through diligent study and at the hands of some of the top thinkers in science. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, persuaded him to broaden his mission, which originally was to regenerate the optic nerve.

“Dr. Salk had urged upon me a focus beyond the treatment of a disease’s symptoms or its individual physiological effects,” he writes in his book. “After all, he had made his own objective nothing less than to end a disease — and he succeeded!”

Sandy has assembled an advisory board of a dozen scientists from leading institutions, three of whom are Nobel laureates, to vet candidates for the award and a governing council that includes the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Bob and Elizabeth Dole, Art Garfunkel, Jerry Speyer, John McCarter (chairman emeritus of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents), and more.

He is equally adept at spreading the word about his mission and bringing people on board. At the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2013, at a dinner to celebrate 11 winners of the Nobel Prize, he spoke about his goal to the editor of Nature magazine, who responded by inviting him to make an impromptu after-dinner speech — “what amounted to an extemporaneous mission statement,” he says.

That led to an appearance on the Charlie Rose Show’s Brain Series. The following year at Davos, Sandy’s campaign was the subject of a dedicated panel session, which helped spread the word globally.

A Bridge Over Troubled Water

Sandy’s accomplishments are all the more remarkable when you consider that he grew up poor, working in his father’s junk yard in Buffalo. He got a full scholarship to Columbia University, became roommates with an architecture student named Art Garfunkel — who would later become famous as part of the singing duo — and Jerry Speyer, now a New York developer and philanthropist. Sandy excelled academically and, together with his roommates and other friends, took in all that New York had to offer — art, music, theater.

Courtesy of Sanford Greenberg

In his junior year, Sandy started having trouble with his eyesight and was treated by a doctor in Buffalo, The problem persisted, and by the time he found a doctor who correctly diagnosed his glaucoma, his eyes were so damaged there was little to be done. Sitting on a round metal stool as the doctor examined his eyes, he expected to be given a pill or eyedrops and sent on his way. Instead, the doctor told him he would perform surgery the following day and then bluntly announced, “Well, son, you are going to be blind tomorrow.”

Despite the devastating news, the insistence of his family that he drop out of college, and the advice of a caseworker that he spend his life caning chairs or making screwdrivers for a living, he decided to return to Columbia. Much of the credit for his decision goes to Art Garfunkel, who promised to read his assignments to him, walk him to classes, and help in myriad other ways.

Sandy finished his senior year on time, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, received a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford University, got a master’s and Ph.D. at Harvard, and became a fellow in the Johnson White House.

He went on to found a series of successful businesses — one of which helped design the computer system for the first lunar-excursion module during the Kennedy administration.

Along the way, he amassed influential friends — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Al Gore, and many others.

I was introduced to Sandy two years ago when a former colleague told me he had just finished editing Sandy’s memoir. Would I like to copy edit it?

It’s a “heckuva read,” he added.

Indeed it is a heckuva read about an extraordinary life, but it’s also about the evolution of a philanthropic gift and an ambitious goal that has been meticulously planned — and a long time coming. That’s what I wanted to ask Sandy about in a recent conversation.

You write in your book about lying in a hospital bed in Detroit back in 1961, right after the surgery that took your eyesight, and making a bargain with God to end blindness so others wouldn’t have to go through what you did. Can you talk about that moment and how that evolved into the $3 million gift?

There was a moment in time when my mother and I went to see Dr. Sol Sugar in Detroit. When he said, “Well, son, you are going to be blind tomorrow,” that was a sentence I had to digest with great difficulty. What I heard was tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. For the rest of your life, this is your condition.

And then he operated the next day, and when I came out of surgery and went back to my room, my mother was sitting at the front of my bed. And you might think that the pain was primarily in my eyes, but the real pain was in my heart for my mother. It was there because I could only image the amount of pain my mother was in, seeing her eldest son lying there with his eyes cut open. I could not imagine that.

Within the next couple of days, I was in such extremis that I promised God that I would do everything for the rest of my life so that no one else should go blind. It was a rather naïve, idealistically motivated statement.

Of course, after that I had to try and rebuild my life. Herman Hesse, the great Swiss poet, said, “God does not give us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.”

The problem was the awakening, which took many years to occur.

The key question was whether science would even come close to matching my promise. I was following it in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and even in the first part of this century, it didn’t seem like there was much progress. Then suddenly there was a burst of discoveries that were simply amazing. And that’s when I decided to see if we could call out to the leading brilliant minds of this generation — because in the end, they’re the ones who are going to do it.

I also elevated that goal to not just curing or preventing but simply to ending blindness. There was nothing fuzzy about that word “end.” I meant it literally then, and I mean it today.

The award will go to an individual or team of researchers who has done the most across the globe to end blindness for everyone forevermore. We do this because blindness is our oldest cruelty, a subversion of our creator’s intent.

So when we succeed, and we will, we will all live in a world where all God’s children can not only feel the sunshine on their faces but witness with their own two eyes its rising and setting.

How will you decide who will get the award?

Our national Governing Council includes many of the most outstanding philanthropists in the country, while our Scientific Advisory Board is drawn from the most outstanding researchers in the relevant and closely related fields.

The Scientific Advisory Board will determine prize winners, subject to approval by the governing council, and we will make public the winners this coming December

You talk in the book about your friendship with David Rockefeller and say that he gave you “informal tutorials” in various subjects, including philanthropy. What did you learn from him about philanthropy?

I learned so very much from David Rockefeller. He was a signal influence in my life. Not only did we talk about philanthropy but about philosophy and politics.

I can think immediately of three lessons — really, gifts — that David gave me. One, and most important: Lead with your heart and everything else will follow.

Two, if you are passionate about the sciences and humanities, which I am and David certainly was: Pursue both because both are equally vital to civilization.

And three Try to find deserving young people around the country and give anonymous gifts. David did that. I’ve known several recipients, and they have no clue where their gift came from, but their lives have been enriched in ways far more important than money.

As chairman of the board of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University, you tried three times to get funding for a retinal prosthesis that one of the institute’s researchers was working on. The first two times you did not succeed, but you did on the third try. Can you explain what happened the third time and what you learned from the first two attempts?

The truth is it was a matter of persistence. And fortunately President Clinton had appointed me to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation. I made a presentation to the foundation board — I didn’t vote on this one, of course — but they said it was too speculative and rejected it flat out. The second time I tried, the same thing happened.

My heart implored me to go back. I was committed to working toward ending blindness. Here was a tangible way to do that.

The third time it succeeded. I was so thrilled. That researcher went on to invent and commercialize an implant and has since done further groundbreaking work on electronic visual prosthetics.

Philanthropy is one way to do good in the world, but we hear a lot these days about businesses trying to do good while making a profit. You wrote about some of your enterprises in your book, saying, “My first interest as a businessperson had to be the viability of each [company] — I don’t shy away from profit — but I also focused on whether each new company might provide value for the common good.” Can you explain?

My goal was not to go to into business but into law and politics. But my senior year in college, I relied on other people to read my assignments to me into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tape would permit me to listen to 150 word per minute, which was too slow. So when I tried manually to force it to go faster, it created distortion. I had the idea then: How could we change the mechanical energy of the voice box and larynx into electrical energy? That was the theoretical construct.

From that idea, I invented a compressed-speech machine that would allow me to listen to 200 or 300 words per minute.

When I went to Harvard, I had some very kind, generous readers, some of whom were physicists and engineers. They and others at Harvard and MIT helped me after many years of struggling to get the patent for the compression of speech in 1969.

You can speed it up and compress it. It’s the same technology now used in audiobooks. And that came from this idea back in 1961. So to the extent that it has helped millions of blind people and others who are interested in getting an education from the spoken word, it provided value to society.

What are your plans for your mission and your philanthropy after your gift is made on December 14?

December is not the end. The end-blindness campaign will end when we eradicate blindness from the planet.

But while the December 14 award is dedicated specifically to ending blindness, it’s only the beginning in several ways. We will be launching the Sanford and Susan Greenberg Center to End Blindness, which is still a work in progress.

More important, we are expanding our goal from solving the mysteries of the optic-nerve system to repairing diseases and injuries of the entire central-nervous system — the core of our existence — before the turn of the century. As I write in Hello Darkness, I learned from former Buffalo Bills quarterback and later Congressman Jack Kemp the value of throwing deep. That’s where we go next. We are throwing as deep as we can.

If you can regenerate the optic nerve, then surely you have a gateway to regenerate the entire central-nervous system for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, muscular dystrophy, a variety of ailments.

So I’m going to try to accomplish that, and using end blindness to expand on a much broader level.

You’ve overcome so many obstacles to accomplish so much. How do you account for your ability to have done all of this?

When people ask me, How do you approach your challenges, I could say, “With determination and persistence. Never ever, ever give up.” While that may be true, what I really think is that the way you look at the world is crucial. Einstein said that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed.”

The notion is that each and every one of us has the possibility of looking at the world in wonder. And if you can’t do that, then you‘re missing the magic of daily living, the beauty and joy that can be uncovered in all things. I stand on the banks of the Potomac where I live and I wait for something extraordinary to happen, and it always does.

Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.