“Being an editor on a journal and seeing the latest research, I get to see what’s happening in translational research that will soon be available to the clinician. It’s fun and exciting to see the research employed and then to put it in a more definitive form in a textbook.” – Dr. Daniel Albert
My co-editor, Dr. Leonard Levin, and I worked together on the Archives of Ophthalmology Journal, put out by the American Medical Association, which had a section called “Mechanisms of Disease.” We realized that there was a need and a tremendous interest in not just knowing how to treat diseases by memorizing the medicines or the operation, but in how to correlate the basic pathophysiology and biochemistry defects with managing the disease. That became our most recent work, Ocular Disease: Mechanisms and Management.
New areas in the field are the tremendous clinical trials and epidemiological studies that are going on now to find best practices. There’s a big movement now for something called “less is more” where we’re starting to realize that a number of diseases are over-treated. This is not only a waste of resources but there are detrimental effects from over-treatment. Being an editor on a journal and seeing the latest research, I get to see what’s happening in translational research that will soon be available to the clinician. It’s fun and exciting to see the research employed and then to put it in a more definitive form in a textbook.
Intellectually, Ocular Disease: Mechanisms and Management and Adler’s Physiology of the Eye just fit together. Adler’s Physiology of the Eye is a special book because Dr. Adler was one of the people that got me interested in ophthalmology. I read each edition of his book. It’s a very scientific and incisive look at how the eye should function. To me, it was almost crying out for a counterpart about what goes wrong and how it can be fixed. So, taking our cue from Adler’s Physiology, we created a counterpart for the diseased eye.
Bio
Daniel M. Albert, MD, MS is the Founding Director of the UW McPherson Eye Research Institute and F.A. Davis Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. He is an editor of Ocular Disease: Mechanisms and Management and the third edition of Principles & Practice of Ophthalmology. He is also an editor of Veterinary Ocular Pathology.
Dr. Albert’s research focuses on ocular tumors. For nearly 20 years, he worked with the National Eye Institute’s Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study and served as the head of the COMS Pathology Center. He continues to curate the specimens collected during the study. Dr. Albert holds a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Related Authors: Leonard Levin, MD, PHD
