Did you have any special plans or ideas about your choice of a profession when you were a kid? I have always been fascinated by biology and physics. For a while I wanted to be an agronomist; that was at upper secondary school. But I eventually realised that medicine was the field that best combined my two main interests. What is your worst experience/best experience from research? My worst experience was at the start of my career, when I asked a lab technician to section rat lenses, and she sectioned all the lenses in the wrong plane. I had to go back to her and ask her to do everything all over again, and that took an entire month. The opposite case might be my fascination over the fact that a sea of numbers from a well-planned experiment can actually be organised into something that means something. Do you have a piece of good advice for your younger colleagues regarding research? Focus on research, and venture to take a little longer leave in order to learn the job. Don’t let clinical work and research become a burden by doing everything at once. The clinic can wait a bit. Research work is a totally different job, and it takes a long time to learn. Many people are afraid to take a leave of absence for an endeavour in which the results are unknown. But with sufficient time and intensity, it will become something. But it requires a decision to focus. If you were an animal, what animal would you like to be, and why? I would like to be a sea eagle, because they have incredible vision and can look out over everything; they glide with the wind and live in a marine environment, which I like. And I also like fish. Which eye disease is the greatest challenge worldwide, do you think? I despair most about glaucoma. It affects such a large portion of the population, and I have a terrible sense that we don’t have any inkling about what we are actually trying to treat, and with limited results to boot. If you were to give me a tip about how to be an excellent lecturer, what would it be? ‘Always make it simple – much simpler than you think necessary.’ Listen carefully to the lecturers you like, and emulate whatever is suitable for you personally; let yourself be inspired. Do you have any favourites or idols that you really admire outside the scientific world? Yes, actually, I admire President Obama. He is a ‘self-made man’ who has taken on an almost impossible task. He is a fantastic speaker, with a mind of his own, and he is trying to do something he believes in. I also admire the author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini. He tells a fantastic story with distinctly political elements, using language that is readily accessible. What is your opinion about how to improve eye care in Sweden (Any opinions regarding the number of ophthalmologists, ophthalmologic education/examination, or the number of nurses/assistants/organisations?). I would divide the question into research, teaching, and clinical work. With regard to research, I wish that we had a research funding system that was based more on quality than on research direction. There is too much political control at present. No one can say in advance which research direction might serve as the basis for important discoveries. That’s why we should trust more in the intuition of the researchers who, like artists, must pursue their own path, which they have a sense of and have been technically trained in. Because I have been teaching in a three-year curriculum for opticians, that work is close to my heart. We almost pushed through a proposal for a collective 3-year curriculum for ophthalmology nurses, opticians, orthoptists, and technical optometrists, in which the students would then be able to specialise in their fourth year. That would have given those involved a greater breadth of knowledge and an excellent knowledge base. Emergency eye care could be improved; neither doctors nor patients are particularly pleased with it in general. I propose that we work cooperatively across larger regions, and have an experienced ophthalmologist on a telephone hotline to allocate patients among the regular care centres. One doesn’t have to wait for 3–4 hr to be tended to at the bank, or at a travel agency. It’s not surprising that the patients get upset. It must be possible to improve our emergency eye care. Do you have any bad habits that you could tell us about? Yes… my family thinks that I work too much. If you were to make a wish for the next year, what would it be? That everyone who applies for a research grant would get money; then more research would get done.