Fyodorov was born in
Proskurov,
Ukrainian SSR (now
Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine), to ethnic
Russian parents. Fyodorov graduated from
Rostov Medical Institute in
Rostov on Don, then worked as a practicing ophthalmologist in a small town in
Rostov Oblast.
Cataract surgery In the 1960s he studied the pioneering work of the English ophthalmic surgeon Sir
Harold Ridley, the inventor of the
intraocular lens (IOL). Fyodorov began to use Ridley's intraocular lenses in his treatment of cataract. At first he used lenses manufactured by the
Rayner company in England but he quickly moved to have his lenses manufactured inside the Soviet Union.
Refractive surgery In the 1970s he developed the surgical technique he is most famous for, the
radial keratotomy, to change the shape of the
cornea and cure
myopia. In 1986, Fyodorov designed the first posterior chamber
phakic IOL in the "collar-button" or "mushroom" configuration and manufactured the pIOL from silicone. In 1980 he became the head of the Moscow Research Institute of Eye Microsurgery. In 1988 he founded the
Fyodorov Eye Microsurgery Complex. In 1994 he endorsed and wrote the foreword to the American textbook (Radial and Astigmatic Keratotomy) by Dr. Spencer Thornton in which Thornton taught a surgical technique derived from but markedly different from the Fyorodov technique. ==Politics==