Mildred Weisenfeld

Mildred Mosler Weisenfeld (1921 – December 6, 1997) is the Brooklyn-born founder of national not-for-profit foundation the National Council to Combat Blindness in 1946, now known as Fight for Sight, an organization based in New York City that provides initial funds to promising scientists early in their careers. For 50 years, Weisenfeld was a one-woman campaign to increase funding for eye research, despite losing her own vision and having no scientific training.

At age 15, Weisenfeld began to lose her vision to degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Although she completed high school and went on to Brooklyn College, her eyesight worsened and her treatment options were few despite visiting more than 100 specialists in the U.S. and Europe. Weisenfeld was surprised to find that most eye and vision funding went into care for the blind rather than treatments or research. As she continued to search for treatment, she was urged by many of the eye specialists to encourage funding of research for eye disease, which totaled just a few thousand annually around World War II. By age 23, her sight was completely lost.

In 1946, 10 years after she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, Weisenfeld founded the National Council to Combat Blindness (NCCB), New York, at age 25 with $8 and no office.

Addressing how other nonprofits focused on adjusting people to their condition of vision problems, Weisenfeld was quoted May 23, 1948, in the New York Mirror as saying "something must be done beyond giving them a dog, a cane, or a Braille book. We must give those who need it the hope that science is actively probing the affliction robbing them of their sight." Weisenfeld herself never learned Braille or used a cane or a guide dog.

Known for her audacity (friends would call it chutzpah), Weisenfeld helped put vision research on the national agenda when she coordinated testimony on eye research before the House in 1949, which led Congress to recognize eye disease and create the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Blindness, and the 1968 establishment of the National Eye Institute in the National Institutes of Health.

Over the decades as Fight for Sight's executive director, Weisenfeld paid herself no salary (she lived on family money) and tirelessly worked six- or seven-day weeks to raise millions of dollars for research and launch the careers of many prominent vision researchers through Fight for Sight and its local women's leagues in New York (Manhattan; Brooklyn: Park Circle, Bensonhurst, Shorefront; Queens: North Shore, Seaside; Bronx, Long Island), Northern NJ, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Greater, Main Line, Cheltenham, and Northeast) and Florida (South Palm Beach, Hollywood, Delray, Deerfield Beach, Miami).Fight for Sight celebrates its 65th anniversary in 2011.

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