National Eye Institute

National Eye Institute

National Eye Institute logo
Abbreviation	NEI
Formation	1968
Type	U.S. government agency
Legal status	Active
Headquarters	Bethesda, Maryland
Region served	United States
Official language	English
Director	Dr. Paul A Sieving
Parent organization	National Institutes of Health
Affiliations	United States Public Health Service
Website	www.nei.nih.gov

The National Eye Institute (NEI) was established in 1968 and is located in Bethesda, Maryland. The NEI is one of 27 institutes and centers of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The mission of NEI is to prolong and protect the vision of the American people. The NEI conducts and performs research into treating and preventing diseases affecting the eye or vision.

Before the NEI was established, primary responsibility for vision research at NIH was done by the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Blindness (NINDB) (which is now known as the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke). NINDB was established in 1950, after President Harry S. Truman signed the Omnibus Medical Research Act. The bill agreed to establish new separate institutes within NIH. This marked the beginning of vision research at a federal level.

Organizing, structuring, and separating vision and neurological research was a challenge at NINDB. NIH did its best to provide an equal budget plan for separate funding for vision research within NINDB. But there was not enough support and staff to handle more projects then what they were already undertaking. This led to the vision research program losing sufficient funding compared to the neurological research program. Some prominent members within the vision research community were not satisfied with how NINDB was operating. They did not approve of combining the two subjects of vision and neurological research together. This prompted some leading academic ophthalmologists and vision community supporters which included Bernard Becker, David Cogan, Edward Maumenee, Michael Hogan, John McLean, Frank Newell, Jules Stein, and Frank Winter to campaign for a separate institute that solely focused on vision research.