Seminar celebrates godsend for the deaf
Web Posted: 02/16/2007
Don Finley
Express-News Medical Writer
It wasn’t exactly “‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” But when Rod Saunders stood and saluted to a few notes of “God Save the Queen,” another inventor knew he was onto something.
It was 1978, and Saunders, who had lost all hearing in a car wreck a few years earlier, was the first patient to receive a surgically implanted “bionic ear,” a device that eventually would be known as the cochlear implant. Some 120,000 people worldwide with profound hearing loss have gotten them.
Unlike hearing aids, which amplify sounds, the cochlear implant converts sounds to electrical signals that travel through wires into the inner ear, stimulating the auditory nerve.
Friday at a reunion and conference at the Westin La Cantera Resort in San Antonio that marked the 25th anniversary of FDA approval, Saunders and inventor Dr. Graeme Clark told hundreds of implant recipients and their families from across the country the story of how the implant came to be — a story of serendipity, TV telethons and a eureka moment involving a blade of grass and a seashell.
Clark’s father, a pharmacist in a little town 30 miles south of Sydney, Australia, was hard of hearing. His embarrassed customers would whisper their requests for personal items, and the pharmacist would holler: “Would you speak up?”
Clark went on to medical school and became an ear, nose and throat doctor with an interest in hearing loss. Inspired by a report by Stanford University Professor Blair Simmons, who in 1962 implanted an electrode into an 18-year-old deaf patient and stimulated an auditory nerve response, Clark quit private practice and began to study the problem at the University of Sydney.
“I came to realize what little we could do to help deaf people. We used to tell them to really go into the woodwork. No one could help them.”
He found a job at University of Melbourne, but couldn’t find anyone to fund his research. His colleagues were hostile, he recalled. “Most scientists said it could not work and it would not achieve speech understanding.”
After earning only a few hundred dollars giving lunch speeches to groups like the Rotary Club, he attracted the interest of Sir Reginald Ansett, who owned two airlines and a Melbourne TV station. Ansett agreed to hold a telethon to raise money for Clark’s bionic ear research. For several years it was an annual event.
Luckily, the research began after the birth of the silicon chip, which allowed them to build small. The next problem was a surgical one: how to thread a small bundle of wires through the spiral-shaped cochlea, or inner ear. Early attempts in animals failed.
On a trip to the beach with his family, he threaded a long blade of grass into a nautilus shell and found that if the base were thicker than the tip it would pass easily into the center. That dictated the shape of his bundle of wires.
The next step was finding a suitable patient. Saunders, an amateur singer who had lost his hearing as an adult, was selected for his attitude as much as his condition. Fine-tuning the technology would be a long, arduous task. One early candidate had committed suicide.
After the surgery, Saunders could hear nothing, and everyone thought the experiment had failed. Two weeks later, someone discovered one of the leads had become disconnected. After it was plugged in, someone played a few notes of “God Save the Queen.” He stood and saluted.
Still, he couldn’t understand words. For more than a year, Clark and his team tinkered with the device and adjusted the frequencies. After 18 months, Saunders understood his first two words: “Hello, Rod.”
Today, Saunders — who until this trip had never been outside Australia — is on his third device. The newest model makes speech — although still a bit robotic — easier to understand. Music still doesn’t sound quite right.
“But the way people sing today,” he said, “I’m not missing anything.”
Link: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA021707.01B.cochlear.120792b.html
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