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The multichannel cochlear implant for severe-to-profound hearing loss

Nature Medicine volume 19, pages 1236–1239 (2013)Cite this article

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It is a great and unexpected honor to receive the Lasker∼DeBakey Award for Clinical Medical Research. My research team and I consider it a privilege to be able to give hearing and speech understanding to severely or profoundly deaf people.

To help severely deaf people, I commenced training in 1962 as an ear surgeon but soon came to realize what little we could do, even with powerful hearing aids. This realization led me to start research on auditory neurophysiology at the University of Sydney in 1967. My aim was to see how well electrical stimulation of the auditory pathways could code environmental sounds and speech.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Temporal and place coding of sound.
Figure 3
Figure 4: Early implants.
Figure 5: Psychophysical studies in the first patient.
Figure 6: Other important milestones.

References

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Acknowledgements

First, I would like to express deep gratitude to my wife Margaret; our children: Sonya, Cecily, Roslyn, Merran and Jonathan, and their spouses; our grandchildren; and our parents. It has been exhilarating leading a talented research team and being part of a unique development by Cochlear Ltd. I would like to thank the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney and the Eye & Ear Hospital for crucial support. We were greatly helped by funding from the TV Channel 10 Nerve Deafness Appeal, a Public Interest Grant from the Australian government, the Bionic Ear Institute and many trusts and foundations. Our scientific studies and development were supported in particular by the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia, the Australian Research Council, the Cooperative Research Centres Program and the US National Institutes of Health. I thank NICTA for support for research to develop more advanced cochlear implants to achieve high-fidelity sound and better hearing in noise. I would also like to thank David Lawrence, Debbie Mussett, Jonathan Clark and Ian Rutherford for help in completing this manuscript.

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  1. National ICT Australia (NICTA) Victoria Research Laboratory, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Graeme M Clark

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Clark, G. The multichannel cochlear implant for severe-to-profound hearing loss. Nat Med 19, 1236–1239 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3340

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