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| Testimonies | |
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Professor Graeme Clark - The Bionic Ear Graham, a committed Christian, overcame intense criticism, being continually told it was impossible and being refused funding over and over again. Graeme¹s father was very deaf and a pharmacist in Camden, NSW. At the age of 10 Graeme helped his father in the shop and read the biographies of Louis Pasteur and Madame Curie. These lit a fire in my belly to do research. He studied at Scots College and the University of Sydney where he went to a Christian Student Movement camp in 1955 and asked Jesus into his life. He became very self reliant as he dealt with emergencies all the time by himself. But on a boat in the Bay of Biscay he developed the symptoms of acute appendicitis and realised he might have to operate on himself at sea. For the first time I knew I could not rely on myself… “I had to rely on God. I started studying the Bible with a friend and realised its power”. In 1967 he brought his family to Melbourne and set up practice in Collins Street as an ear, nose and throat surgeon and started seeing profoundly deaf people who could not be helped by a hearing aid. Meanwhile in America the Blair Simmons multi electrode connector had been developed which allowed people to hear some sounds, but not speech. So he took his family to Sydney to study and worked in a laboratory to try and reproduce sounds in the brain by putting wires in the inner ear. He needed equipment which cost (then) $100 which neither he nor the university had, and he had to go around raising the money to buy it. Graeme explained that brain waves respond to sound waves and electrical signals could not reproduce all the sounds by responding in time. But he hoped it could be done by responding in place like a piano keyboard. But the scientific community refused to believe it was possible and continued to say he was either irresponsible or crazy so after he finished his PhD at Sydney University he had nowhere to go. At that time Melbourne University established a Chair in Otolaryngology and in 1970 he was appointed to it. He was given a lab in the mortuary of the Eye and Ear Hospital and three staff but he had to raise his own funds for research so at lunchtimes he would go and shake a tin at a city intersection and so would his secretary. The difficulties involved in developing the bionic ear included: the complexity of the inner ear; implantation could lead to the loss of needed nerve cells; speech is very complex; and the fear that children born deaf would not have the needed brain connections to hear. He took 1 Thessalonians 5 as his theme verse and spoke at many lunches to raise $100 here and $50 there towards his research. Then in 1973 Sir Reginald Ansett organised a telethon for his work. This happened three successive years. The original bionic ear was the most complex box of electronics ever seen in Australia. It was at the very start of the development of the silicon chip and contained information that would have required 4000 valves to contain it. But his colleagues were still saying it could not be done and that he should be forced to stand down from the chair. So he took Matthew 6:34 as his theme verse and prayed for peace. In 1977 he was sitting on a NSW beach with his children and threaded a blade of grass through a spiral sea shell and he saw how the information could be coded into the inner ear (Isaiah 42:3). In 1978 the operation was performed on the first patient, Rod. No-one knew whether or not it would work but when Rod first heard speech Graeme went into the next door lab and cried with joy and relief. But again they had no money so Graeme spoke to the then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and a heart pacemaker firm agreed to produce smaller, neater bionic ears. We are continuing to make leaps in analysing speech. It is now possible for people to hear over a telephone which was always previously impossible because they could not get cues from lip reading. And at last we are able to help children born profoundly deaf. It was in 1990 after an international trial that our bionic ear was the first ever approved by a regulatory authority for use in children 2-17. Now 50,000 people in 120 countries have cochlear ear implants they work in any language, he said. Graeme is currently working on leading edge research to repair spinal nerve damage. You can support Graeme's work by purchasing his book “Sounds of Silence”, the sale of which supports his research - or by contacting the Bionic Ear Institute as follows: Bionic Ear Institute |
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