Hear, hear: Graeme Clark wins Florey Medal

It’s 33 years since Rod Saunders received the first Cochlear implant and had his hearing restored. And now Professor Graeme Clark has received the CSL Florey Medal for his instrumental role in inventing the bionic ear and helping over a quarter of a million people around the world to hear again.

Yet Clark, 76, is not ready for retirement quite yet, and intends to return to the lab and continue research on how the brain responds to the bionic implant, and how the device can be even further improved, allowing recipients to not only understand speech but to enjoy music.

Professor Clark has announced that he will be joining NICTA, Australia’s national ICT Research Centre of Excellence, to help them close the gap between electronics and the brain.

He’ll be working with Terry Caelli, a research director at NICTA whose training and career bridges maths, mathematical psychology and physics.

Together, modelling the brain using supercomputers, they hope to develop a model of how the brain translates sound into speech, and from that knowledge, to build a true hi-fi implant.

To do so, they’ll be using brain and ear samples generously donated by Rod Saunders, who died in 2007 and bequeathed his body to medical science in the hope it could help more people hear again.

There are two major challenges in providing hearing to the profoundly deaf via an electronic device which connects into the auditory nervous network in the inner ear.

First, you have to develop a sophisticated and robust link between the external device and the sensory nerves. Then you need to feed electrical impulses which are capable of being interpreted by the brain through that connection. For high fidelity sound, both these will have to be upgraded.

At Wollongong, in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science which Clark helped to establish, he and his colleagues have been working on polymers that can be directed or steered by electrical impulses.

The researchers aim to develop electrodes which, even after they have been surgically implanted in the cochlea, can be moved to the best position, close to the nerves – in effect, they would allow the implant to be tuned.

The CSL Florey Medal, issued by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science (AIPS), is one of the most prestigious accolades issues to Australian life science researchers, and comes with $50,000 in prize money donated by CSL.

“Graeme Clark is a fitting winner,” said CSL Chief Scientist, Dr Andrew Cuthbertson. “Professor Clark had a big idea and took it through a tortuous scientific and regulatory path to create a device that has transformed the lives of people around the world. His ideas have seeded many other initiatives in bionics.”