Graeme Clark
Watched his deaf father struggle and spent decades building the bionic ear others called impossible
Graeme Clark grew up in Camden, New South Wales, where his father, a pharmacist, was hard of hearing and had to ask customers to repeat their whispered requests across the counter. Clark decided early that he wanted to help deaf people. He studied medicine in Sydney, trained as an ear, nose and throat surgeon, and grew frustrated that surgery could do nothing for people whose inner ear had failed.
In the 1960s he read that electrical stimulation of the hearing nerve produced crude sensations of sound. Most experts believed it could never convey speech, and colleagues told him he was wasting a career. He gave up his practice for a PhD on the question and in 1970 became the first professor of otolaryngology at Melbourne. There was almost no money. His early research was paid for by a television appeal.
The hard problem was getting a bundle of electrodes deep into the spiral of the cochlea without tearing it. On holiday at the beach in 1977 he pushed blades of grass into a turban shell and saw that something flexible at the tip and stiffer behind would find its way round. The first implant went into Rod Saunders, who had lost his hearing in a car accident, in August 1978. When the device was switched on, he heard.
The Australian company Cochlear was formed to make the device. Hundreds of thousands of people now hear with it.