When was graeme clark born

Again it was a reasonable criticism. They said surgery would be dangerous and it could even lead to meningitis. Surgeons had embarked upon stapes surgery at that time. Stapes surgery, although not terribly well broadcast, did have risks and there were some people who died from meningitis after having stapes surgery.

So they had concerns. Then there was the third group. I always felt that we must work on adults first, for ethical reasons. But after working on adults who had hearing before going deaf, I started to work on children. This led to further hazards and problems. The Signing Deaf community said that I was doing something wrong and maybe even evil to operate on children when they should have been learning to sign.

So there were many criticisms. How did that feel personally? Was there a vulnerability for your reputation, for your position? I am sure that it had an effect on my reputation. I tried not to think too much about it and to focus on the work rather than to be too concerned.

But I know, from feedback, that there was a lot of criticism. My good friend and colleague, Professor Gerard Crock, and I both shared the problems of being the first professors of our specialty in a clinical domain. He would tell me that some of my colleagues had been to the vice-chancellor suggesting that I might take a new job or leave, as a reflection of the personal concern they had.

Yes, I had some wonderful supporters. In fact, they helped encourage me to keep going in spite of all the difficulties and criticisms. The people who were severely or profoundly deaf, who needed the device, were supportive in the hope that we would be able to do something for them. But there were others who helped or had children who had a hearing problem and wished to help as well. They helped in fundraising.

It was great to feel that there was good support, and I thank them. How did your family deal with what, at the time was public criticism?

How did your wife and family deal with that? It can affect the family. It was really my wife rather than the children.

My wife was an enormous support. I could go back and discuss all the difficulties with her. Yes, I did. I had a Christian faith. I was doing it, firstly, to see whether it was scientifically possible but also, with prayer, to see whether I was able to be used to do some good to help deaf people. It was in that the first multiple-channel cochlear implant was put in. What was it like when it was turned on? It was a very turbulent experience. We were going into completely new ground. I think it was the first fully implantable device and it was being put in against a lot of criticism.

The Eye and Ear hospital was very supportive. But they also went to see their legal advisers to make sure that they were covered legally if anything went wrong.

It did mean quite a lot of extra effort. But the staff were fantastic. Then the day came, 1st August Just beforehand I had been away for a weekend to recover and refresh. It was a bit of bedlam.

Rod Saunders, our first patient, had been admitted and was being prepared for surgery. I went to see Rod and tried to reassure him that all would be well. The surgery started and we took quite a lot longer than we would now. But I wanted to do everything to prevent an infection. One mistake with that first operation would have stopped the whole thing. Then I was operating on Rod. I was a little bit put off by the fact that the side I had chosen was the side he had had a craniectomy on.

It was not in view, but I had to be so careful not to enter the cranial cavity. We then were able to put the electrode in without too much difficulty. The staff at the theatre were wonderful. I know that the sister was on tenterhooks. She thought that Brian and I were very relaxed. Anyway, Rod recovered. He went back from the theatre to the wards. I had a somewhat restless night. It might lead to haemorrhage. And there was I, pressing onto the dura the sac surrounding the brain. So I was a little concerned that night that all would be well, and that Rod would recover well the next day.

Then three days later there was a code blue in the hospital. This worried me a little. I flew up the stairs like a prime athlete. I got there and it was bedlam. It was Rod. He had collapsed. Being an ear, nose and throat surgeon I had many patients faint in front of me when I was going to wash their sinuses out with a long trocar. So I knew well that Rod had fainted. Anyway, all was well. Sister had taken off his dressing and he had just collapsed.

But such was the tension around the ward and their concern for this patient that it did cause quite a disturbance. Anyway, Rod recovered from that. The wound healed up well and Rod was sent home and asked to come back within four or five weeks. A little bit longer than it is now. When everything was lined up, he heard nothing. So day one was very disappointing. We all went home pretty dejected, I can assure you. One last time — third time lucky — he came back.

In the meantime engineers had checked the system and found that they had, believe it or not, a loose connection. So it worked! It was a wonderful experience when Rod heard, out of the tinnitus background of his head noises, this different sound. As we turned the electrical current up, it got louder and louder. So we knew that his system had worked. That was only the first challenge. It was great that it worked. Then the next simple tests were to see whether he got different sensations for different sites of stimulation.

This whole procedure was based on the premise of multichannel stimulation. Fortunately, he did have different pitch sensations that we needed to explore later. The other thing that we did was to see whether he could respond to tones and stimulus rates, which was part of a single-channel system. In those days, when we played God Save the Queen , everyone stood to attention. Nevertheless, after that, we settled him down and played him our alternative, Waltzing Matilda , and I have a wonderful recording of Rod singing Waltzing Matilda.

Very interestingly, in his description, he said a lot about the psychophysics that we later learned. The song was a higher pitch than he could sing and he got rhythm not by the tone but by the variations in intensity and loudness. So, as happened later, the patients often were very good research subjects. So, for the next two months, until the end of the year, we had to do a series of psychophysical tests to see just what he could hear, what he could make of sensations and whether I could bring it together as a speech processing strategy.

At the last minute — almost at the end of the year — we did. Rod heard real speech sounds using electrical signals alone. When he did, I was so moved that I went into the next-door lab and burst into tears of joy because I knew then that all this effort probably had been worthwhile.

We met and talked often about it. In addition, Jim Patrick and Ian Forster helped with the electronics, but it was the three of us who worked through the questions. Bruce Millar, who had been one of the students and postdocs of Bill Ainsworth, with whom I had worked at Keele University, was now a very good speech scientist. I had supervised Joe initially on developing models of how cochlears function.

It was only when we had implanted a patient that I was able to work with Joe and develop an engineering type approach to psychophysics. But we really complemented each other. I had personally been helped by having taken study leave, when the telethon was on, to work with a speech science laboratory at Keele University in the UK. I had felt that one of the keys to all this was to understand speech, and in the Department we knew so little then about speech.

I had this feeling that the key was not physiology alone, which is what I had set out to do, but it would be speech science.

It turned out, for me, to be a very helpful approach. I came back from Keele in with a very strong interest in formants, which are key elements of speech. None of us knew much about formants. When I examined audiology students on formants, they said it was a very strange and unfair question. Of course, it is not now. At this stage there was real promise with the implant and no doubt you had something to say on the international stage.

What was it like coming into the cochlear implant field with your new data? Were you well received? Was it a collegial experience or was it more competitive in nature? The first indication of success came at the end of , just before the Christmas holidays.

I asked our audiologist, Angela Marshall, if she would do an open-set test. Having been appointed as the senior examiner in audiology, I was well aware of the testing. I needed an audiologist and Angela was on the teaching side. However, being the chief examiner, I had an inside running into who were the best audiologists. Lois Martin shone that year and, without all the niceties that you go through these days, I knew that Lois was a really likely person. After her examination, I remember running down the street to offer her a position.

Lois did a great job to help develop tests and evaluate Rod in the next months. It must have been about mid when the initial results were being presented.

Someone said when I had used film, I had altered the sync between the lip-reading and the speech, such was the scepticism. So it did need quite a lot of proof.

But that is one thing that we did do. I was convinced that right way was to operate on a small number of people — in this case, at first one — and do this testing thoroughly. Not to skimp the testing.

That proved, I believe, to be the right approach because then one could show the sceptics what the results were scientifically. But it did take quite a lot of time. It was not until July that I was prepared to operate on a second person, George Watson, to show that it was valid for other patients.

At the same time, when I went to the press to say that we were getting some interesting results, I got approached by 3M. They are a well-known company who were interested in medical technology at that stage.

They wanted to do something simple like the House single-channel implant. I wished they had offered money. I had to get money from some source and I turned to the Commonwealth Government of Australia. I was very fortunate that they had a new public interest scheme that was prepared to fund new, potentially interesting and commercially relevant research projects.

That meant that they were prepared to fund our research back in , after the initial results on Rod had come through. They did a wonderful job. I think they are an exemplar on how to fund this sort of research: one year at a time.

They give you some money. Soon after these initial exciting results, we were planning to do its commercial development. It was then made as a commercial device in I remember that well because I was a medical student and I was sitting here, watching the surgery. The whole focus changed when there was commercial involvement. How did that change the focus of your research?

That is a very important and fundamental question that nowadays is even more relevant than it was then. I have personal views on the subject about fundamental research and commercial research. Firstly, having been criticised for not doing pure enough research, it is odd that I am now someone who advocates more pure research rather than applied research. But I felt a commitment to bridging that divide. There was more research to do.

On the other hand, there was a responsibility and a need to get the device out into the marketplace as soon as possible.

The first people that came wanted help. I felt a need to direct some important areas of research with Cochlear Pty Ltd or Nucleus Limited, as it was, towards the commercial outcomes, but at the same time to keep the research going here at the University of Melbourne.

That is a different ball game, as you know. So initially there was a very close relationship between me personally, the research here and Cochlear, as it became. But, as the company grew, it needed to be more industrially relevant. It had to have a wider audience. Clark was particularly involved in the development of new generation bionic ear; and, the possibility of using plastics to join up the top and bottom of damaged spinal cords to enable people to walk again.

He also acted as a consultant for research into a bionic eye. Graeme Clark led the research team which developed the first prototype fully implantable multi-channel cochlear implant. Robert Kapsa and Graeme Clark worked together on the bionics, and particularly the organic chemistry, to develop an improved bionic ear.

Graeme Clark and Gordon Wallace worked closely on the bionics of the intellegent polymers and the biological application of the chemistry, and, the release of nerve growth factors. Change text:. Site navigation Home About Search Browse. Details Summary of Graeme Clark's Discoveries Using Electrical Stimulation of the Brain Perception: Psychophysics Temporal coding is essential for perception of low pitches and voicing; Place coding is essential for perception of timbre, vowels and consonants; Place coding of frequency requires early exposure to sound; Place coding is necessary for speech perception; Separate brain channels are required for temporal and place coding; Averaging over site of stimulation varies place pitch.

Bioengineering of the multi-channel cochlear implant Bionic Ear Clark's first scientific achievement in the development of the bionic ear was in Clark, J. Patrick, I. Forster, Y. Tong and R. Patrick and Q. Patrick, J. Millar, P. Seligman and Y. McDermott, P. Blamey, R. Black, G. Clark, D. Money, J. Patrick, Y. Clark and H. MD University of Sydney, Australia. Blamey, G. Dooley, G. Clark, P. Xu, J. Xu, H. Seddon, F. Neilson, G.

Clark, R. Vandali and G. Clark, L. Cohen and P. MD , Medizinishche Hochschule, Germany. Blamey, H. McDermott, B. Swanston, J. Patrick and G. DSc , University of Wollongong. LLD , Monash University. Charles Holland Foundation International Prize received. Career position - Lead Research Scientist in establishing the State Government of Victoria's Science, Technology and Innovation STI program, with the aim of bringing research and industry together to produce industrial outcomes.

It funded the Graeme Clark Chair in Audiology and Speech Science, and helped to sustain research and support into bionic ear and medical bionics generally. It has been developed industrially by the company Cochlear Limited, which has had the major share of the world markets for the last 25 years, in part due to the ongoing research led by Professor Clark.

Around , people of all ages worldwide - in over countries - have benefited from life-changing cochlear implant technology. When Clark started his research in he did so against considerable opposition from the scientific and medical community.

This meant that Clark had very little funding for his initial, crucial research. The big question was: what speech information could be transmitted through the bottle neck to provide speech understanding?

This seminal question could only be answered by testing with deaf people, and not by experimental studies on animals. Clark, also as a surgeon, opted correctly to develop a multi-channel device that was fully implantable with information and power transmitted through the intact skin, rather than run the risk of introducing infection through the skin using a plug and socket. This was to be a very expensive exercise that Clark was fortunately able to fund through the generosity of a philanthropically minded television proprietor running public telethons for donations.

Before operating on people there were many difficulties to resolve. His specialist ear surgeon colleagues considered that the inner ear should not be operated on - the very nerves that were to be stimulated could be destroyed. Middle ear infections, especially common in children, could spread to the inner ear and lead to meningitis. Furthermore, the electrode bundles would not pass around the tightening spiral of the inner ear to the speech region until Clark discovered in a shell a replica of the cochlea that it needed to be flexible at the tip and progressively stiffer towards the base.

Clark the surgeon operated on the first patients, as he was head of the clinic and felt it was his responsibility to lead in this way.