Three scientists have won the 2013 Lasker Award for clinical research for their pioneering work on cochlear implants by giving the profoundly deaf the ability to hear, according to LA Times.
The decades of groundbreaking research by Graeme M. Clark, Ingeborg Hochmair and Blake S. Wilson - often in spite of overwhelming technical challenges and disapproval from their scientific peers - drew high praise from experts.
"These three scientists had the grit to pick 'impossible' projects and the courage to remain steadfast in the face of failure and criticism," Gerard O'Donoghue of the National Institute for Health Research in England wrote in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine. "Above all, they remained incurably passionate about achieving victory over one of humanity's most prevalent disabilities."
Some 360 million people suffer from serious hearing loss worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and until the last century it could be a lifelong debilitation with profound effects on daily life.
"For me there can be no relaxation in human society; no refined conversations, no mutual confidences," composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote in 1802, about a decade before becoming almost totally deaf. "I must live quite alone. Such experiences almost made me despair and I was on the point of putting an end to my life."
For the young, it can also have serious repercussions to their early brain development, particularly on the development of speech, language and later literacy.
"Low literacy leads to poor educational outcomes, limited employment opportunities and restricted participation in society," O'Donoghue wrote. But the design of a hearing aid was considered a technical challenge beyond humans' medical engineering capabilities.
