The lank-haired teenager in the black T-shirt was stunned. We were both standing in the damp twilight outside San Francisco’s Cow Palace, waiting for the doors to the Megadeth concert to open, and I had asked him a patently insane question.
Wear earplugs during the concert? he echoed, blankly. Why would I do that? Earplugs are, like, condoms for your ears.
His nonchalance about strafing his ears with 115 decibels of heavy metal is sad but understandable: hearing has always been the Cinderella of the senses. Helen Keller thought its absence was more painful and isolating than blindness, yet most people say they’d rather lose hearing than sight. Such second-class status has had a predictable effect on research funding (low), the number of scientists attracted to the field (few), and the rate of progress (slow). As recently as the early 1980s auditory researchers were still laying the foundations for the microscopic and biochemical basis of hearing while their counterparts in vision research were, so to speak, putting up the drywall. As for the numbers, sniffed one biophysicist, Go to the vision meetings and it’s like the Super Bowl or something. He estimates that serious auditory researchers might, worldwide, number 200.
But Cinderella had her moments in the limelight, and it looks as though the Cinderella sense is about to do the same. Technological advances in laboratory techniques, coupled with an aging population--and perhaps a few influential government boomers who put in some hours listening to Stairway to Heaven at top volume--portend a bright future for the field. There is already a whisper of a hint, in fact, that scientists may someday be able to restore some of the hearing receptors my young friend was so casually sacrificing.
Those hearing receptors are called hair cells, specialized sensory cells that are among the most remarkable structures in the body. Only 32,000 strong (compared with, say, the eyes’ 300 million light- sensitive cells), under constant siege from age, drugs, and a world that includes snowmobiles and jet planes as well as Megadeth, they are all that stand between us and silence. Like princesses turning straw into gold, the inner hair cells transform the mechanical forces of sound into the electrical impulses of hearing.
