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  • Sounds of computer game

  • DX 22's over there. Yeah.

  • (Off screen) Sam, get off that silly Xbox please. Isaac, get ready for school. Come on boys.

  • Yes, Mum.

  • Ninety-nine per cent of the scientific community said that it was not possible, and I was seen as

  • somewhere between a dreamer and a clown.

  • Music

  • Not far from Sydney is the picturesque country town of Camden. It was here that Professor Graeme Clark

  • began what was to be a lifelong quest, one which transformed people's lives

  • and opened up new frontiers in Science and Medicine

  • His vision was sound - sound for the millions of people who could not hear

  • The development of the Bionic Ear or Cochlear Implant would not be an easy journey, and demanded courage,

  • determination and an insatiable thirst for knowledge - traits that were apparent very early in Graeme's life.

  • I don't remember too much after I was born till I was about three or four, but my parents told me

  • I was a bit of a handful. They told me that I used to wake up early and I've got a photo of them

  • taking me for a walk - poor parents!

  • I had a lot of energy and that attitude continued as I grew up till my sister came along, and then my brother

  • Graeme was three years older than I was and he was always the big brother and there was always

  • a lot of activity going on around Graeme.

  • As I grew up I was always saying to Mother,

  • 'What can I do now?' And she'd find things for me to do

  • and then I'd say the same again. And so she did have a hyperactive child on her hands.

  • I think that's what I remember most, that I actually didn't walk till I was two because I didn't need to...

  • he provided all the energy in the family!

  • That energy found many outlets. Growing up in this small country town, the young Graeme was free

  • to wander, riding his bike for miles, exploring the countryside he loved.

  • There was also sport, and cubs, and getting up to tricks with the kids next door.

  • And of course they did a famous trick with me where they dug a great big hole in the ground and put mud in it,

  • and then thought that I wouldn't know what was going on, camouflaged it. No, I wouldn't know, even though I was

  • watching it for days! And because I wouldn't walk over it, they actually pulled me over it, and what a surprise I had!

  • As a young boy, Graeme read widely, and was inspired by the story of Louis Pasteur and also Madame Curie.

  • By the age of ten he'd already decided he'd be an ear doctor, to help deaf people like his father, Colin,

  • pharmacist and optometrist for the local community.

  • In the pharmacy I would love to experiment with all the pharmaceuticals that he had, make smells,

  • surprise people with the various potions that I had been able to create, and worked with the chemist's material

  • and was known by the shop girls as 'the bunsen burner boy', who had come home from school. I learned too

  • at an early age that people did want certain things like contraceptives and others, and they wouldn't always

  • speak it in a loud enough voice for Dad, so he'd ask them to speak up loudly, so all the people in the shop

  • could hear, and they were embarrassed. And I tried to save him the embarrassment by going and saying,

  • 'I'll get that for you', and knew where these things were. But I don't think I could have wished for a better

  • mother or father. They both had different talents, they both interacted in different ways.

  • My mother was a creative person. She was a very gifted pianist, could sight-read at a young age,

  • and was an artist. She was in the Sydney Art Group and had scholarships.

  • And so I inherited some of those artistic, creative talents I think from Mum. My father was much more

  • the common sense practical person, ran a very good pharmacy.

  • He was always very wise, not that my mother wasn't. She had a more intuitive wisdom. My father had a more

  • practical wisdom. But combined they were great parents, and I think we as children realised that.

  • Yes, I can remember my father saying, 'Never try and cheat the taxman', so I don't! Are you listening?

  • Yes, he always brought us up to do the honorable thing and he certainly treated us all well as his family, yes.

  • He was a good man, but so was Mum, and I remember Dad saying, when Mum died, 'Your mother was...

  • you would describe your mother as pure in heart', and I thought that was a really lovely way of expressing

  • what he felt about her, but he was equally, totally honorable, yes. No, they were great people.

  • My brother was good because he was ten years younger than me,

  • and so in a way I brought him up almost like a father.

  • He sadly died some years ago, but it was really lovely having both a brother and a sister.

  • Bruce was very smart. He was very passionate about sport.

  • He did very well at school when he came back to the local high school. He was rather a home body, Bruce.

  • But Bruce had an amazing compassion

  • and he had the ability to care for everybody.

  • He was a really beautiful person.

  • In 1946, when Graeme finished primary school, Camden did not yet have a high school.

  • So it was off to Sydney Boys' High, spending weeknights with his grandparents

  • and then home for the weekend, a one hundred and thirty kilometre round trip.

  • The following year he began boarding at Scots College, where his sporting ability was soon noticed.

  • School terms were busy with rugby, cricket, cadets and study,

  • and Graeme made the most of his holidays back in Camden.

  • For me, to be in a country town, and free, with parents who were guiding me to do different things

  • was a really wonderful opportunity.

  • Graeme used his father's glass blowing equipment to make his own testing materials.

  • He set up a laboratory at home and experimented with plants, developing his dissection skills

  • whenever and wherever possible.

  • Yes, I did some slightly unusual things, but they weren't illegal I might say at that stage.

  • I did simple experiments in my mother's laundry to try to look at the biological side of things.

  • And so when I went to Medicine it was exciting. To learn about sexual and asexual reproduction in flowers

  • turned me on! And then we did all sorts of things, dissect stingrays and so on. Then of course to do

  • Anatomy in our second year and dissect the human body, that was very stimulating.

  • At the University of Sydney Graeme was already heading down what almost seemed a predestined path.

  • My real love was Function and Physiology.

  • I was starting to really get to love that, and in my third year of Medicine I was so taken with it

  • that I took my textbook away on holidays and finished up with a First Class Honours result

  • and an offer of doing research.

  • That same year Graeme discovered another love.

  • Well, I was fifteen, and I was at MLC Burwood with Robin, his sister, and she asked me to go up

  • for the weekend to Camden where they lived in the country. And so I went, and another friend.

  • They got off the train at Campbelltown and two pretty MLC girls were on the train, and I took notice.

  • And I remember Graeme, walking along the platform at Campbelltown Station, in a brown sports coat,

  • and slightly wavy hair, and a nice smile on his face.

  • Then I went in the afternoon, to give them a little bit of entertainment, took them out to the local golf club.

  • And that was quite a bit of fun!

  • I remember him saying what a terrible shot he'd done and I thought it was pretty good.

  • They had never played golf and I thought I was pretty good. And I gave them some instruction, and I thought

  • it was really quite nice being able to hold Margaret from behind and show her how to play these shots.

  • Yes, that night, I remember they had a clock, the church clock, it struck every quarter of an hour,

  • and I had trouble getting to sleep. Maybe it was excitement too. I don't know!

  • But it was early days. They were both young, and needed to focus on their studies.

  • Graeme began his clinical training, working with patients in the wards. He loved this part of it so much

  • that he spent much of his holidays gaining experience with Dr Crookson, a local doctor and surgeon.

  • He was the epitome of the old-fashioned doctor who did everything. And he took me under his wing. He'd let me

  • go and watch and maybe even do a little assisting when he did gastrectomies, taking out the stomach of some

  • of the locals, and all sorts of operations, let me take blood from some of his patients.

  • Graeme's passion for all aspects of medicine saw him top his final year at Sydney University.

  • Over the next few years Graeme crammed in a range of surgical experience,

  • with residencies at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred and Royal North Shore hospitals.

  • He was also seconded to the busy casualty department of the Wollongong Hospital.

  • Here, Doctor Clark operated on patient, Clark, with anaesthetist, Clark, in the Clark Theatre.

  • Coincidences seemed to come Graeme's way. At RPA he was appointed Registrar of Brain Surgery,

  • and then of Ear, Nose and Throat, both areas intrinsic to his future work.

  • He had also, by chance, met up again with Margaret Burtenshaw,

  • whom he had most definitely not forgotten over the last five years.

  • We got together again when I was over the problems of working like a slave as a resident

  • at Prince Alfred and the North Shore hospitals.

  • And then I met Margaret again after our youthful friendship and knew that she was the right one.

  • She was the nicest girl I'd ever met, and still is.

  • I went round to visit Robin who was in a little flat in my suburb. She had done Pharmacy and I hadn't seen her

  • for a while and I thought, 'Oh I'll go around and see Robin'. And when I was there Graeme visited

  • and well, from that time, you know, we found we had a lot to talk about.

  • And it wasn't, yes, that was November of a year, and we were engaged by the next April.

  • On the 27th of December 1961, Graeme and Margaret married.

  • Three days later they were on their way to the U.K.

  • We went to England, as most did those days, to get post-graduate training

  • in surgery at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital and the

  • Royal College of Surgeons of England and Edinburgh. So I'm a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons

  • in General Surgery and then also in Ear, Nose and Throat Surgery.

  • Returning to Australia, Graeme and Margaret were now expecting their first child, and needed a stable income.

  • So my father had a friend who was a pharmacist and then an ENT specialist here in Melbourne,

  • and he was looking for a partner, so I came to Melbourne as the surgeon

  • in the partnership and earned my living that way. And that's how we got back to Melbourne

  • and I was in that private practice for three years.

  • Graeme was frustrated at being unable to help profoundly deaf patients, and believed there had to be a way.

  • And I took out the latest paper to read to be up to date, and saw this article by Blair Simmons where he'd

  • actually stimulated one profoundly deaf person who had some hearing sensations but couldn't get

  • speech understanding. And I said there and then - it lit the fire in the belly, a bushfire - that this is really what

  • I wanted to do. I wanted to be, for better or worse, I wanted to help people who were profoundly deaf.

  • For some reason that was what I'd been sort of working towards, unbeknownst to me sometimes,

  • and that's where I really found a fit.

  • So it was arranged. Graeme was offered a research position at Sydney University.

  • The family made the move late in 1966 -' Graeme, Margaret, and their two daughters,

  • Sonya, not quite three, and Cecily, just sixteen months old.

  • When I left private practice to go to Sydney University to do what I believed to be important basic

  • neuro-physiological research, there was no likelihood necessarily that it would work, because

  • ninety-nine per cent of the people - the scientists of the day - said it would not work.

  • And I was seen as foolish and other things. I was called 'that clown Clark', and there were comments made

  • that it would be as successful as putting a light-bulb in the backside and turning the electricity on so

  • that was the attitude, and so I left in that climate to give up my partnership and become a poor PhD student.

  • Yes, we had a car that packed up when we were thinking we'd take a trip back to Melbourne and visit

  • people in Melbourne, and it stopped, and never went again. So we left it at Gundagai tip.

  • We didn't have money to buy another second-hand car so I had to travel everywhere by public transport

  • or good will of friends. But it turned out to be a blessing because there's nothing like standing at a bus stop,

  • waiting for a bus, to think. And I learned at the University of Sydney to think.

  • And that's the difference between being a surgeon and a research scientist.

  • You have lots of mental challenges that you've got to think through.

  • The trick with cochlear implants is not getting people to hear. That's actually easy. You can put a wire

  • in the ear and you can send a current down it and people will hear something. The trick is getting them to hear

  • something that's useful to them, and what's useful is hearing speech in particular, for communication,

  • and making that as clear as possible.

  • Graeme's thesis focussed on exactly this problem - how to enable speech recognition

  • through electrical stimulation? He knew that twenty thousand nerve-endings in the brain

  • are involved in normal hearing. Through his research he worked out how to electrically stimulate the

  • important nerve-endings, using just ten or so electrodes.

  • To Graeme it made sense, but he had to turn that theory into reality. There was a lot of work

  • still to be done, and his three year term at Sydney University was now over.

  • As one door closed, another opened. In 1969 the University of Melbourne was looking

  • to appoint a Foundation Professor of an entirely new department.

  • The chair of Otolarangology was the first in this country and it was at a time when Ear, Nose and Throat work

  • was not necessarily seen as elite, academically. It used to be thought of as taking out tonsils and snotty noses

  • and so on. Of course, times have changed and it's one of the high flyers now, but at that stage

  • the University of Melbourne, the academic side was more into the traditional subjects like Ancient History

  • and Mathematics and they didn't even see a place for Medicine, but certainly not Otolaryngology.

  • This break from tradition, and Graeme's appointment as Chair, produced a groundswell of criticism

  • and ridicule directed at Graeme by many of his peers.

  • You know he got told by many people during that time this was a lot of nonsense, and his colleagues

  • were not all that supportive. I know that they've turned around now, quite a lot, but the fact is

  • back then colleagues, both scientific colleagues and ENT colleagues were not necessarily supportive,

  • but he had that perseverance to say, 'Well, this is what I'm doing with my life and I'll keep it going'.

  • Graeme is a person that feels things very, very deeply. He's not able to just say, 'Oh, I can brush that aside'.

  • I'm sure he would have felt it very deeply, but I think he just had

  • the courage of his convictions and faith, that he needed to go on.

  • Well, when there's criticism and difficulty, we can always pray about it,

  • and that was very important really. Graeme prayed constantly really.

  • And the Church, we went to church, and that was always a help and I think

  • just believing that God could help you and guide you.

  • My Christian experience has been hard earned and I tried to live it in the real world,

  • and developing the Bionic Ear was as hard a part of the real world

  • as I could have experienced. I can assure you it was one of the most demanding experiences of my life.

  • Well, we'd talk about it. He was always willing to talk. You know, that's important. So I could

  • be a sounding board, and that helps. Some men just bottle up, and then it's hard to help them.

  • So I think he was saved by that.

  • I don't think it impacted our lives when we were very young very much because Mum was such a constant,

  • steady support, not only to Dad, but certainly to us.

  • Margaret was a young schoolgirl friend, and a great supporter, a great person,

  • and I have lots to owe her for her tremendous support that she's given in many ways.

  • Yeah, that saying, about behind a successful man is a strong woman, couldn't be more true,

  • when you think about them.

  • Although the hours were long, Graeme was able to enjoy family life, especially weekends.

  • The family loved it at home in Eltham. It was a haven for Graeme and Margaret.

  • There was plenty to do, finishing off the house they'd built, setting up the garden,

  • and simply enjoying every aspect of their one acre property.

  • For the children there was much to do, the perfect place to burn off an abundance of energy.

  • Graeme's parents would often come down from Sydney, and when Robin and Bruce arrived with their families,

  • it was quite a gathering.

  • Back at work in Melbourne, pressure for funding continued.

  • When I took the chair I was told I had to raise my own money and I got $6,000 a year from the faculty,

  • and the rest was up to me. And I could see it was going to cost some hundreds of thousands of dollars

  • to develop the first prototype electronics and I just didn't have that sort of money.

  • But Graeme had a lot of support from people who could either help him directly,

  • and I'm thinking of for example the Murdoch family.

  • That generosity from private individuals and foundations

  • enabled Graeme to put together a small team and begin the essential research,

  • and eventually even buy a computer.

  • When you think about it now, we take so much for granted, for sure.

  • We needed to use computers to analyse the brain responses that we got from physiology.

  • We needed computers to analyse the speech signals that we were getting, and how to manipulate those.

  • Now what we don't realise is that the memory for these computers, and computing, was 4K,

  • four thousand bytes. Nowadays we're talking in terms of hundreds of thousands - megabytes...millions.

  • There was an extraordinary team spirit there and people came from different disciplines.

  • We had, I mentioned, pre-Med Science students, psychologists, I had a background in Physics

  • and developing expertise in Physiology (in fact my PhD ended up being in auditory neurophysiology),

  • mathematicians, engineers, but all of these were important.

  • The psychologists, the behavioural people were interested in doing behavioural experiments

  • with animals to see if electrical stimulation of their nerves could distinguish between

  • sounds of high pitch, to low pitch, and so on - all necessary conditions for ultimately

  • developing a bionic ear.

  • The group that was doing the funding for the research, really had expert consultants they would go and talk to,

  • and so the view from them was very negative.

  • So when it came to Graeme applying to the National Health and Medical Research Council for grants,

  • and I don't know the reasons, but he didn't get the support that he probably deserved because

  • I'm not sure that everyone could quite think on the same wavelength as Graeme.

  • And so it was always thumbs down from them, no money from them.

  • Graeme managed to generate some funds speaking to community service clubs

  • such as the Apex Club of Melbourne.

  • And it got onto the ABC news that they'd raised a thousand dollars - of sufficient interest then -

  • and who should be watching the opposition's news but Sir Reginald Ansett. He was just setting up

  • Channel '0' as it was called then and he was keeping his eye on what the others were doing, and so he saw that,

  • and a light went on and he thought 'That's really what I need for a telethon for Channel 0'.

  • But for Channel 0, as it was then, and Reg Ansett to say, 'We'll run a telethon for you over a fixed period,

  • and from my memory it was probably six hours or something like that, just for one project within one department,

  • it was quite...it was quite remarkable!

  • Tina was here and we're here to take your calls. So what about anyone from Traralgon,

  • ring Coral on 2340011 and have a chat to your favourite weather girl. OK?

  • I'd love to take your call too, please do phone in.

  • Your help is needed to assist in rehabilitating people with a permanent hearing loss. Rehabilitation costs

  • money, and that's what this telethon is all about.

  • And it brought in some money just to start us rolling and, you know, this was riches to me.

  • Ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars was just unbelievable.

  • We thought they were so exciting, like a concert. You know the Applause sign would flash and we'd be

  • screaming out. So that was really exciting.

  • It was sufficiently of interest then for Reg to have a second major telethon in '74, another one in '75 and '76.

  • But that was enough to get the electronics developed and some staff like Jim Patrick and others

  • to develop the first prototype to see if it would work.

  • Electrical Engineering here at the University of Melbourne was very lucky to have a David Dewhurst,

  • who actually started biomedical engineering in the late '70s. '77 he started up the course,

  • and Melbourne was the first university to offer Biomedical Engineering.

  • The Department of Electrical Engineering through David Dewhurst was the first time really that

  • an Australian university had actually had contact with Biology and Medicine. It was ground breaking stuff.

  • And David Dewhurst started working with Graeme Clark with a few students of his.

  • David had two very good students, particularly Ian Forster, who was doing a PhD in Engineering,

  • and David had him working over with me and we both supervised Ian,

  • and then there were other linkages developed.

  • He had put a lot of effort into gathering together PhD students mostly, but with skills in the areas that

  • he saw were going to be needed to really work on all the aspects of the cochlear implant design.

  • So he had, I don't know, a dozen PhD students and then of course access to their supervisors in other faculties.

  • So here one was in the medical faculty, in Otolaryngology, but actually with connections

  • through to Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, all these really very skilful people

  • who then of course contributed through their students. It was a wonderful group.

  • I set up, I changed the Department of Otolaryngology to become virtually an Engineering-cum-Biology laboratory.

  • In fact the area, for example, where I used to set aside to wash wax out of people's ears became

  • an electronics lab.

  • Oh well, there was a huge spirit in the place, there really was. Some of the experiments would go through

  • the night, to the next morning, and if it had to be done, people would certainly...that was just how it worked.

  • And he was there, contributing to the effort in doing that as well. So yeah, the mood overall was really good.

  • And at one stage the Department of Otolaryngology for ENT was the second largest purchaser

  • of electronic parts in the whole of the University of Melbourne.

  • I think people must have wondered what on earth I was doing!

  • Always a big picture person, Graeme didn't confine his thinking to just the technology. In 1974 he established

  • a post-graduate audiology school and became Lecturer and Chief Examiner.

  • Graeme knew that right from the start he needed the engineers, audiology, psychologists, the whole group.

  • He tried to get good people together, covering all the disciplines, and he listened to them all. He just didn't

  • sit there and say, 'Well I'm the boss and we're doing it this way.' He would listen to that group of fairly young

  • people and act on that, and that was so important. That's what really got it together.

  • He sought knowledge in all areas he considered would contribute to the project's success.

  • He and the family went to England for five months, where he studied Speech Science at Keele University.

  • This was a critical step in my career, to go to England. It was right at the stage I was getting money from the

  • telethon, was meant to turn up to the telethons to help raise the funds, but knew that

  • if I didn't learn more about speech understanding, then it would not be easy to do whatever was needed

  • if the cochlear implant or bionic ear was to work.

  • His experiments at Keele identified what were the most important speech frequencies and their intensities,

  • associated with vowels and consonants - the basics of speech.

  • Back in Melbourne, work continued on the advanced electronics of the implant.

  • It was just at the right time, when these things were becoming available, and we were able

  • to harness those and use it. It was told to me it was beyond the capabilities of silicon chip work

  • to put such a complex device in a human being.

  • We just have been very lucky all the way through. That chip with Ian and I, if we tried to do that

  • two years before, we couldn't have. That technology wasn't available.

  • It was done too against a lot of perplexity on the part of Australian industry. Can we do it? And we did.

  • With the technology now well in hand, Graeme turned his attention to selecting

  • a suitable person for the first implant.

  • At first when I asked for people, patients, no-one came forward because they were all being told,

  • 'Don't go and see Clark', and 'It won't work'.

  • Some people however were not deterred.

  • My recollections for Rod - I talked to him a lot over the time - he was in his mid forties,

  • had a car accident, went profoundly deaf really overnight, had teenage children and a wife

  • that he only could communicate with when they wrote to him, and that really frustrated him,

  • and so he was determined to do something.

  • (Graeme) Good Morning, Rod.

  • (Graeme) Good Morning

  • (Rod) Good Morning.

  • (Graeme) Yes.

  • (Rod) How are you?

  • (Graeme) How are you?

  • (Rod) Oh, not too bad thanks.

  • (Graeme) How old are you?

  • (Graeme) How old are you?

  • (Rod) I'm sorry.

  • (Graeme) Are you...How old...your age?

  • (Graeme) Your age?

  • (Graeme) How old

  • (Graeme) are

  • (Graeme) you?

  • (Rod): Oh, getting too old!

  • For years Graeme had been planning the surgery technique, but in 1977 one step still eluded him.

  • How could he safely guide a bundle of wires into the cochlea, a spiral that narrowed and tightened

  • as it neared the hearing nerves?

  • He mulled over this problem while sitting on the beach at Minnamurra, near Kiama.

  • And I picked up shells and they were similar in shape to the spiral of the human cochlea,

  • and I experimented with grass blades, dune grasses and little flexible twigs, and found the fairly simple

  • principle that if it's very flexible at the tip, stiffer at the base, that it would go in, around that spiral,

  • and not bind on the outside as these other electrodes were doing. So I thought, that's it!

  • I cut short our holiday...a little bit...and we came back to Melbourne and that principle worked, and it's really

  • been a fundamental principle that's been used in all of the cochlear implant electrode arrays since.

  • On the first of August, 1978, Graeme took a deep breath and began operating on Rod Saunders.

  • He was assisted by Doctor Brian Pyman in a mammoth nine-hour operation.

  • Today it's fairly standard, and over and done with in just a couple of hours.

  • After a month and two false starts due to technical problems, Rod was successfully switched on.

  • At first we didn't know what people would hear, and so we played the rhythm and the intonation of

  • we thought a song that he would know, and we thought, well the first one would be

  • 'God Save the Queen'. So anyway Rod was played 'God Save the Queen', and before we knew

  • where we were, Rod stood to attention as was the custom, pulled all the leads out of the equipment,

  • and so we have no recording.

  • Rod heard sound, but speech had to be worked on. Over the next few months Graeme's knowledge

  • of Speech Science proved its worth.

  • We'd worked out how to process speech reasonably well by the simple clue given by Rod Saunders,

  • that when we stimulated different electrodes in his

  • inner ear, he heard a vowel sound. It wasn't just heard

  • as pitch, or timbre as we call it, but it was a vowel. That put the clue together to break speech down

  • into these special resonances called formants, and we did that for Rod and at the end of '78

  • we played him our first speech test and my audiologist, I asked if she'd give him the absolute standard test,

  • and she wasn't keen to do it, because at that stage she didn't think it would work.

  • Anyway, I managed to encourage her to do it.

  • (Audiologist) Bail.

  • (Rod) Bail.

  • (Audiologist) Mail.

  • (Rod) Mail.

  • (Audiologist) Good.

  • (Graeme) Just for fun!

  • (Rod) Where it's going to go to here, I haven't a clue.

  • (Audiologist) Raw.

  • (Rod) Raw.

  • (Rod) No, I didn't see it.

  • And I was so overcome with emotion, of joy, I think it was only the second time,

  • I went into the next-door lab and I simply burst into tears of joy.

  • Rod Saunders was undeniable proof that the Bionic Ear worked, and the Australian Government took notice.

  • Malcolm Fraser and his cabinet realised that Australia was not earning enough money from industry and our

  • intellectual contributions, and it was put forward by his minister, Ian Macphee, that there should be

  • a special program to encourage science in this country to develop things that are helpful for industry,

  • and they set up this Public Interest Grants scheme.

  • It didn't take long to be convinced by Graeme that it was absolutely the most wonderful thing

  • that could be done, not just for those with hearing impairment, but for Australian industry as well.

  • It should not be another project that just fell by the wayside.

  • And it was fortunate that during that period of time, discussions with government, meeting their

  • representatives, and a very careful analysis, that they finally agreed in January 1979 to fund it,

  • but only after we had operated on Rod Saunders and shown that it was possible.

  • This was a crucial time for the development of Australian industry, and of course the skills

  • that go with it. Too many research and development projects had not been undertaken,

  • too many Australian inventions had languished and had either not ever been developed,

  • or had been developed by commercial interests overseas. So here we had the opportunity.

  • And the Department of Productivity was looking for a commercial partner for the university project,

  • and they found Nucleus, which was the company that was the parent company of Telectronics,

  • the pacemaker company and Allsonics, an ultrasound company, and a number of other biomedical companies.

  • And so they were interested in developing the Bionic Ear and they actually had all the technology

  • which we needed to do it because they were already into implantable devices,

  • which is the really, really hard part.

  • The Government established a Public Interest Grant, with funding spread over four phases.

  • All of these were conditional on specific targets that pushed both the science

  • and the engineering to new levels.

  • So that was first of all to do a market survey and development of a cost plan with the Nucleus Group,

  • with Telectronics, and down here we were implanting two more subjects, and so that happened in 1979.

  • Also in Melbourne, intensive work was underway to improve the speech processor.

  • Well, Ian Forster was the guy who was the original electrical engineer, whose

  • photograph you can see with the chip.

  • Then Peter Seligman joined us after Ian went off to Switzerland, and Peter

  • was very interested in how we could turn this computer into something that the patients could wear.

  • So you need, for a cochlear implant device you need an external as well as the internal device

  • that takes the sound, and processes it and sends it into the internal device.

  • And Peter was the first one to... he came in with the mission I suppose to,

  • bring that down from a whole computer, down to a wearable device.

  • They were building a box that was about the size of a TV set, and the idea was that the

  • patient would sit in a room, next to his speech processor, and people would sort of hold

  • a microphone and be able to talk to him.

  • And I could see that you could do this in a much simpler way. So instead of doing the job I was

  • employed to do, I started sneaking off and doing my own thing, and building a much simpler

  • speech processor. So then I built something which was about the size of a binoculars case.

  • And he was able to achieve that in, it would have been ë80 or ë81, around that time when I'd just started,

  • and we thought that was a great achievement. But that was a whole big box, but it was at least,

  • could be carried around by the two patients we had at that time.

  • The government support back in 1981, Phase Two of this project, which was to build the device, and so

  • they paid their money to do that, and that was 1.6 million, then the next thing, after we had the

  • Proof of Concept with six patients in Melbourne, was to take that to the US, as the first

  • market-place which was identified by the market survey. And that was going to cost a lot of money,

  • and so the government then came to the party with another grant, another 2.3 million,

  • which was actually to fund the conduct of a clinical trial in the US.

  • You had a very serious, very committed, very knowledgeable group of people working in the area,

  • who understood the physiology, understood the psychology as well,

  • understood the electronics, understood all the elements pulling it together.

  • So I was, I think I was really very confident that they would make it and that, because of the significance

  • of what they were doing, and because there was no direct comparison,

  • that they would be likely to have that international impact.

  • Well, I know they got back, I think it was twenty million dollars in terms of royalty payments,

  • back in the days when the royalties, the licence agreement was there.

  • I haven't done the sums but I think they're a long way ahead.

  • Unlike some issues, other issues that I raised, I didn't have to argue all that hard with my colleagues

  • because it was really self-evident. It was, as we say these days - a no brainer!

  • The implant now is approved in most markets for severe to profound hearing loss because it does much more now

  • than it did at the beginning. At the beginning it just was a supplement to lip-reading, it helped lip-read.

  • Now the average person can use a telephone.

  • I believe those ideas can be repeated, and we have an example of how it can be done. We can copy what

  • was excellent in that environment, the collaboration, the multi-disciplinarity that underlies all of this success

  • in a way, and I believe it can be done again. And to some extent it's that belief,

  • and that example that Graeme gave, that gave us the vision also to work on the Bionic Eye.

  • When I first heard about the project I thought, 'Oh wow, this has got a long way to go'.

  • I really had absolutely no idea that in three years we would have a product that was safe and reliable

  • and marketable, and that within four years we would be selling that in the United States.

  • That was from 1979 to 1983. That was just an amazing amount of progress.

  • If you didn't have Graeme and his persistence and these other qualities,

  • I just don't know whether it would have come together.

  • It's been wonderful. We've got hundreds of thousands of patients, people who can hear, who previously

  • couldn't hear or had lost their hearing.

  • And as the world economy develops, I mean it's millions of people,

  • it will be millions of people that will eventually be helped by cochlear implants in particular.

  • It's a long way from the first dreams, Graeme's first dreams, I mean, are delivered and then some.

  • It is the reward for all the blood, sweat and tears, and there were a lot of challenges, there was

  • a lot of angst, a lot of hardship, but now when I look back, and I see these children's lives,

  • in particular changed, I feel so grateful.

  • Well, it's amazing to think of, that this thing worked. And even when it worked we couldn't imagine

  • the difference it would make, and how it would help so many people. You know, it's a miracle really.

  • I think my brother's marvellous, but I think in life we're all equal. And we all have a different journey,

  • and Graeme was given gifts that were pretty unusual. He was given Margaret and he's been given a good,

  • a wonderful family. So if you're given a lot, you need to give a lot back. That's what I see.

  • To whom much is given, much shall be expected. And I think that's what he's done.

  • Family tell me I must slow down, and I owe it to them to slow down, and honestly, I do try hard to slow down.

  • But I owe a debt to them as well. So there's ten grandchildren, five children and their spouses,

  • and I like that too. They're special.

  • (Music)

  • Thirty years has changed the world

  • A small group from Melbourne that had to be heard

  • Don't try, you crazy fools

  • It cannot work, it's against all the rules

  • And armed with the brains of Peter and James

  • And Graeme's persistence to guide us

  • We forged ahead where they feared to tread

  • And showed that the dream could inspire us

  • We had one dream

  • That children would hear

  • And those children might sing

  • Who knew back in '82

  • Sometimes your dreams can come true

Sounds of computer game

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