The recent debt ceiling negotiations here in Washington DC disgusted people throughout the country. And the endless media bloviating has not ceased to explicate the lack of comity and compromise: gerrymandering, uncontrollable budget deficits, political polarization, Rupert Murdoch—all of these factors and more have been picked over endlessly. But a solid potential reason for at least some of this ill feeling has not even been considered: these politicians could not seem to hear each other because they could not hear each other.
According to neurobiologist Dr. Hamilton Farris of Louisiana State University, we aging Baby Boomers and our offspring may represent the deafest humans in the history of our species. Our hearing has been under multiple assaults since childhood: massive doses of antibiotics (which can destroy auditory receptors), rock and other music (whether we were sitting next to the speakers at Woodstock or wearing ear buds adjacent to the eardrum for hundreds of hours), chemotherapy, impaired blood flow … the list of causes is long.
But recent work by Dr. Farris and his colleagues at the Smithsonian and the University of Texas are creating new possibilities for understanding hearing by studying unlikely and often unlovely subjects: rainforest frogs.
Because the physics of sound is the same for any organism, brains from crickets to frogs to humans must solve the same complex auditory problems, such as sorting sounds into groups and assigning them to their correct sources, something Baby Boomers often have trouble doing at a cocktail party. If one wants to learn how hearing happens between the ear and the brain, the lowly frog represents an excellent starting point because understanding a simple system (the frog) reduces complexity and facilitates the understanding of a more complex system (the human).
The similarities and difficulties in being able to hear at our cocktail parties and the frogs’ jungle mud puddle notwithstanding, the key to restoring hearing in hearing-impaired humans may be a better understanding of hair cells, which are the crucial components for translating vibrations in the air into electrical signals in the brain. There are over one million receptors in the eye, but only about 3,500 inner hair cells in the inner ear, meaning the loss of each hair cell is proportionately a far greater loss. Damage to or loss of our hair cells is what causes most of our deafness – and these cells do not regenerate. However, other more “primitive” creatures, like fish, turtles, birds, and frogs, can regenerate hair cells, something our greatest biologists and physicians cannot yet accomplish nor even fully comprehend.
According to neurobiologist Dr. Hamilton Farris of Louisiana State University, we aging Baby Boomers and our offspring may represent the deafest humans in the history of our species. Our hearing has been under multiple assaults since childhood: massive doses of antibiotics (which can destroy auditory receptors), rock and other music (whether we were sitting next to the speakers at Woodstock or wearing ear buds adjacent to the eardrum for hundreds of hours), chemotherapy, impaired blood flow … the list of causes is long.
But recent work by Dr. Farris and his colleagues at the Smithsonian and the University of Texas are creating new possibilities for understanding hearing by studying unlikely and often unlovely subjects: rainforest frogs.
Because the physics of sound is the same for any organism, brains from crickets to frogs to humans must solve the same complex auditory problems, such as sorting sounds into groups and assigning them to their correct sources, something Baby Boomers often have trouble doing at a cocktail party. If one wants to learn how hearing happens between the ear and the brain, the lowly frog represents an excellent starting point because understanding a simple system (the frog) reduces complexity and facilitates the understanding of a more complex system (the human).
The similarities and difficulties in being able to hear at our cocktail parties and the frogs’ jungle mud puddle notwithstanding, the key to restoring hearing in hearing-impaired humans may be a better understanding of hair cells, which are the crucial components for translating vibrations in the air into electrical signals in the brain. There are over one million receptors in the eye, but only about 3,500 inner hair cells in the inner ear, meaning the loss of each hair cell is proportionately a far greater loss. Damage to or loss of our hair cells is what causes most of our deafness – and these cells do not regenerate. However, other more “primitive” creatures, like fish, turtles, birds, and frogs, can regenerate hair cells, something our greatest biologists and physicians cannot yet accomplish nor even fully comprehend.
Nor are the medical lessons that could be learned from these slimy batrachians limited to understanding hearing loss and healing deafness. The world’s coolest amphibian, the hallucinogenically-skinned giant green monkey frog of the western Amazon, has yielded compounds being studied as novel treatments both for lowering blood pressure as well as potential cures for drug-resistant strains of fungi, protozoa, viruses and bacteria—collectively, a much greater threat to our species than global recessions and gaseous politicians. A rainforest frog from Ecuador produces secretions helping us to develop new non-addictive painkillers. And the gastric brood frog from Australia was believed to hold the key to curing acid reflux, but it went extinct before it could be studied in the lab.
Sadly, frogs are disappearing faster than any other vertebrate group. Climate change, habitat loss, over-exploitation by the pet trade, and disease have led to sharp declines in amphibian biodiversity to a degree that has led researchers to dub this a “herpetological holocaust.”
How tragic, then, that we grow deafer and the frogs disappear faster. “If we continue to destroy our hearing at the current rate,” asserts Dr. Farris, “hearing aids are destined to be the eyeglasses of the 21st century.”
We all know someone who talks too much and too loudly to compensate for their hearing loss – how common is this on Capitol Hill? No less an authority than the late Helen Keller observed: “Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” What we (and, particularly, politicians) need to do, then, is show a bit more humility, listen more closely, protect our hearing—and better protect the frogs and other creatures that have so much to teach us.
Primatologist Jane Goodall is on the Advisory Board of the Amazon Conservation Team, and will be featured in the December Issue of the Biologist.
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ReplyDeleteFascinating Dr. Plotkin!
ReplyDeleteYour missive outlines yet another reason to preserve cultures, species and habitats through proactive conservation and support. Indeed frogs are a particularly threatened group that holds promise to reveal helpful pharma.
I am one mid-fifties boomer that seems to have hearing loss possibly related to years of the Stones, Zeppelin, Hendrix and other talented legends. I find it fascinating and not surprising that frog-derived compounds could indeed provide the keys to extremely useful hearing loss medicines. Natural selection has created many keys we are only now discovering.
Research and design of such a hearing loss drug also must be just as selective and precise, as manipulation of natural substances has its pros and cons. For example, scientists tried to create a medicine to control aberrant egoic behaviors by crossing a genome from the infamous star Cher with that of the rare Black Lion Tamarin monkey. Something went very wrong. Their blunder resulted in the colossal mistake known publicly as "Kim Kardashian".
So, I reason that if scientists use just a tiny bit of the wrong part of that Green Monkey frog (or other notoriously substance-laden amphibians) to produce a hearing-improvement drug, a mis-dosage could create an irreversible side effect of being trapped in an audio-visual hallucination of the entire 30 year catalog of The Grateful Dead.
Without a co-marketed antidote , I'd rather crawl slowly into the silence of deafness than suffer recovery while hearing the tragic twirlings of a band that nearly made me jam pencils in my ears.
If only more people recognized that the Amazon is the most advanced yet most economical research lab in the world!
ReplyDeleteIf the public-at-large heard that the Louvre was in danger of burning to the ground, there would be a public outcry and a massive influx of donations.
We should ALL make a year-end contribution... any contribution... to Amazon Conservation Group. I did because when you come down to it, saving the Amazon and Humanity is the most important gift to give our children and grandchildren.
If we fail to do so and things just continue as is within our children's lifetime there will not be a single tree or indigenous village left in the Amazon!