I wonder if this treatment is permanent. They’re injecting the cochlea with the crispr fluid which changes dna in the existing cells, won’t new cells have the mutated gene?
Well as I wrote this I remembered cells divide themselves to grow, so maybe the fixed gene carries over?
Yes, daughter cells of corrected ones will also have the correction applied.
That said the inner and outer hair cells (the ear cells that have “hair” strands that respond to frequency and amplitude)involved in this have extremely low if any turnover. Hair cell loss is involved in noise-related hearing loss.
I’m glad he likes it. That’s always been my main concern with such technologies. I’m Deaf and would pursue this, but I also will always be Deaf in my experiences and am sympathetic to the fears of the community. We have a long history of hearing people ignoring what the individual wants when it comes to dealing with deafness. I wish I was taught sign as a HoH child, I’m grateful I was given hearing aids, but I needed both and I needed sympathy for when the act of hearing was too much and I needed them out. Fortunately my HoH mom was sympathetic, but teachers and my hearing father were much less so. And I’ve seen the trend of hearing people jumping against Deaf concerns with new technologies without bothering to understand why we have our concerns. Please don’t do that. Our culture and opinions exist for reasons.
We have a beautiful culture and sign language is valuable. Additionally I’ll still have an auditory processing disorder so visual communication will always be more effective for me.
Ha. Loved the last one. Everyone’s speech is so unpredictable, it’s hard to understand everyone. Some too deep, some too soft, some too shrill, etc.
This study is very promising to me, where I was born profoundly deaf and need hearing aids to hear. Hopefully one day I may be able to take it to improve my hearing.
Can agree with the deaf community part - they really have a “one of us, one of us, one of us” vibe going on.
I wonder how much the hearing aid industry will be impacted with this. You can only fit so much technology into a plastic shell but you still don’t fix the underlying issue.
