A TINY baby, gurgling with pleasure; a heavily tattooed young woman burying her face in her hands. Videos of formerly deaf people, overcome by emotion as they hear for the first time, are . It is easy to see why: they vividly capture the moment that someone joins the world of the hearing.
But to some, such videos can seem misleading, if not , in the impression they give of a miracle cure. Not everyone can use the cochlear implants featured and those who do sometimes struggle to make sense of what they hear. A growing number of people now reject the idea of deafness as a disability that needs curing; rather, they identify with a Deaf community with a rich culture of its own.
“A growing number of people reject the idea of deafness as a disability that needs curing”
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These issues are about to snap into sharper focus. We should soon know if gene therapy can safely restore ear function, rather than emulate it as implants do, or amplify it as hearing aids do. If it can, a large number of people who lost their hearing through damage or disease will be able to regain “natural” hearing (see “Deaf people get gene tweak to restore natural hearing“). But will they want it?
Many will, of course. But those who have spent much of their life unable to hear may find it hard to choose between the milieu they know, and a medical procedure that will open up one they have barely experienced.
Increasingly, there is a third way. Advances in biomedical technology are making the distinction between “disabled” and “differently abled” more nuanced than ever. One 91av staffer, for example, is hacking hearing aids to make them report signals humans can’t usually detect, such as Wi-Fi.
Spectacles and walking sticks are socially unremarkable; soon augmented reality headsets and multifunctional prosthetic limbs will be, too. These, and other assistive technologies on the horizon, won’t so much “cure” disabilities as offset them.
That’s going to make for many more tough choices as more people find the approach that best suits them. Vive la difference.