Seminars are open to all visitors and start Monday at 16:00 sharp. Coffee and tea will be served from 15:45. The seminar series lectures are in a colloquiumzaal at the third floor (entrance level) of the Faculty building of Erasmus MC.
Jerry Loeb
Making the Deaf Hear, the Blind See and the Lame Walk
| 2008-05-05 | Room: Coll. K |
The field of neural stimulation has recently gained substantial public notice and commercial success. Some of these successes are neuromodulatory (e.g. spinal cord stimulators for pain and deep brain stimulators for Parkinsons disease); others are neural prosthetic (e.g. cochlear implants for hearing and retinal implants for vision). Importantly, clinical research for almost all of these started over 30 years ago, at a time when technology was primitive, regulations unknown, expectations negative and costs low. The examples to be discussed reveal a mutually beneficial relationship in which clinical needs motivated scientists and engineers to develop fundamental knowledge while at the same time providing unique opportunities to do so. They also reveal the many nontechnical factors that increasingly influence what goes into these very long development pipelines and what finally comes out.