22/01/2023
50 years research on outer hair cells
Peter Dallos studied at the Technical University in Budapest, Hungary, and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He completed his master’s degree and PhD in electrical (biomedical) engineering at Northwestern University. For almost fifty years, Dr. Dallos has explored the structure and function of the cochlea, with an emphasis on inner and outer hair cells in mammals. Along with colleagues in his labo- ratory at Northwestern, Dr. Dallos proposed and con- firmed that outer hair cells function as amplifiers in the cochlea and contribute importantly to sensitivity of the ear to faint sounds and the ear’s capacity to dis- tinguish small frequency differences in sound. In 2000 Dr. Dallos and his research team discovered a special protein called prestin that powers the movement of outer hair cells. Using genetically engineered mice, they demonstrated that prestin-based amplification is essential for normal mammalian hearing. Throughout his illustrious career, Dr. Dallos has disseminated new research findings in scientific articles but also
in readable review papers and remarkably understandable lec- tures to audiologists.
Dr. Dallos devoted most
of his productive career to the
study of why we have outer hair cells. A sympo- sium was held at Northwestern University in 2010 to honor Dr. Dallos. A quote from an article about the symposium offers a glimpse at the impact that this hearing scientist has had on our understand- ing of how the ear works. In an interview Dr. Dallos explained: “Outer hair cells have clearly shown what makes the mammalian ear so wonderful. It turns out that they are local mechanical amplifiers. They feed mechanical energy back onto the vibrat- ing substrate upon which they’re located and boost its amplitude so that we hear better and hear more sharply.”
You can read the entire interesting interview of Dr. Dallos at the Northwestern University
