揭開聽覺奧秘的A. James Hudspeth逝世，享年79歲 (2/2)

Recently The New York Times picked up the following:

A. James Hudspeth, Who Unlocked Mysteries Behind Hearing, Dies at 79 (2/2)

He was pivotal in discovering how sound waves are converted into signals that the brain can perceive as a whisper, a symphony or a thunderclap.

The New York Times -By Jeré Longman

Sept. 5, 2025

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His 50-year career deciphering the process of hearing began by accident, he said. He was more interested in brain research. But, while he was in graduate school, one of his professors asked him to deliver a paper on hearing and balance.

“I was so amazed that so little was known about hearing, yet it’s so manifestly important,” he said in a 2020 Kavli Prize lecture.

Torsten Wiesel, a Nobel laureate who was Dr. Hudspeth’s graduate faculty adviser at Harvard, described him as impatient with small talk but brilliant and brimming with ideas. He said an interview that he had nominated Dr. Hudspeth for a Nobel Prize three times, including this year, adding, “I hoped he would get the prize before he died.”

In the mid-1970s, while Dr. Hudspeth was at the California Institute of Technology, he and his lab began to explore whether the movement of the bundles atop hair cells created electric signals. A challenge for studying the human cochlea is that it is tiny, fragile and inaccessible, so Dr. Hudspeth studied the dissected inner ear of bullfrogs. Under a microscope, he used a small glass rod to push gently against the tips of hair bundles.

He continued his work at the University of California, San Francisco, in the 1980s. For one experiment, he needed a quiet space so one of his postdoctoral students could conduct extraordinarily sensitive measurements of how far trap doors move when opening to allow ions to flow into the cells and create an electrical signal. (The answer: one ten-thousandth of the width of a human hair.)

So Dr. Hudspeth set up a lab in an abandoned swimming pool in the basement of his office building. Dr. Corey of Harvard said that Dr. Hudspeth had truckloads of cement brought in to fill and stabilize the pool.

“It worked absolutely brilliantly,” Jonathon Howard, his postdoctoral student and now a professor of physics at Yale University, told The Transmitter, an online publication devoted to neuroscience. “We were just absolutely single-mindedly going after it.”

In the latter stages of his career, Dr. Hudspeth and colleagues found a way to keep a sliver of the cochlea of a gerbil functioning outside the body, which was related to his study of potential ways to reverse hearing loss.

Once human hair cells die — from such means as repeated exposure to loud noises, aging, and certain diseases and medications — they do not regenerate. An estimated 1.5 billion people experience some degree of hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization.

Dr. Hudspeth explored — along with many other scientists — possible ways to restore hair cells, which many nonmammalian animals like fish and birds can do. One method involved druglike compounds that release the genetic brake that stops cells from multiplying during development.

Along with his wife, Dr. Hudspeth is survived by a daughter, Ann Hudspeth; a son, James Hudspeth; a grandson; and his brother, Tom.

Just before Dr. Hudspeth died, the Rockefeller University optioned technology regarding promising research into restoring hair cells in mice and rabbits. The technology, developed in Dr. Hudspeth’s lab, has been enhanced by one of his former postdoctoral researchers, Ksenia Gnedeva, now a professor at the University of Southern California.

“If all goes well,” Dr. Gnedeva said in an email, “these compounds will soon be tested in human clinical trials. It pains me deeply that Jim will not be here to see where our work leads.”

(Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.)

Translation

揭開聽覺奧秘的A. James Hudspeth逝世，享年79歲 (2/2)

他在發現聲波如何轉換成大腦能夠感知的訊號例如耳語、交響樂或雷鳴方面發揮了關鍵作用

（繼續）

他表示，自己50年來致力於解讀聽覺過程的職業生涯始於偶然。他原本對大腦研究更有興趣。然而，在研究院期間，一位教授邀請他發表一篇關於聽覺和平衡的論文。

他在2020年 Kavli Prize 的演講中說道: 「我很驚訝，人們對聽覺的了解如此之少，但它卻如此重要」。

諾貝爾獎得主 Torsten Wiesel 曾是 Hudspeth 博士在哈佛大學的研究生導師。Wiesel形容Hudspeth 博士不耐煩閒聊，但才華洋溢，充滿創意。他在訪談中表示，自己曾三度提名 Hudspeth 博士獲得諾貝爾獎，包括今年的提名。他還補充道： “我希望他能在去世前獲獎。”

1970年代中期，Hudspeth 博士在加州理工學院工作時，他和他的實驗室開始探索毛細胞頂端毛束的擺動是否會產生電訊號。研究人類耳蝸的一大挑戰是它是微小、脆弱且難以接近，因此Hudspeth博士研究了牛蛙解剖後的內耳。在顯微鏡下，他用一根細小的玻璃棒輕輕按壓毛束的尖端。 

1980年代，他在加州大學舊金山分校繼續他的研究工作。為了進行一項實驗，他需要一個安靜的空間，以便他的一名博士後學生能夠進行極其靈敏的測量，測量活門打開時移動的距離，從而允許離子流入細胞並產生電信號。 （答案：人類頭髮寬度的萬分之一。）

因此，Hudspeth 博士在他辦公大樓地下室的一個廢棄游泳池裡設立了一個實驗室。哈佛大學的 Corey 博士說，Hudspeth 博士用卡車運送水泥來填充和固定游泳池。

他的博士後學生、現任耶魯大學物理學教授的 Jonathon Howard 告訴專注於神經科學的線上刊物《Transmitter》說: 「它運作非常出色」; 「我們當時一心一意地追求它」。

在職業生涯的後期，Hudspeth 博士和同事找到了一種方法，可以讓沙鼠耳蝸的一小部分在體外保持功能，這與他研究逆轉聽力損失的潛在方法息息相關。

人類的毛細胞一旦死亡 - 例如由於反覆暴露於高噪音、老化以及某些疾病和藥物等原因 - 就無法再生。根據世界衛生組織估計，全球約有15億人患有不同程度的聽力損失。

Hudspeth 博士與許多其他科學家一起探索了修復毛細胞的可能方法，許多非哺乳動物，例如魚類和鳥類，都可以做到這一點。其中一種方法是使用類似藥物的化合物來釋放基因制動器，阻止細胞在成長其間增多。

Hudspeth博士身後留下了妻子、女兒 Ann Hudspeth、兒子 James Hudspeth、孫子和弟弟 Tom。

就在Hudspeth博士去世前不久，洛克斐勒大學選擇了一項相當有前景的研究，用於修復小鼠和兔子的毛細胞。這項技術由 Hudspeth博士的實驗室開發，並由他之前的博士後研究員、現任南加州大學教授的 Ksenia Gnedeva進行了改良。

Gnedeva博士在一封電子郵件中寫道： “如果一切順利，這些化合物將很快在人體臨床試驗中進行測試。Jim不能親眼看到我們的工作會帶來什麼成果，這讓我深感痛心。”

So, Dr. Hudspeth has been pivotal in discovering how sound waves are converted to electrical signals in the inner ear that the brain can perceive as a whisper, a symphony or a thunderclap. Apparent, his research is very crucial to us in understanding how our ears operate.