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| Georg Von Bekesy. Photo courtesy of the University of Hawaii, Georg Von Bekesy Archives |
In 1961, when Georg Von Bekesy arrived in New York City to receive an achievement award from the Deafness Research Foundation (DRF), he had no idea that soon he would also be honored with a Nobel Prize for medicine. In fact, Gordon Hoople, M.D., an otolaryngologist deeply involved in launching DRF, recalls, “He didn’t catch on when I said, ‘Congratulations,’ because he assumed I meant the [DRF] award he was getting in New York. It wasn’t until one of the reporters asked, ‘How does it feel to be a Nobel winner?’ that he turned and asked me what that was all about.”
This sort of humility was perhaps to be expected from a man who liked to work alone in his laboratory, shunning the attention that his groundbreaking work attracted. “I like a lonely life,” he once said. “Concentration on one field is possible only if you are lonely to a certain degree.”
Born in Hungary in 1899, Bekesy’s education took him to Munich, Constantinople, Budapest and Zurich. After earning a Ph.D.from the University of Budapest in 1923, he worked until 1946 as a physicist in the research laboratory of the Hungarian telephone system, seeking solutions in telephone transmission. This work prompted Bekesy to ask the question: How much better is the human ear than the telephone system?
Forty years of research followedfrom this simple question, as well as from an even simpler one: How does the ear hear? Bekesy’s research enabled him to demonstrate how sound travels within the cochlea -the traveling wave theory, winning him DRF’s accolade and later, the Nobel Prize. His work contributed to later advances in ear surgery and the improvement of hearing aids.
As S. S. Stevens, director of Harvard University’s Psycho- Acoustics Laboratory, where Bekesy worked from 1947 to 1966, said, “Like all dedicated investigators, Bekesy goes wherever his problem leads him.”And in Bekesy’s case, that was Hawaii. In explaining his reasons for leaving Harvard for the University of Hawaii, Bekesy said: “I have done most of my research on humans, guinea pigs and higher vertebrates. ... I think many of the phenomena I am interested in investigating may be observed in fish. ... And like everyone else I am interested in the dolphins.”
Bekesy’s winning combination of curiosity and research ability enabled him to make landmark contributions in a variety of fi elds related to hearing, including music theory and concert-hall acoustics. His ultimate objective, though, was to learn how physical stimulus is transformed into electrical discharges in the nervous system and transmitted into the brain. In humble irony, Bekesy remarked on the prospect of solving that mystery: “I would feel I had done something really worthwhile.”
For more information on Georg Von Bekesy, visit the following link to the Web site of the University of Hawaii: www.hawaii.edu/bhsd/bekesy. ■
