Our speaker this month was Francesca MacKenzie who is a Senior Lecturer in Physiology and Pharmacology at Kingston University.   Francesca has a particular interest in deafness because her great grandparents were deaf from birth (her great grandfather was the first born deaf person to get a degree from a British university).  

She gave a wide-ranging talk on all aspects of the subject including the physiology of the ear and the causes of deafness (such as genetic and environmental factors).  She talked about her own research for her DPhil on the study of a mouse mutant (named ‘Cloth-ears’) to identify genes involved in hearing.  She also mentioned suggestions which have been made for the causes of Beethoven’s deafness.  

She finished by talking about recent developments such as stem cell therapies and gene therapies and recommended a free hearing test provided by the RNID.