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kokonut......ever read Flowers For Algernon? An MR man got an operation to make him smart. Everyone thought "YAY!!!! A CURE!"  It worked initially but it turned out that the surgery was temporary and he regressed back to being MR.

To everyone else who is pro stem cell. One of the beefs I have with the stem cell research is that they imply that ALL hearing loss will be cured.

It is TOO soon to tell. Quite frankley I think that when stem cell comes around, most late deafened adults as well as dhh as teens  will respond well. However those with genetic losses and dhh as babies won't respond since they have never known what its like to be able to hear normally. You remember that Oliver Sacks story abt the blind guy who had the operation to be able to see? He COULD see....but it wasn't at ALL like the way sighted people think of as seeing.

Also geneticly dhh folks will still have the gene that causes the damage.

It would be awesome if this helped a lot of late deaf folks......and THAT is the population that will most benifit. Their brains know how to interpret sound the way a hearing person inteprets sound...they just need better equiptment.


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