A Nobel for a Snail Shell

The Nobel Prize in medicine for 1961 was awarded last week to a man who began his lifework as a telephone engineer, has only honorary medical degrees, and can never treat a human patient. The $48,300 winner: Georg von Bekesy, 62.

Von Bekesy (pronounced Bay-keh-shee) was born in Hungary, and was still there in the 1920s, when he did the fundamental research now belatedly recognized. As a telephone engineer, he concentrated on the human ear and in particular the cochlea, the "snail shell" of the inner ear. For research he built models, bored through the temporal bone of a corpse so that he could observe with strobe lighting the effect of sound waves on the cochlea, which is linked to the eardrum by three small, movable bones of the middle ear. What he saw was that the cochlea reacts to the pitch of a struck note by making different parts of the membrane vibrate within the tiny organ's 2 1/2-turn canal.

This and other findings by Von Bekesy have given ear specialists new ways to distinguish between different forms of human deafness, which may be important in deciding treatment. After he left Budapest, Von Bekesy spent two years at Stockholm's Caroline Institute, which awarded the prize. Then he moved to the U.S., now works in Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory where, still experimenting, he has built a model of the cochlea big enough to hold a man's arm.

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