HHIssues

Shown below, is a letter written by By Edwin W Rubel, PhD, Virginia Merrill Bloedel Professor of Hearing Science. Printed with permission.

January 2, 2001

Dear Addressee,

I am embarrassed that it has taken me this long to write and thank you for the generous gift you made toward our research on hair cell regeneration in the inner ear. As I am sure you recognize, this type of research is very, very expensive and because it is such a new field - we only discovered hair cell regeneration in the inner ear of birds in 1988 - a large variety of approaches must be undertaken in order to figure out which ones will be the most promising toward the goal of regenerating hair cells in the mature mammal inner ear, and eventually in human patients suffering severe hearing loss and/or balance disabilities. Much of our research is funded through the National Institutes of Health in the form of research grants and I hope that some of your efforts will go toward lobbying your Congress persons to continue to allocate increasing resources towards this effort by the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communications Disorders (NIDCD).
My laboratory's efforts toward research on hair cell regeneration are moving ahead at what I feel is a good, if not accelerating, pace. We are testing a large variety of molecules for their ability to stimulate hair cell regeneration and we are testing a variety of genes that we think may be involved in this process. I would like to report at this time that a terrific breakthrough has occurred during the past six months, but unfortunately this is a slow process where many, many experiments are necessary and the data analysis alone takes a considerable amount of time. Your contribution is extremely helpful, but our funds for this research effort continue to be quite limited. We can only afford to have a small group of investigators working on this problem at any given time. I am attempting to raise five million dollars for a
multi-disciplinary research effort on hair cell regeneration here at the University of Washington (see [url="http://depts.washington.edu/hearing"]http://depts.washington.edu/hearing[/url] and select Information Articles), but thus far have not found a source likely to provide this type of funding. In the meantime, we will continue to work hard on this problem with the funds available, and again I would like to thank you personally for your generous contribution to this effort. If you would like more information please contact me or Linda Howarth at the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center.

I wish you a very happy New Year.

Sincerely yours,
Edwin W. Rubel, Ph.D.

** HHIssues **