Maria Urbano, an El·lipse subscriber, has sent us this image of a sculpture by Mexican sculptor Alberto Cavazos, located in Plaza Monterrey (near La Maquinista, in San Andreu) – a very noisy place, according to the author of the photo, who writes:
“A sculpture of a woman without ears, surrounded by noise, with an emptiness full of silence and an indifferent gaze, in search of any sound. She aspires to be able to occupy this space with those sounds that she one day lost. She looks carefully at the horizon and with the robustness of her body, she waits patiently for Science to return to her what she most desires…, the ability to hear and communicate with the world“.
María explains that she has a hearing impairment, caused by streptomycin: “I communicate by reading the lips. With this image, I would like to make clear the need to investigate acquired deafness so that it does not happen again and to find mechanisms that may favor communication for everyone – as well as the need to investigate tinnitus, because it is terrible to suffer them”.
Scientists around the world are studying how hearing and the ear works, and why sometimes it doesn’t. At the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), for example, the laboratory directed by Berta Alsina in the developmental biology unit of the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University (DCEXS-UPF) studies the development of the ear in zebrafish.
Want to see your photo here? Send us your images related to science or life at the PRBB to ellipse@prbb.org.
