| Citation | Distinguished for his studies of the mechanism of hearing in vertebrates. In 1976 Fettiplace and Crawford developed a method of recording the electrical responses of hair cells in the isolated cochlea of reptiles. These remarkable experiments, which were the first to give extensive quantitative records from auditory receptors, showed that each hair cell is sharply tuned to a characteristic frequency and that much of the frequency selectivity in the turtle's ear can be attributed to electrical resonance in the hair cell membrane. Later work proved that nerve impulses in efferent nerve fibres reduced the sensitivity and sharpness of tuning of hair cells by increasing the electrical damping. Another important result, obtained by imposing mechanical displacements, was the direct demonstration that basilar membrane vibrations of about 0.1 nm can be detected by the cochlea and correspond to the behavioural threshold of the animal. In the mid seventies Fettiplace worked with Baylor in Stanford and carried out a major piece of research on the transmission of signals between turtle photoreceptors and ganglion cells. He has also made a detailed study of the water permeability of lipid bilayers. |