Pity those who believe that this will give them a singing voice!
The talent and vocal structures must be firmly in place before
they should even consider going this route.
A gel that can vibrate 200 times a second aims to replicate human vocal cords and give throat cancer victims a way to restore their voices.
According to a Bloomberg report, Robert Langer, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with Harvard surgeon Steven Zeitels, plan to test this gel next year in a cancer patient. MIT highlighted the voice gel in July.
The experiment is backed by some big voices—The Who’s Roger Daltrey, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and singer and actress Julie Andrews. Daltrey and Tyler were Zeitels patients. About 6 percent of the U.S. population has some kind of voice disorder, according to Sandeep Karajanagi, a former MIT researcher who developed the gel while working as a postdoc in the Langer lab.
Among the key points from the Bloomberg story:
- The gel is injected into the vocal cords.
- Once there it acts like a membrane and responds to breath and muscles as real tissue would. Langer rearranged molecules to allow the gel to vibrate at the right speed.
- The gel has to bond with existing vocal cords and be long lasting. In addition, the elasticity has to be there to respond to muscle contractions.
- This gel is a form of polyethylene glycol, which is found in some skin creams.
For more see MIT’s Langer Lab, Zeitels’ bio
