In the mid-1950s surgeons were experimenting with a variety of materials to produce implants, but they all triggered an immune response and were rejected by the body.

"I was reading Popular Science and read about a new material that was discovered by accident at DuPont," Shea says. "Nothing affected it. I already knew that if I was going to replace a bone, I needed something that the body wouldn't react to."

The material was Teflon, and Shea met with a materials engineer, Harry Treace, at Richards Medical on a Friday afternoon to discuss his idea. By Monday morning Treace had fabricated a replica of the stape, which is about 2 millimeters long.

The stape rests against the eardrum and picks up the vibrations, translating them to sound. The most common form of hearing loss is when the stape calcifies. The Teflon implant not only works just like a natural stape, it does not calcify so hearing remains intact.

Shea and Treace went on to file another 50 patents, shared between Shea and Richards Medical, which is now Smith & Nephew.

Shea credits the development to surgeon Fred Jack, who he met in 1948 while studying at Harvard Medical School; Jack was 92 and still practicing. Four years later Shea was in Vienna and found a 50-year-old paper by Jack describing a variation on the surgery, with no implantable device.

By Scott Shepard
http://memphis.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2006/05/01/daily5.html