The obstacles for deaf students to become molecular scientists are shrinking, but it's still hard
Ivan Amato

When Australian-born John W. Cornforth of the University of Sussex, in England, traveled to Oslo in late 1975 to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work that helped clarify how enzymatic reactions control stereochemistry, he couldn't hear a word that was said during the awards ceremony.

"I amused myself by looking around at the audience," Cornforth later told an interviewer with Vega Science Trust, a U.K.-based science communication organization. "I could see in the darkness of the auditorium, these flashes of bright light ... and I couldn't make out what they were. And finally, I realized all the women were wearing their jewels and that was what was causing the flashes of light. And that is what I remember most of all from the ceremony."

The hall's acoustics were fine. Cornforth began losing his hearing in the late 1920s at the age of 10 and had become profoundly deaf within a decade. And in winning the Nobel Prize, Cornforth showed the world that deafness is no barrier to reaching the pinnacle in chemistry.
Aside from the signing, the near absence of spoken words, and the small size of the group, the scene looked like any other chemistry class.

According to the latest workforce data available from the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resources Statistics, 2.6%, or 3,256 of those 124,235 technical professionals in the database who call themselves chemists also describe themselves as deaf, or at least moderately hard-of-hearing. Of 74,643 chemical engineers in this 2003 database, 2,325, or about 3.1%, report having the same hearing disabilities.

For those with the most dramatic hearing deficits, the road to becoming a professional chemist is riddled with extra obstacles. For many of them, even reading high school textbooks can be a challenge.

"By the time deaf students are 18 or 19 years of age, their measured reading ability is generally no better than an average eight- or nine-year-old normally hearing student," says Harry Lang of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology. Lang investigates the cognitive features of learning for deaf students in an effort to identify, develop, and promote effective teaching practices. At most universities, which are not nearly as culturally and technologically attuned to the needs of deaf learners as Rochester Institute, the graduation rate at the baccalaureate level for deaf students is about half that of hearing students. At Rochester Institute, Lang notes, the rate is above 60%, which makes it at least on par with the national average.

As it turns out, of the 30,000 deaf students in postsecondary programs, only a small number each year now choose to follow Cornforth's pathway into chemistry. Keeping this trickle of students moving through academic programs and into the chemical professions-even at places like NTID and Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., one of the country's premier institutions of higher learning explicitly founded and designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students-takes devotion and persistence on the part of students, teachers, and employers.

With about 15 majors in its chemistry program this year, "we have a bumper crop," says Walter E. Trafton Jr., chair of Gallaudet's chemistry and physics program. In a normal year, three or four students will graduate with a chemistry degree. When Trafton, who is not deaf, applied with some trepidation for an opening in the department of physics and chemistry 31 years ago, the same year Cornforth won his Nobel Prize, he couldn't sign a word. A crash course in signing got him partly up to speed, but he says it took a few years to become proficient. "I feel sorry for those students in my first year," he says. Now he signs like the seasoned pro he has become, and he teaches his students with a supply of enthusiasm, devotion, and energy that science teachers know it often takes to keep their students on task.

In his organic chemistry class one day last month, he simultaneously signed and spoke to about a dozen students. Because it's impossible for his students to engage in a heads-up signing conversation while also taking notes with heads-down concentration, Trafton frequently flicked the classroom lights on and off or waved to get everyone's attention as he worked through the interpretation of a half-dozen infrared and NMR spectra that he flashed onto a screen with an overhead projector. Now and again, a student would raise a hand, point to a band in an IR spectrum or a set of peaks in an NMR spectrum, and then sign out the molecular fragment that each corresponds to. In one explanatory bout, Trafton gave the hand sign for C, quickly followed by the sign for O, and then a pair fingers drawn horizontally across the air to indicate a double bond.