After more than 52 years, Fred H. Linthicum, Jr., MD, still looks forward to coming to work every day at the House Research Institute. Although his hours were reduced by half more than 20 years ago, he happily puts in a full eight hours most days. When asked what it is that compels him to continue, his answer is “Curiosity. I like to know why things do what they do. People do many things for that reason. I choose to look into the microscope.”

Fred has been with the Institute since 1958. As a young doctor, Fred met Dr. Howard P. House and prevailed upon him to teach him the surgical techniques he had mastered. Howard agreed, and later asked Fred if he would consider joining a group of physicians that he was forming. By then, Fred, a Los Angeles native and body surfer, had served a few years in the army, graduated from medical school, completed his residency, and joined his father’s medical practice. But the offer from Dr. House was too good to resist.

There are two reasons why Howard asked Fred to join the group. Fred was very active, working at Childrens Hospital as a pediatric otologist. None of the other doctors was interested in working with children. Howard also wanted to start a temporal bone lab and had already begun asking patients to pledge to donate their temporal bones when they died. The study of temporal bones is vital because this is where the hearing mechanism resides. Fred had an interest in pathology and, during his residency at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, had worked in the temporal bone lab, which was the first lab of its kind in the country. When he joined the medical group he was allowed one day per week to do research. By the time he retired from practice in 1984, he already had many years of experience in the temporal bone laboratory.  

Fred has directed the Institute’s temporal bone bank and database for many years, a responsibility he now shares with Dr. Jose Fayad. “Our goal is to find the cause of various hearing loss and balance disorders,” Fred indicated. “What we do is called histopathology. This is the microscopic examination of human temporal bones that have been specifically sectioned to look at under the microscope.” The lab also does DNA extraction to determine the hereditary aspects of hearing loss and is beginning to do proteomics – the extraction of protein produced by various genes – to further clarify the nature of many hearing problems.

All of the clinical data from each patient’s chart and the analysis of their histology are entered into the lab’s temporal bone database. This enables researchers to search for multiple criteria. For instance, if they are interested in people over age 50 with 70% hearing loss, who have lost 20% of their hair cells, staff can pull up the relevant charts by querying the database to retrieve those particular parameters. This is extremely valuable in finding combinations of symptoms. The lab’s database also contains images of what is important about a particular temporal bone. When a specific case is retrieved, the images that go with it are also there. An abstract of the database is updated annually and sent to the National Temporal Bone Registry’s database. The information there is accessible to the whole world.