T hirty years ago, cochlear implants were in their infancy as research projects conducted at a handful of institutions around the world. The devices were crude, typically manufactured in a university or other noncommercial engineering laboratory, unapproved by any government regulatory agency, and implanted in experimental animals or humans for short periods. There was substantial skepticism, not only about the efficacy of the existing devices but also about the entire concept. It simply was not believable to many that such a device could ever functionally replace the complex and elegant biophysics of the cochlea. Pioneering implant surgeons were accused of performing unethical human studies. I was strongly encouraged, as were other interested students, to seek alternative, and putatively more rewarding, dissertation projects.Today, cochlear implants are a global commercial enterprise, with three major manufacturers and a few smaller entities developing or marketing these devices. Various implants are approved by government regulatory agencies across the developed world and are reimbursed to various degrees by commercial and government payors. Financial analysts now pay as much attention to the results of clinical trials of these devices as do clinicians. It is a new world for these remarkable devices because they represent a highly effective and cost-effective treatment 1 of severe-profound sensorineural hearing loss in both children and adults.It is now well established that prelingually deafened children (loss of hearing before speech begins) can develop near-normal levels of speech and language and achieve normal educational milestones when given an implant at an early age. Postlingually deaf adults, even octogenarians, 3 can usually speak on the telephone and, in some cases, achieve normal levels of speech understanding in quiet environments within a year of implantation. This level of success is beyond the wildest dreams of the pioneering engineers and clinicians. So what are the hazards? Implants previously underpromised and overdelivered. In an era in which patients were unable to understand speech with a hearing aid, any chance of improvement was welcome. Patients were warned that they might not benefit from an implant but would often proceed anyway because there was little risk associated with implanting a device in an ear that already had essentially no hearing. Even minimal postoperative speech perception would represent a substantial auditory benefit. As the devices improved over time, so did the risk-benefit ratio, at least for people with severe or total hearing loss.Today there are several quite promising nontraditional applications of implants that challenge this highly favourable risk-benefit analysis because they either involve implanting a device in a partly hearing ear or demand extremely high levels of performance from an ear with an implanted device (implanted ear) to provide benefit.Because speech discrimination with implants has improved dramatically, the criteria for implantation has ap...