Page 11 - CUHK MEDICAL ALUMNI Newsletter Issue 2 Vol 9 2018

SPECIAL FEATURE ➋ SPECIAL FEATURE ➋
- NEJM’s “10 MOST NOTABLE ARTICLES OF 2017” - NEJM’s “10 MOST NOTABLE ARTICLES OF 2017”
10

While he was interested in medicine, To his surprise and delight, Professor I rushed off an email to my team.” A
he was also very keen on engineering, Hjelm said “yes”. few months later, the puzzle which had
remembering fondly his first computer - eluded him for years, was finally solved.
an Atari - given by his mother. “It was the biggest Christmas present I
had ever been given,” Professor Lo says. “Research to me is a way of life. I don't
So when it was time to apply to a look at it as my job. Every day I wake
university, he was still of two minds. “I With that machine, Professor Lo and his up and I will be thinking…oh, good!
applied to Cambridge to do medicine team were able to measure that 10 percent Another day where I can pursue and test
and Stanford to do electrical engineering. of DNA from a pregnant woman’s plasma something,” he says.
I was accepted by both,” Professor Lo is from the fetus. With that astounding Professor Lo lives by this philosophy…
says. In the end, Cambridge University discovery - and over 10 years later - they always be sceptical. He says he
- with its relatively longer established were able to develop a non-invasive learnt this from a tutorial professor
tradition and history - won. prenatal blood test that could, not only from Cambridge who continuously
In 1997, Professor Lo made world figure out the sex of the baby, but also challenged his text book answers. “He
headlines when he discovered the detect if the baby had Down Syndrome. was basically telling me not to blindly
presence of cell-free fetal DNA in a This method is now being used worldwide. trust everything I read. You have to go
pregnant woman’s plasma. This project, back to the original source, he said.”
he says, was partly thanks to a high-tech So imagine his surprise when he was
one-million-Hong-Kong-dollar machine made Fellow of the Royal Society in
which he got as a “Christmas gift” from 2011 - the oldest scientific academy in
his new employer.
the world - to discover that its motto was
Before returning to Hong Kong in “Nullius in verba”, or in plain English:
January 1997, he was invited to a “Take nobody's word for it.”
Christmas party by his new boss, Besides his love for science, Professor
Professor Magnus Hjelm, who owned Lo is also into photography. He recently
a house south of London. “I thought took up drone photography and was
maybe that was a good time to ask extremely proud of his first shot of the
him for that machine, but I was worried famed Glacier Lagoon in Iceland. He also
that I might offend him by appearing admits to being a “gadget guy”, always
too aggressive or greedy. After all, he scouring the internet for news about
was the head of CUHK’s Department of Professor Lo says his flashbulb moments gadgets that have yet to be released.
Chemical Pathology, and I was going to can appear anytime and anywhere -
start my work there in four weeks’ time!” while sleeping, eating or even watching Professor Lo says medical students should
a movie. He says he got the idea on consider becoming a clinician-scientist
how to decipher DNA fetal genome like himself. “We have urgent need for
from maternal blood while watching individuals who are both doctors as well
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as scientists to serve as the bridge that
in a cinema with his wife. brings scientific advances to patients.
And, with the Hong Kong government
“When the 3-D movie started, the words
'Harry Potter' appeared to fly out and pouring new resources into innovation
and technology, now is the best time to
somehow my eyes were attracted to be a clinician-scientist.”
the letter H. It looked to me like two
strokes…like a pair of chromosomes.
Suddenly I realised that for every pair of
chromosomes that a baby has, one copy
is from the father and one copy is from
the mother. Then I thought to myself …
maybe I needed two algorithms - one
to solve the father’s side of the fetal
genome and the other one to solve the
mother’s side!”
So while his wife was enjoying the
movie, Professor Lo spent the next two
Professor Lo plucked up courage, faced and a half hours in the theatre thinking
Professor Hjelm and said… “Ok, Prof, about genomes, chromosomes and
could I have this machine for Christmas?” algorithms. “As soon as I arrived home,