How watching Alien 3 movie set top Hong Kong scientist on the road to developing cancer and prenatal health screening tests

Professor Dennis Lo might have spent his career doing autopsies and looking into a microscope had he not seen the opening postmortem scene in Alien 3

He chose a different speciality that led to him developing a prenatal test for genetic diseases such as Down’s syndrome in babies and screening tests for cancer

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Professor Dennis Lo, the Li Ka Shing professor of medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, whose cancer and prenatal disease screening tests put him at the forefront of modern medicine. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Published: 12:15pm, 6 Jan 2022Updated: 2:38pm, 6 Jan 2022

If it hadn’t been for the American science fiction horror movie Alien 3, one of the brightest lights in Hong Kong’s scientific community could well have spent his days staring into a microscope and performing autopsies.

“The night before the [job] interview, I went to see Alien 3 – which opens with a postmortem. I thought, ‘Do I really want to start my days with a postmortem?’ So, in the end I became a chemical pathologist – we look at blood rather than dead bodies,” says Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, the Li Ka Shing professor of medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

It seems, then, that we have American film director David Fincher to thank in part for Lo’s many contributions to health – from the development of non-invasive prenatal testing to new screening tests for cancer.

Lo’s dry sense of humour speaks to 13 years in the UK – at Cambridge University, where he got his undergraduate degree, and then Oxford University where he worked as a doctor, completed his doctor of philosophy degree and then stayed on as faculty.

Lo won the US$3 million 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for discovering that fetal DNA is present in maternal blood and can be used for the prenatal testing of Down’s syndrome and other genetic diseases. The Breakthrough awards, known as the “Oscars of science”, recognise the world’s top scientists and reward the winners with the single biggest financial prize going.

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