Full of bright ideas
Against the odds, three young Hong Kong researchers have made groundbreaking medical discoveries
Hong Kong has long been maligned for its meagre investment in research and development. Less than 1 per cent of the territory's gross domestic product is spent on research, compared to 2.5 to 2.8 per cent in the US, South Korea, Japan and Singapore.
When University of Hong Kong (HKU) chemistry professor Vivian Yam Wing-wah won a 2011 L'Oréal-Unesco Award for Women in Science, she lamented that doing research in this city is a lonely journey, with writing proposals to compete for funding taking up precious time.
Medical researchers in the city run into the same obstacles in their quest to find cures for diseases and develop vaccines. But in spite of the unfavourable environment, many beat the odds to deliver groundbreaking findings published in prestigious medical journals.
Here are three young researchers whose passion and determination in seeking medical breakthroughs have helped put Hong Kong on the medical research map.
Leo Poon Lit-man was thrust into the front line of the city's war against severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in 2003, when he became one of the first researchers in the world to decode the genome of the Sars-associated coronavirus, which was previously unrecognised.
Instead of resting on the laurels of this crowning achievement, Poon, an associate professor with HKU's Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, dived into more studies on bird flu, swine flu, coronaviruses and astroviruses. He is using the smallpox vaccine to develop a universal vaccine that can fend off both human and animal flu viruses.