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Teaching and Research in the University

 

Soon after I had started, Professor Wong Poi Kong, then Head of the University Department of Medicine I (MUI) guided me on my work in his department. At a meeting with three elder doyen in Medicine, Professor Seah Cheng Siang (Head of the Ministry of Health’s Department of Medicine, at Singapore General Hospital), Professor Khoo Oon Teik (Head, University Department of Medicine, and Professor Shanmugaratnam (Head , Department of University Department of Pathology), I was formally invited to be charge of the Research on Liver Cancer, as it was the top cancer in Singapore then with a high mortality rate.

 

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~ Research facilities & funding ~

 

Prof Wong, offered me a space in the Ransome Research Laboratory in the attic of the Old Norris Block. With a Lee Foundation Liver Cancer Grant of S$10,000 donated by Mr. Lee Seng Gee, through the help of my aunt ,Dr. Oon Chiew Seng, I was able to employ a Research Scientist Dr. Yo Sui Lan (a PhD graduate of McGill University) and a technician Mdm Lim Gek Keow.

 

My first task was to assemble together interested clinicians and specialists within the hospital. Amongst the early supporters were surgeons, like Prof Abu Rauff and Ho Soon Teik, Radiologist Prof Lenny Tan, Pathologist Dr. Gilbert Chiang, Biochemists Chio Lee Foo and Tan Aik Khoon, microbiologist Jimmy Sng, Professor Chan So Ha (WHO Lab for Immunology), Dr Goh Kee Tai (MOH Epidemiology Department), Felix Sundram (Nuclear Medicine) and members of our department staff.

 

We called this group the “Hepatoma Research Group”  and we would meet monthly in our attic lab meeting room. We reviewed laboratory and clinical data, prognosis, virology of Liver cases, treatment outcomes, diagnostic measures and carried out early clinical trials for antiviral anti-HBV treatment using adoptive immunotherapy (a method for inducing remission in acute leukemia patients), conducted experiments on nude mice by transplanting liver cancer tissues into them, chemotherapy with cytotoxic drugs and the use of anti-androgenic drugs.

 

In 1981, I formed the Singapore Society of Oncology (SSO) (see: Founding of Singapore Society of Oncology, the Singapore Society of Immunology and Rheumatology (SSIR) and the Asia Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver (APASL). I was the founding President of the SSO and SSIR, and the Secretary General of APASL.

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Working with World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research in Cancer/WHO

 

In 1984, I was appointed as Adviser and Consultant to the World Health Organization in Geneva on Biological Standards for products for human use. At several regional meetings in the Western Pacific region, I was an adviser on Hepatitis, Liver Cancer, Hepatitis B Vaccines and Cancer prevention and helped to organise many of these W.H.O meetings in Singapore.

 

In 1985, I was appointed the Principal Investigator by our Government and by the International Agency for Research in Cancer /WHO in Lyon, for the Hepatitis B Vaccination project. Singapore was the first country in the world to implement this on a global primary immunisation of Hepatitis B vaccinations in all our new born children and young children successfully.

 

25 years later, on the 2 October 2010, we celebrated the success of that program, which showed that Liver Cancer was considerably reduced from 27.7 cases per 100,000 persons in 1978-92 period to 17.8 per 100,000 in 2002-2007 period and, the carrier rate down from 9.1% in 1975 to below 2.7% today. Furthermore, there were no children under the age of 15 years with illnesses due to Hepatitis B. [see section on My Research in my Profession]

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Professor Baruch Blumberg, Nobel Laureate for discovery of the Hepatitis B virus, visited our Ransome Laboratory in 1997 to learn more about discoveries of Hepatitis B surface mutants, and the new Hepatitis E infection. He congratulated us on our pioneering work on the vaccine and liver cancer. In 1998, I visited Professor Blumberg at Balliol College, Oxford University when he was the Master, and we had some very close and long-time collaboration in research.

 

 

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Publication of my book, "A Cancer Vaccine that transformed Singapore and the World". This was co-written by Mrs. Karen Kwek, an English graduate from Oxford University . It was to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the launch of Singapore W.H.O/International Agency for Research in Cancer, Hepatitis B Vaccine Study".

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Professor Baruch Blumberg was so delighted with this book that he took 6 copies for his Fox Chase Cancer Centre library in October 2010. In return, he gave me his Nobel Prize book of his discovery of the Hepatitis B Virus and was about to promote my book when he suddenly collapsed from a massive heart attack and passed away in February 2011.

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In 1985, Sir Sidney Brenner, the Nobel Prize Laureate for monoclonal antibodies, from Cambridge, visited us at our Ransome Research laboratory and I presented our research on Hepatitis B Molecular virology and the discovery of the vaccine escape mutants. He was a jocular and friendly person and encouraged us in our pursuit of the research. Meeting two Nobel Prize laureates in our Ransome Lab. He had come to visit the newly set up Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology at Kentridge, which I had helped Dr. Christopher Tan, then, the new Director of the Institute.

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Setting up my own practice, working with the Ministry of Health & contributing to the nation and world.

 

In October 1986, I retired as Associate Professor of Medicine in the University, and left to set up my own practice at the Mount Elizabeth Hospital. Our two children were growing and there were a lot of expenses particularly with education. I was able to continue in research, while still doing my busy private practice at Mount Elizabeth Hospital giving my services freely.

 

At the invitation of Dr. Kwa Soon Bee, Permanent Secretary and Director of Medicine, Ministry of Health, I returned to help the Ministry of Health in the Hepatitis B prevention and control programs. I was given the Ransome Laboratory at Singapore General Hospital to conduct and monitor the changing trends of hepatitis and liver cancer in the country as the Principal Investigator for Hepatitis B & liver cancer research in the new Department of Clinical Research.

 

One day he had walked into my Research Office at Ransome laboratory and said " This is really an academic's office". With a new team and a lead scientist Dr. Chen Wei Ning, who had come over from the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, we researched the depths of Hepatitis B, and all its 40 mutational strains, studying the functions of the genes of the virus. We asked ourselves “how could the HBV virus avoid destruction by vaccine and natural anti Hepatitis B antibody, and by what mechanism did the virus cause liver cancer”.

 

With our strength in basic research, a huge depository of tissue and blood samples from diverse populations, we could make many discoveries and novel products. We filed 5 industrial patents on the new mutant 145 Glycine to Arginine vaccine escape mutant, 133 Threonine to Methionine mutant, Gene Chips, a diagnostic assay to detect these mutants, and a method to test for antiviral activity against HBV. These patents were awarded in the USA, Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Australia, and the main industrial countries of the world. MOH was the owner of the patents (as they had funded the research). These were the first biomedical patents filed in Singapore. I was nominated twice for National Science and Technology Award in 1985 & 1986, by the Ministry of Health in recognition of the scientific work done for the country.

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In 1998, I donated a challenge cup to my old Perse School, Cambridge for the student who excelled in a racquet sports and academically.

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Finding God in Research

 

As we researched in depth into why genes mutate to form new viruses, and also cancer, we asked a few fundamental questions. We can synthesize DNA, and produce clones of bacteria and viruses in the lab, but these do not have human feeling. We can see the changes in atoms in new DNA, and wonder, where did the energy to change arise?  How did the complexity of the human being with trillions of atoms be harnessed together to make a nucleus, cytoplasm, nucleoli, to produce normal products? How are these cells located where they are, and not wonder out to cause cancer? As we wander deeper into the unknown, using new vaccines, and not knowing how hazardous they may be, from the time they were injected into babies, we prayed for divine help.

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In 1994, after helping my father get baptized as a Catholic on his death bed, my mother followed suit and was baptized six months later. I had always been leaning towards Catholicism, as young as a child during our evacuation to Bandra India, during the Japanese Occupation. There we attended a Jesuit school called St. Stanislaw’s High School.

 

Susie, who noticed I was searching for a religion, and seeing me studying books on Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, the Bible, invited me to join Fr. Tom Eagan’s Religious Instruction of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). I found it so exciting to read the Bible, especially the book of Proverbs , the Books of Wisdom and Psalms. It gave me great comfort, peace, joy to experience God’s love to read the Bible every day. Today, I carry the Bible, wherever I go. I have a Bible in my office, at home, one in my retreat apartment in Pebble Bay, and my travel bag.

 

Today, I pray the scriptural Rosary of Jesus’s life in my long and daily prayer. One of my greatest god experience was at the Chester Beatty Institute in Dublin, where I saw the ancient parchment, and papyrus leaves of the book of Mark and Esther . God had shown me the proof that I had asked. He showed a "Doubting Thomas" that the Word of God existed and it was real.

 

 

Pilgrimages to ancient Archaeological Biblical places

 

My curiosity in the person of Jesus Christ, the Apostles and the early church, led me to ask: Is Jesus real? Did he exist? Did the Apostles go to the ends of the World? What happened to the Apostles? What proof was there that Jesus came back from the dead on the third day after crucifixion? Who is God? Is He real? I don’t see Him, how can I know he is there? I asked all these questions in prayer.

 

God answers.

 

In my visit to the Holyland in 1996 with my mum in a wheel chair, we were so afraid of the bombing and killings that we almost didn’t go. But two weeks before we went, my cousin Kenneth Kwan and I, saw a video which I had obtained “ Jesus the Prophet”, narrated by Fr. John Doyle CSsR from Cincinnati, USA. After watching it, we were so fearless that we decided to go. At the foot of Mount Tabor at the site of the Transfiguration of Jesus, we met to our surprise, Fr. John Doyle! He blessed us. Fr Jim Wallace who was our Spiritual Director, commented that our lives were transfigured, and God had given us the chance to come to the Holyland to meet Fr. Doyle. On the second pilgrimage to the HolyLand, Fr. Gino Henriques joined us with his mother as we were a Doctor’s group. At the bookshop at Qumran (site of the Dead Sea Scrolls), I was drawn to a book “The Jewish Antiquities and the Essential Writings” by Flavus Josephus. As I read and digested the book with excitement, I came to the passage:

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“There was man, called Jesus the Christ, who did phenomenal deeds, but he was handed to Pontus Pilate, who put him to death in AD32. But on the third day, he reappeared again to the joy of the local Christian sect, and that sect lives on to this day”. [This famous Flavian Testimony was authenticated by non-Christian sources from the Jewish ruler Herod and the Roman Emperor Vespasian Josephus was a Jewish zealot in Tiberius, born in A.D 37, five years after the crucifixion of Jesus in AD 32. He was of Jewish nobility, from the Hasmodean family, and at an early age of 14 years, had studied the Jewish sects, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes.”

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He travelled to Rome, to intercede on behalf of some persecuted priests whom the Roman procurator Felix had sent to Rome for trial. He was impressed with the Roman culture. On return to Judea, a Jewish revolt took place, and he was appointed the Jewish Commander in the Galilee area. Cornered by the Roman general Vespasian in a cave, where many of the zealots committed mass suicide by killing one another, Josephus and another survived. His prophesy that Vespasian would be the next Roman Emperor came true and he was adopted as Vespasian's son, and enjoyed all the privileges of the Roman nobility. His writings of this period of the early Christian history was authenticated by Vespasian and the Jewish King Herod. Fr. Gino confirmed that these readings were genuine.

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My other pilgrimages took me to Madras to see the place where St. Thomas was martyred, to Santiago de Compostella, where the relics of St. James are, and to Asia Minor, where the other Apostles were martyred. At Ephesus, Turkey, we saw the Basilica of St. John (son of Zebedee), the Cappodocian Fathers (St. Basil and St. John Christendom ), Antioch Fathers (Matthew, St. Paul, Peter to St. Antioch) and in Rome at the Church of the Holy Apostles, we saw scenes how they all were martyred, except St. John. We also went to ancient Mesopotamia in late September 2009 to see the ancient Chaldean Churches on the border of Iran, Turkey, Iran and Syria. There, at the Ararat Mountains, we saw Noah's Ark, lying on the slopes of the Ararat Mountains (see Ancient Mesopotamia, Ararat mountains and Noah's Ark).

 

 

Knight of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta (Knights of Malta)

 

On the 23 February 2003, I was invested as a Knight of the Order of Malta, a noble and chivalrous Papal Catholic Order at the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, Singapore. I was appointed first, the Hospitaller, i.e the person in charge of the works of mercy both locally and internationally. Later in November 2008, I was appointed the Chancellor of the Association dealing with the administrative affairs of the Singapore Association. Besides the works of mercy (see Mission Impossible 2003) and at the repair of school and church buildings at Lawdesky, Aceh, I also arranged the regular Lourdes Pilgrimages with the maladies as well as the Holy Land, (see Malta, Rhodes and Rome).

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