Leaving for schooling in Cambridge. Living under the Emergency and terrorism (1954)

 

We stayed in our new Golf View Road house from 1950-54, when Chong Teik and myself left to study for our 'O' & "A' Levels at the Perse School in Cambridge. This school was chosen by my father, as he was impressed by it when he was a university student at Downing, and the Perse School was just nearby. Terrorists whom we called bandits did try to get money via threats. I remember one evening two male Chinese cycled into our compound. My parents 'shooed' us away, and we later heard that they had shown my parents two bullets. I think this was one of the factors my parents decided to send Chong Teik and myself to school in England, and for him to retire early at the age of 40 years, and to be with us looking after our scholastic and badminton career

 

 

~ Schooling and Cambridge University years (1950-75) ~   

 

My brother Chong Teik and I studied at the Batu Road School in Kuala Lumpur, and remembered receiving a lot of cloth to make clothings. We also saw many leaflets being dropped by Dakota planes. From Batu Road School, we went to the Victoria Institution and in 1954, in Sec 2, I was chosen to represent the school badminton team. My brother Chong Teik was then the VI captain (see Chong Teik's account in "Great Badminton P layers). In 1954, both of us left to join the Perse School in Cambridge. We did our O levels and A levels there, and trained in badminton with the Cambridge University Badminton Team.

 

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~ Aims at early age ~

 

Our aim then was to enter into Downing College to study Medicine and to continue to excel in badminton. Chong Teik passed his requisite Advanced Level and first M.B. subjects and his excellence in world class badminton, worked strongly in his favour for acceptance into Cambridge. He joined Downing in 1957.

 

When I had completed my "O' & "A" Levels and passed all my first M.B Cambridge exams, I too, was accepted into Downing College. I remember the Senior Tutor in Medicine, Dr. Frank Wild asking me "Why do you want to do Medicine?”. I answered "I wanted to help humans in suffering, and later also to be able to look after my own family. I also mentioned that I was interested in why our body forms cancer and can't reject them". He was amazed and replied " You all say the same thing".

 

In 1957, whilst waiting to enter Cambridge, I spent it in playing county and International Championships, and was the young 'protégé' in the Malayan Badminton camp at Wimbledon, under the famous All England Champion, Eddie Choong and his brother David . That year, I won the All England Junior Singles Championship at the age of 17yrs. I was the first Malayan to win it. That year, I won 39 trophies, The All England Junior Singles, The Scottish, Welsh, Ireland in Singles, Men’s Doubles and Mixed Doubles. I had benefitted a lot from the training that I had had at the Wimbledon Squash and Badminton Club. I returned to Kuala Lumpur and in 1958 won the prestigious Selangor Junior Badminton Singles Championships. I was then considered the future Thomas Cup prospect.

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Badminton and studies in Cambridge

 

In 1958 I was admitted in Downing College, Cambridge University to study Medicine. I was then the first All England Junior Badminton Champion and had won 39 county and international Badminton titles, capturing the Scottish, Welsh , Ireland and French Singles, Doubles and Mixed Doubles titles. I also represented Cambridge University in badminton and received my half blue for it. Our Badminton team was the second best team in Europe, and next best to the Denmark national team, then considered one of the top teams in the world. In 1961, I Captained the Cambridge University Badminton Team, and we were undefeated in all our matches, including a 15-0 victory over Oxford. I would also represent the British Universities team in their tours and matches.

 

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~ Amongst scholars and sporting greats in Cambridge ~

 

Walking through the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge, where the cyclotrons were located, old buildings, passing over the Newton bridge, the house of Charles Darwin, set me in awe of being amongst such great Scientists and Nobel prize winners, like Sanger who had discovered insulin 6o years earlier. Even the Sedgwick Laboratories, Downing Street, where we did our Organic Chemistry Cambridge Entrance exams in 1956 had a Cyclotron there.

 

Our undergraduate life was filled with keeping up with our tutorials and work for our supervisors, in Anatomy, Physiology, and Biochemistry, as well as dissecting the formalin soaked bodies of cadavers of men and women who had donated their bodies for medical science. My dissecting partner was then Dewi Roberts, the Welsh Commonwealth sprinter.

 

The other portion of our work, was training and playing badminton at a top international level. There were many sportsmen and academics in the University. We enjoyed our pranks there, had fun, late nights, climbed over the gates, dodging the university 'bulldogs' who were the university law enforcers. Indeed our tutor said to our class in 1958 " Have fun, enjoy yourself, but don't let me bail you out of prison!"

 

 

~ The Hawk's Club ~

 

This is the much sort after elite sports club for outstanding university sportsmen. In order to be a member, one needed the support of a Council member and ten other members. It was a mark of distinction to earn the coveted Hawk's Club membership and to mingle with all the sportsmen in Cambridge. Despite my own heavy academic work load, I was often amazed how some of these chaps did not study, yet did brilliantly in their Tripos, or answered the lecturer, when half asleep after a late night.

 

25 years later, I would learn from my Master of the College, that many of these students, excelled in public life and were leaders in their field. University life had taught them to master their time management skills. Furthermore, they had also tasted the fruits of victory, as well as the humility of defeat and took that strategy to their work places and in society.

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~ The Cambridge degrees & challenges ~

 

I qualified with upper class honors in Medical Sciences and went down to Middlesex to start our clinical years of training. One day, together with my medical school colleague, David Cheung, we looked at our Grey book which recorded all our laboratory attendances. We looked at the back of the book, and saw that the last highest exam in Cambridge was the Doctor of Medicine , and Master of Chirurgery ( Surgery). We jokingly laughed.” Will we ever reach that highest level?

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 ~ Postgraduate Medical and Academic training and research ~

 

I spent 1965 to 1971 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and was fortunate in getting a great surgical training houseman job, under Mr. Ian Ranger, a senior vascular surgeon, and a keen badminton player too. From Surgery, I went on to Medicine under Professor Theo Chalmers in Endocrinology, and then to Paediatrics (under Dr. Douglas Gairdner, President of the British Paediatric Association). As a house officer, I learnt to carry out some of the researches done by my registrars. Here, I would meet Sir Professor Roy Calne, already a pioneer in liver transplant, when he joined our hospital.

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~ Studying for the Diploma in Child's Health and the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians ~

 

I completed my Diploma in Paediatrics and did a short stint as locum senior house officer at Great Ormond Street, and then at Hammersmith Postgraduate Hospital, when I had passed Part I of my MRCP exams. M y attachment to Addenbrooke’s Hospital led me to work for a time as Medical Registrar, then moving to a rotating post at the Accident & Emergency unit at the New Addenbrooke’s Hospital and, the Neurosurgical unit under Mr. Walpole Lewin and Mr. Gleave.

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Subsequent postgraduate jobs led me to move from Cambridge, to the East Birmingham Hospital for infectious diseases, to Edinburgh to St. Mary’s Hospital, where I completed my MRCP successfully. I was now armed with the MRCP (London), and the DCH , and was on a path to a successful academic career.

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 ~ Cancer Research and onwards to WHO ~

 

Professor John Hobbs, a well-known Cancer Immunologist took me as honorary Senior Registrar and Lecturer in Tumour Biology at the Westminster Hospital, as I was interested in an academic career in studying how to reject cancer cells immunologically. This new adventure opened up a new vision of the world of Cancer Research, basic laboratory research, international meetings and presentation of papers. I began this work in 1972 and worked on my Doctor of Medicine Cambridge thesis.

 

We published many papers on cell separators, its clinical use and basic physiological changes with infusion of large quantities of plasma. We raised human anti-cancer antibodies to melanoma, neuroblastoma, coupled this to chlorambucil and used it for targeted treatment of cancer. Whilst we could induce delayed hypersensitivity response to melanoma antigen, we could stop the progression of the Cancer. This showed that in an established growing cancer like malignant melanoma, induced a delayed hypersensitivity reaction did not alter the progression of cancer. With this knowledge , we used combination of chemotherapy, tumour vessel blood supply ablation with lipoidal in treating liver cancers . This effectively killed off the cancer growth

 

I was also posted to the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton under Professor Ray Powles and we studied the outcome of active immunisation of Acute myeloid leukaemia patients in remission, using allogeneic irradiated leukaemia cells. There I understood the meaning of being an Oncologist. "He is a person who is a supreme optimist, even though he/she is faced with overwhelming evidence of failure". In 1974, I submitted my Cambridge MD Thesis. Susie, my fiancé then, helped to type the thesis out. We rented a type writer and stayed in the University Arms Hotel to complete this.  Later, when I went up for the exam in 1975, she joined me, and helped to type some of the corrections in the manuscripts. When completed this I handed the books to the University Registry of thesis 

 

Professor David Butterfield, was then the Regius Professor, and the late Professor Peter Alexander were the examiners. At the M.D Award ceremony, the Praelector of Downing, walked together with us M.Ds ahead of the entourage of PhDs, MScs, B.As following behind to the Senate House, where I received the degree from the Vice Chancellor Professor Butterfield.

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Return to the Far East

 

I had always had a yearning to return to the Far East, either to Hong Kong or to Singapore to work, and had made annual trips back to see relatives and to the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, where Professor David Todd, then Head of the Department of Medicine, would always invite me to join in his ward rounds as well as give lectures on my cancer research.

 

On one of my visits, he invited me to come back to work in Hong Kong. I was then working on the Continuous Flow Blood Cell Separator, looking at ways to remove cancer blocking factors in the blood which prevented rejection of human cancers, like melanoma, and myeloma. He introduced me to the Director of the Hong Kong Blood bank, to see if there were opportunities there. The second person, was Mr. Sung Chee Kwan, Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, who used to come to our home at 6, Deep Dale, Wimbledon to have lunch with us and spent the day. My parents at that time, had frequent trips to China and were very helpful to the Chinese badminton teams, as my father was a member of the International Badminton Federation. Mr Sung said to me one day “Sung Yan" (my Cantonese name), you must go back to the East and help your people”. That advise still resonates to this day in me.

 

The third person was Professor Seah Cheng Siang, a senior elder statesman in Medicine in Singapore. On his visit to my Research Laboratory at Westminster Hospital, he was so impressed that he invited me to go back to Singapore to work.