If doctors and surgeons are the actors on the stage, then basic scientists are the technical staff backstage, optimizing the entire process of medicine. Prof. Patrick Tang is a locally incubated basic scientist in CUHK working on cancer immunity. If you would like to learn more about the scientific sides of medicine, read on.
Basic Science
Although “basic” is reminiscent of easy and monotonous work, the life of a basic scientist is, in fact, full of surprises.
Basic scientists aim to understand the natural world better and identify new therapeutic strategies for future medicine. They need to be imaginative and tough. Going against the predominant trend and getting unexpected results are just parts of their daily lives.
Fate and Destiny
Prof. Tang’s path towards professorship was neither planned nor expected. After graduating from Pui Ching Middle School, he opted to study biochemistry at CUHK. He was not a particularly high-scoring student back then, and he took his first job as a Customer Service Representative at a bank. Serendipitously, he received a call from a professor asking whether he wanted to take up a job as a junior research assistant. Usually, professors wouldn’t keep contact with students after graduation, but on that day, the conversation carried on about his research life. “If it were not for that call, I would probably still be a banker or jobless,” he added. “Cliché as it may sound, research chose me.”
Oxford and HK
In 2003, Prof. Tang received a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for postdoctoral training at Oxford University with a scholarship, intending to overcome the drug resistance of cancer.
As Prof. Tang recalled his life in Oxford, he jokingly compared it with an “underdeveloped Tuen Mun”. “To compensate for the loss of entertainment, I spent more time working in the lab,” he added.
“Education-wise, professors and students are the same there. When a question arises, undergraduates, postgraduates and professors will objectively discuss the issue, and all possibilities will be considered enthusiastically. There is no ‘the teacher is always right’ kind of vibe,” Prof. Tang explained.
The timetable of an Oxford researcher:
09:00 – 09:30 Lab
10:00 – 10:30 Breakfast
10:30 – 12:00 Lab
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch that always turns into a casual lab-meeting with boss in the canteen
13:30 – 15:30 Lab
15:30 – 16:00 “Let’s go for tea!!” — time for gossip and scientific discussion
16:00 – 17:25 Lab or Workout
The day ends at 17:30.
“Although scientists at Oxford spend approximately the same amount of time working as their Hong Kong counterparts, their research outputs are higher in terms of quality, ranking, and social impact,” Prof. Tang explained. “This is due to their creativity. By coming up with a novel yet intuitively obvious idea, they don’t need to do much to prove the theory.” Prof. Tang’s experience exemplifies the need for intuition in scientific research.
He further provided us with an example. “If you managed to capture an alien and uncover its DNA, obviously you would get flying colours on your research paper. However, if you take a human, because of how basic and commonly researched it is, the results would most likely be disappointing.”
One thing Prof. Tang has learnt from Oxford is to be smart and original.
Making Choices
Many senior secondary school students are forced to make choices about their future careers quickly. When asked about decision making, Prof. Tang said, “I believe it is all programmed by fate. If you make the best decisions for yourself, you will eventually be led to a career that suits you most.”
A Rocky Road
Despite fate and destiny being on his side, and receiving numerous opportunities, Prof. Tang’s journey towards a professorship was not an easy path.
After going to Oxford for further studies, he chose to be a research manager in a company. However, as the company collapsed 2 years later, he had to restart his career as a research associate with the salary equivalent to a fresh graduate of university. “It was a job I would have taken as a beginner,” Prof. Tang said, “this set my career back ten years.”
However, that was not the only obstacle Prof. Tang faced. As a researcher specialising in kidney diseases, he faces a lot of competition against his peers all over the world. Upon discovery, only the first research paper published is recognized, while others are just viewed as papers that further support the first paper’s claim. Sometimes, when other scientists publish papers on topics that he is also working on, years of hard work may vanish in an instance.
“There is not much you can do,” Prof. Tang admitted, “the world is big, so overlapping is often expected. Nevertheless, we can repackage the findings on hand to launch a new research direction.”
Advice for Aspiring Pathologists
“Honesty is one of the most crucial things about being a researcher. Once, my classmates set up a hypothesis to prove that cancer cells would undergo programmed cell death under certain circumstances, ” he recalled. “However, the experiment did not go according to plan. In the results of the 12 trials, only 2 fit the hypothesis.”
His classmates tried to obtain enough expected findings by repeating the experiments, ignoring the ‘unwanted’ data. “I was wondering why they didn’t simply accept the reproducible findings in 10 out of the 12 experiments? It should be the truth and an interesting discovery.”
“Be flexible and stay honest to your research. Ground-breaking discoveries are often made by keeping true to your observations rather than your will,” he concluded.
Another quality of a researcher is to never give up. Once, Prof. Tang was working on a paper which was rejected for two years and had to be revised eight times before acceptance. Usually, a paper would be accepted after several amendments. Many people told him to give up, but he pushed himself on. Eventually, after the eighth submission, his paper got published following a widely reported press conference: https://www.med.cuhk.edu.hk/press-releases/cuhk-uncovers-novel-immune-escape-mechanism-of-cancer-opening-up-new-direction-for-cancer-immunotherapy
“If you believe in what you are doing, please persevere,” Prof. Tang encouraged. “You never know how close you are to your goal. Stay positive!”
Opportunities for Me?
A research internship under the guidance of Prof. Tang would be possible after the pandemic. Asklepian Medical Society will keep in touch with professors and inform you when opportunities are available.
“Students can still wisely utilise their time during the pandemic,” Prof. Tang added. “Let’s make every day count!”
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