Lap-Chee Tsui
Person
Personal life
Tsui was born in Shanghai. He grew up in Tai Koon Yu, a little village on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong near Kai Tak Airport, where typical entertainment constituted exploring ponds and catching tadpoles and fish for simple experiments with other children. Due to this upbringing he speaks fluent Cantonese. Tsui apparently dreamt of being an architect as a child. He received his secondary education at Homantin Government Secondary School, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
He studied Biology at the New Asia College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was awarded a B.Sc. (3rd Class Honours) and a M.Phil. in 1972 and 1974, respectively. Despite his unpromising performance at university, Tsui would eventually prove himself as an accomplished scientist. Upon the recommendation of his mentor at the CUHK, he continued his graduate education in the United States and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1979. He became Postdoctoral Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, then joined the Department of Genetics of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto in 1981. Career
From 1981 to 2002, Tsui continued his research and teaching in the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto alternatively. Prior to his appointment as the Vice-Chancellor, he was Geneticist-in-Chief and Head of the Genetics and Genomic Biology Program of the Research Institute at the Hospital for Sick Children and co-founder (with Dr. Steve Scherer) of The Centre for Applied Genomics. He was also the holder of the H.E. Sellers Chair in Cystic Fibrosis and University Professor at the University of Toronto. He was the President of Human Genome Organisation (HUGO), the international organization of scientists involved in the Human Genome Project, from 2000 to 2002.
He has also served on the editorial boards for 20 international peer-reviewed scientific journals, numerous scientific review panels, and many national and international advisory committees, including the Medical Research Council of Canada, Canadian Genome Research Task Force Committee (Chair), Scientific Steering Committee of the National Institute of Biological Science, Scientific Advisory Committee of the China National Center for Biotechnology Development and Human Genome Organization. He is currently member of the Judicial Officers Recommendation Commission, Council for Sustainable Development and Executive Committee, and Executive Committee of the Commission on Strategic Development of the Hong Kong SAR Government.
He was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in May 2002 and assumed office as the fourteenth Vice-Chancellor of the university with effect from 1 September 2002. As of October 2011, he had decided not to seek re-appointment.
Driven by a commitment to science, and a creative approach to difficult problems, Dr. Lap-Chee Tsui made what is described as the most significant breakthrough in human genetics in 50 years, namely the discovery of the cystic fibrosis gene. Born in Shanghai, China, studied in Hong Kong and USA, and coming to Canada in the early 80s, Dr. Tsui is an innovator, mentor and role model who stands as a true giant in the field of human genetics. He has made extraordinary contributions to science through his discoveries and is a leader in developing the field of genomics in Canada and internationally. Indeed, his contributions reach round the world to the countless people afflicted with cystic fibrosis (CF), offering new hope for diagnosis and treatment.
The decade-long march to discover the cystic fibrosis gene began when Dr. Tsui arrived in Canada and applied a new theory called genetic linkage to map the most common inherited disease affecting Caucasians: cystic fibrosis. The work of Dr. Tsui, in collaboration with Dr. John Riordan at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and Dr. Francis Collins at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Michigan, led to mapping the CF gene to chromosome 7. The discovery, published in three foundational papers in 1989, alerted the scientific community to the powerful new tools now available for the study of inherited disease. One of the most closely watched endeavours in all of science, the search for the gene was regularly featured in scientific journals and mainstream media.