Fireside Chat Series 5: Professor Philip Ingham, FRS

The fifth Fireside Chat held on 21^st of October, featured Toh Kian Chui Distinguished Professor, and the Professor of Developmental Biology Philip Ingham, with the session entitled “Trithorax to Therapeutics”. Nearly 80 guests including faculty members, postdocs, PhD students and administrative staff from LKCMedicine, A*STAR and NUS, attended the online event. In a wide-ranging discussion, Prof. Ingham shared his motivation to be a geneticist and his journey to becoming a developmental biologist. He narrated the story of how as a young PhD student, after his work on the trithorax gene had been published, he naively applied to attend an EMBO conference. This enabled him to establish contacts within the small but insular Drosophila community, which served him well during later stages of his professional career. Prof. Ingham also revealed how he was persuaded to switch to a vertebrate model system – zebrafish, by the Nobel laureate Prof Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, and how the collaboration that he fostered at informal gatherings she organised, led to the seminal discoveries related to the Sonic Hedgehog pathway in the early 1990s. His experiences with patenting ideas in basic sciences and how that generated interest amongst the venture capitalists, followed by drug screenings by a start-up and a resultant FDA approved drug, brought home the importance of curiosity driven research to the audience. During the Q&A session, Prof. Ingham took questions about the differences in PhD programs during his time as a student and now, and noted that the graduate schools have now become more structured, perhaps at the cost of students’ intellectual freedom. He also emphasized that being able to pursue what you are passionate and curious about, eventually leads to success.