CODE BREAKER

Doctor and molecular biologist Dennis Lo invented the prenatal DNA tests used in millions of pregnancies every year he tells Tatler we are living in a golden age for science in Asia

- David Bishop

Dr Dennis Lo has won some of science's highest honours. In just the past three years, he has been granted The Breakthrough Prize, the Royal Medal and the LaskerDeBakey award-an honour often seen as a precursor to winning a Nobel prize. There is a good reason for this: Lo is the inventor of a genetic testing technology that has revolutionised prenatal care for millions of women around the world. It has also been found to have promising applications in the detection of cancer.

If that wasn't enough, he's also a delightful storyteller. As he shares highlights from a remarkable career, he can recall the smallest of details: The name of a biology textbook from childhood. The knot in his stomach, over 30 years ago, as he waited to meet with famed Oxford physician Sir David Weatherall: "You knew he was in that office just by the way the pipe smoke crept through the slit in the door," Lo says.

Lo's narrative abilities may come from his natural gift for treasuring what the rest of us miss. In 1989, he became one of the first researchers in the world to discover the presence of an unborn child's DNA in its mother's bloodstream. Like bits of radio chatter, these random snippets of genetic code had gone undetected for years. In 1997, Lo had another game-changing idea by looking for foetal DNA in the mother's plasma, the amber-coloured liquid in which blood cells are absent: "Frankly, the last place you would expect to discover any DNA," he says.

Lo spent the next decade reassembling these fragments back into a complete genetic picture of the unborn child. In the process, he co-parented a revolution in medical diagnostics: non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). Today, doctors use his patented DNA testing technology to learn a baby's sex and test for chromosomal abnormalities such as Down Syndrome, all with a simple blood test.