How I Got There

Virologist

I was born in Indonesia but I came to Hong Kong because this is where my husband is from. We met at university in Australia. I got the opportunity to join the Hong Kong Department of Health in 1981. Then in 1988, the head of the Government Virus Unit retired. As a specialist in medical microbiology, I was considered suitable to take up the post. It was a new scope of work for me and I found it challenging and interesting. I have been doing this for 17 years now. One good thing about virology is that it involves constant advances. It keeps my enthusiasm going because there is always something new.

I have a team of 45 technical staff, eight science staff, three medical staff. Most of my staff are women. I don't know what happens to the men. I guess they go into finance. In my time in medical school, only 15 percent of my class were women. Now it is different. Half the students in medical school are women. There are a lot of women working in Hong Kong, and in the government we have a lot of women heading departments or bureaus.

One big advantage is that here we can have help at home. That takes away a lot of pressure. My children are now grown up, but when they were young, if I had to stay late at the office, I knew someone could pick them up from school at 6:30. I didn't have to worry. I am very grateful to my household help. My husband, who is an engineer, is also very supportive. During busy times, he knows I'll be home at 11 p.m. or 12, and he takes care of himself.

In Hong Kong we've had H5N1-type avian flu, SARS, we don't know what's next. What we have found is that it is important to be able to cope with the sudden surge of lab work. We have had to deal with this since we had the avian-flu outbreak in 1997 that infected 18 people and killed six. That was a terrible experience. Usually we process a few hundred specimens a day. In 1997, suddenly the samples were coming into the lab by the trolley.

We are very lucky in Hong Kong that we have a big lab and we have the resources. We have helped process avian-flu samples from Hong Kong, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia. Testing is very expensive and people need to be trained. What we do is rotate everybody to different labs to acquire the essential techniques used in virology. That way, if something happens, we can quickly move all the people who are working on, say, hepatitis, to flu.