To contain SARS, scientists believe it is necessary to tackle the culprit that triggers the killer disease. Michael Lai (賴明詔), a US Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has returned to Taiwan to head up the fight against the coronavirus, the causative agent of SARS.
Dubbed by China "the father of the coronavirus," Lai has spent the past 30 years studying the virus, which only started attracting world attention after it was linked to SARS.
At the institution, Lai's laboratory studies the replication and pathogenesis of several human and animal RNA (Ribose Nuclei Acid) viruses, including the hepatitis C virus, hepatitis delta virus and coronavirus.
On May 10, Lee Yuan-tseh (
Lee invited Lai and Chen Ding-shinn (陳定信), dean of National Taiwan University's College of Medicine, to co-chair the SARS research task force. Lai and Chen were classmates in the college Chen now heads.
Both Lai and Chen became fellows of Academia Sinica's Institute of Life Sciences in 1991. As Sunney Chan (
Lai was born in Tainan in 1942 and entered the city's most prestigious high school.
"He was a distinguished student in high school. He had done well in his studies and had a good personality," Chen said.
According to Chen, Lai was friendly to his classmates.
"He did not become aloof because of his outstanding academic performance," Chen said.
Lai obtained his MD in medicine at NTU in 1968 and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. His research topics are virology, RNA and DNA, gene regulation and transcription.
While summing up Lai's research, the insitute reported that the coronavirus causes respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases in humans and animals.
"It [the coronavirus] also causes neurological symptoms similar to those of multiple sclerosis. The virus has an RNA genome of 31,000 nucleotides, which is the longest known viral RNA," the institute said.
Lai is a distinguished professor of molecular microbiology, immunology and neurology at the University of Southern California's School of Medicine.
In an interview with Chinese media in late April, Lai said the genetic sequences of the coronavirus causing SARS showed similarities to those of the coronaviruses found in mice and poultry.
Lai, who has studied coronaviruses in cows, pigs, chickens, cats and mice, said coronaviruses do not usually jump from one species to another.
According to Lai, coronaviruses from different species will occasionally swap genes and mutate. But he said it is unlikely that humans were infected with the virus because of eating poultry.
Lai, author of many textbooks on the coronavirus, mapped out the world's first genetic sequences of coronavirus found in mice 12 years ago. So far, he has published more than 270 papers, according to the US National Library of Medicine.
In the interview, Lai also remarked: "Viruses are more intelligent than human beings. Their history on the planet is far older than human history. They know better than humans about how to survive."
Decades of research on viruses has convinced Lai the invisible organisms display great intelligence and skills to survive.
"Viruses are very intelligent. They can think. They do things that we do not expect. They adapt to the environment. They change themselves in order to survive," said Lai in an interview with USC Trojan Family Magazine in 1999.
The magazine also quoted Lai as saying: "Viruses can pick up pieces of cellular genes or incorporate their genes into the cell's genome. That means that evolution occurs all the time in viruses."
"It's a very dynamic process -- that's why I always feel that the viruses are alive," Lai said.
The magazine concluded that: "after all these years, studying viruses' ways continues to leave Lai with a sense of amazement. Part of this comes from their ability to shuffle genes as deftly as some genetic engineers can."
Perhaps still amazed by the viruses' ability to change, Lai is now set to launch another significant study on the coronavirus that might leads to the recovery of the hundreds of lives now threatened by SARS.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater