EVENTS

Nobel Laureate Inaugural Lecture: Toward Affordable Preventive Healthcare: How Basic Science Addresses Grand Challenges

Grand Hall, Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre, Centennial Campus, HKU

Abstract Basic research rarely helps practitioners directly with their everyday concerns; nevertheless, it stimulates new ways of thinking that have the potential to revolutionise and dramatically improve how practitioners deal with a problem in the future. This lecture aims at providing an example. At the dawn of the new millennium, attosecond metrology enabled us to capture sub-atomic motions for the first time. A couple of decades later, the new technology paves the way towards precision preventive medicine. When triggered and captured in the molecules of human blood, these motions can reveal changes in its molecular composition and provide early signs of unfolding health aberrations. Cost-effective monitoring of human health will address several grand challenges of our time.