EVERY tumour is individual. A prize-winning insight, it must be said. And it did — the 2019 Dr Josef Steiner Cancer Research Prize — for Professor Dr Nik Serena Nik Zainal, a Malaysian at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Medical Genetics, for her work on cancer genome interpretation.
As a clinician scientist, she studies mutation patterns in human DNA and finds ways to make it applicable in a clinical setting. Dr Serena, as the web page says, is a mother of two, loves music and being outdoors, and fights the 40s with kung fu. Quite a lady, we have to say.
Dr Serena has a way with words too. She credits the “little touches” of the many people along the way that went to form the person she is today. First of all, her parents.
Her late father — Datuk Dr Nik Zainal Abidin Nik Abdul Rahman — was the country’s first cardiologist. He was a man of a few firsts, and a celebrated one at that. A doctor with a heart to his friends, he is said to have trained many cardiologists.
Dr Zainal had a hand in Serena’s dream too. So had her mother. As they say, parents make or break you.
This newspaper is rightly proud of Dr Serena’s accolade. Dr Serena and her team’s work will change the world in a good way. Isolated, tumours may be tamed, and cancer, hopefully, cured.
She may not have won the Nobel prize for medicine, but the Dr Josef Steiner Cancer Research Prize is otherwise called the “Nobel prize in cancer research”. Perhaps the Nobel prize is closer than we think. A Steiner prize brings us that much nearer.
This notwithstanding, the New Straits Times is not just about Nobel or Olympic prizes. World events are shaped by extraordinary people as much as ordinary men and women in the street. Just as many things happen in the omnibus as in the 747 jet plane.
Our journalism gives space for the ordinary, the extraordinary and everyone in between. For every life lived there is a story. And a backstory. It is our job as journalists to bring them to you.
As we have done for 174 years of newspapering. Today, the New Straits Times celebrates them — as we did in our NST Leader: “Glorify them” on Oct 14.
The world needs local heroes and heroines. Because they inspire. They become what Dr Serena calls the “little touches” that go to form us. They pick us up when we are down.
They put us together when we fall and fracture. Like all people who bring meaning to others, the Serenas, Anands, Samuels and Zulkernais (see NST Leader: “Glorify them”) of the world teach us perseverance. Caring for another. Respecting the other.
And most all, of being humble. Towering personalities know in the deepest recesses of their hearts that they stand tall because others have offered them their shoulders to stand on.
Everything we achieve today is made possible by others who have gone before us. We finish what others have begun.
Someone else will begin where we have ended. Thus is the cycle of success set in motion. With a little help from journalism.