The immunologist

What was the first moment that you truly felt like a scientist? 

The first time I really felt like a scientist was when I entered a lab, put on a white coat, was shown a bench and actually did my first lab experiment. That might sound strange because I was a doctor, so I'd worn a white coat many times before on hospital floors. When I now put on a white coat and went into a laboratory and actually did something on the bench, that's when I really felt like ‘wow! Now I'm a proper scientist’.   

I also felt this when I completed my first experiment. When you're in the lab, you measure different reagents in really tiny volumes, it looks like it's just a bit of water, and you mix it with something else and then you wait and you shake it up and you wash it out and blah blah blah, you go through a series of steps. That's like following a recipe, like you were cooking something, but at the end of it I was really satisfied  because I had a result! I had an ELISA plate – it's like a little plate and you have different compartments  on it and some of these had turned  a different colour which means they had something that I was looking for. The colour in some of the compartments did not change. 

There was a range of colours that told me there were different levels of what I was looking for. The whole cooking exercise actually gave me a real result that really got me excited. While I was cooking, it felt like a step of faith. Would I really see anything in the end? But then there it was: something happened, and I had data. So now I was feeling like ‘wow, I'm really becoming a scientist here’. 

You mentioned there that you're a doctor too. Why is it that you didn't necessarily feel like a scientist? 

As a scientist, in my mind, I step out of that day-to-day zone and almost look at the bigger picture. Because what I ultimately became interested in was vaccines. If you can design a vaccine, you prevent that day-to-day activity that I was engaged in as a doctor who was mostly treating infectious diseases. If people could be protected from that disease, then you would already reduce so much suffering.

So to me, you could think of both of them as scientists, but they work at different interfaces. You can tackle the problem once it's already happened, for example by treating the infection. On the other hand a scientist actually can step back and think about preventing the problem in the first place. 

Why do you think somebody should pursue a career or higher education in science? 

When you work in a hospital, you see sick people every day. The pain and suffering that it causes is real. However, there are many more people in the world who are not in hospital and who seem to be well and getting on with their lives. So I think that being a doctor allowed me to get close to that pain, and to understand the impact of preventing it, and allowing those people to live healthy, happy lives and do everything they want to do just like everybody else. So I think science gives me the opportunity to try and change something and make things better. 

What's next for you? What do you want to achieve in the next period of your career? 

I really want to focus more on malaria. Malaria is still a big, big problem and we've forgotten about it now. COVID has absorbed everybody's brain, but malaria was there before and it's going to be there after, and things have even gotten worse. It's not fixed yet. We've had a big announcement from the WHO that there's a great vaccine, the first ever malaria vaccine that's been licensed. It's good news, but the vaccine isn't as effective as we would like, and it doesn't protect people for as long as we would like. Again, COVID has shown us that you got your first jab, and then they said you needed a second one, and then they said you need a third one. And so similarly for malaria, the amount of protection isn't that long.  

With COVID, we're hitting efficacy of eighty/ninety per cent with the vaccines. With malaria it's about thirty to forty per cent, when you really squeeze the data out. So there's still a long way to go and there's still two hundred million cases every year just in Africa. So when you try to crunch those numbers in your mind and think about all the lives and the livelihoods that are lost and the economic impact, there's the scope to really make a difference there if you could get a good vaccine or interventions that really work. So in the coming years I really want to focus on malaria vaccines and hope that I'm one of the lucky people that make a nice breakthrough. 

If you could give your younger self some advice for career or studies, what advice would it be? 

The advice I would give is to chart your own future, that you are the one that decides what your future is going to be, not all the voices that you hear telling you ‘don't do this and don't do that, and there's no hope in this and you'll never make it in this’. Don't listen to those external voices.

I think that's just what I'd tell myself, to believe in what you want to do, listen to your inner voice and just go for it regardless of what everybody else is telling you. And you'll surprise yourself by achieving it. Lose that fear and just go for it and reach your dream.