Canada loses top geneticist — Lap-Chee Tsui

Score one for brain drain. World renowned geneticist Dr Lap-Chee Tsui has resigned from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) to accept a position as vice chancellor at Hong Kong Univ, effective this September. The 52-year old researcher will maintain a relationship with the hospital, but his departure is clearly a blow to Canada’s growing genomics research community, of which he is a leading proponent and supporter.

Tsui holds multiple positions at HSC — geneticist-in-chief, head of the genetics and genomics biology program in HSC’s research institute, a professor with the Univ of Toronto’s department of molecular and medical genetics. The genetics and genomics program has a staff of 250. He also holds the HE Sellers Chair in Cystic Fibrosis and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholar.

Tsui is most famous for leading the research team that isolated the defective gene responsible for cystic fibrosis (CF) and defining the principal mutation. Four years earlier, he and Dr Manuel Buchwald (now director of HSC’s research institutes and chief of research) identified the first DNA marker for CF on chromosome 7.

In the late 1990s, Tsui was a key organizer and lobbyist for the creation of Genome Canada, a role he assumed despite his reluctance take time away from his research to enter the realm of politics. He and others were successful in convincing Ottawa to fund Genome Canada, which put Canada back on the genomics research map after stumbling badly during the mid 1990s. During that time he served as co-chair of the Genome Canada interim board. In 2001 he served as president of the International Human Genome Organization.

HSC has mounted an international search to find a replacement for Tsui but Hospital officials admit it won’t be easy. The global competition for top geneticists is brutal, with many other nations also working hard to build up their own research programs.

Tsui was born in Shanghai and raised and educated in Hong Kong where he received his BSc and MA from Chinese Univ. He earned his PhD from the Univ of Pittsburgh. He moved to Canada in the early 1980s.

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