Reception in Honour of Luke O'Neill's RIA Gold Medal
Saloon, Provost's House
18:00, Tuesday, 29 January 2013
Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Two months ago Luke O’Neill received the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Life Sciences.
As you know, the RIA awards only two Gold Medals a year and competition is always intense. Everyone in Trinity is delighted, and proud, that Luke O’Neill received this award for his exceptional research. He has also in recent years won the highly prestigious Boyle medal of the Royal Dublin Society and the Science Foundation Ireland Researcher of the Year Award, not to mention other awards from universities abroad - including the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, and McGill.
So tonight we want to pay our own tribute to Luke, here in Trinity. It’s important, when our staff members are heaped with honours by other places, that we in Trinity make recognition of this, and mark our appreciation.
Excellence should never go unacknowledged, especially excellence like Luke’s which, I think it’s not an exaggeration to say, illuminates the whole university.
Immunology is one of Trinity’s eighteen multidisciplinary thematic research areas, and it is also one of the research areas for which Trinity is ranked in the top 1% of higher education institutions world-wide. If Trinity is a world leader in immunology, that has a huge amount to do with Luke.
He is a graduate of this university, and after a PhD in the University of London and post-doctoral research in Cambridge, he returned to work in Trinity, becoming a fellow in 1996. Since then he has greatly built up the teaching and research capacities of biochemistry and immunology in Trinity. He was instrumental in the creation of the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute – and today he is its first Academic Director.
Luke is one of those fortunate beings who has a cross-breadth of skills and talents. He is, of course, an extraordinary scientist, but he is also, by all accounts, a wonderful teacher and collaborator, a formidable organiser, a man of ideas, and an entrepreneur. This evening, I want to pay tribute to all these attributes because we must recognise that in the 21st century the new breed of excellent academic is often just such a multi-talented figure – a modern version of the renaissance ‘man’.
Now I hope there will always be space in universities for those who devote themselves to one thing – for those who concentrate exclusively on laboratory work or archive work, aware that their skills do not lie in organising conferences or starting campus companies. I do not under-estimate the importance of their singular contribution.
However as universities look increasingly to engage society in their research and as they become global competitors for great talent, then, yes, setting up campus companies, and organising large international conferences, and managing boards, and competing for research grants, and establishing international research collaborations – all these activities do assume an ever greater importance. So much so that the work of an academic today extends well beyond what it was even a few decades ago.
We may all sometimes crave the scholar’s traditional solitude in the library or lab, but increasingly the challenge of academia demands that we exercise the full artillery of our skills. It makes the job more dynamic and rewarding. Luke is, I think we all agree, the best of us at this. The sheer amount he must get done in a day is dizzying to contemplate.
But of course it was for his research that he won the RIA gold medal. Luke is a pioneer in his discipline, one who was at the forefront of the shift in focus towards innate immunology.
His work on a set of immune proteins called Toll-like receptors (TLRs) had a major influence on the field. The discovery of these TLRs was rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology to Jules Hoffmann and Bruce Beutler, and the O’Neill lab played a very important role in supporting and extending their initial findings. These findings helped explain how TLRs work in terms of signalling, and we’re now closer to developing therapeutic approaches which might be used to target TLRs in a number of conditions, notably transplantation, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and metabolic diseases.
In order to commercialise his work on TLRs, Luke co-founded the company, Opsona Therapeutics, in 2004, together with his Trinity colleagues, Professor Kingston Mills and Professor Dermot Kelleher. Last year Opsona received an Outstanding Achievement Award from Enterprise Ireland. Luke is currently acting as Opsona’s chief scientific advisor.
Luke’s former PhD students are in faculty positions around Ireland and overseas. Recently members of his lab, led by Dr Sarah Doyle, in a collaborative research project with the Ocular Genetics Group of Professor Peter Humphries, discovered that a part of the immune system, called the inflammasome, is involved in regulating the development of one of the most common forms of blindness, called Age-Related Macular Degeneration. This discovery could prevent the development of the disease.
In so many ways he enhances the life of the university. I’m thinking of the Science Gallery exhibition he co-curated a few years ago - called ‘Infectious’ now that I recall. And I’m thinking of the key role he played in organising last year’s Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) programme in Dublin.
He was chair of the programme committee, and was instrumental in devising and co-ordinating a brilliant programme – we all remember the ‘What is Life?’ lecture of Craig Venter. Not only Trinity, but all of Dublin has much to thank him for.
I’d like to close with Luke’s own words in an interview last year, when he was asked about his goals. I think that what he said then really sums up Luke’s approach – his generosity, his inspiration, his team spirit, and his sense of excitement about scientific discovery. He said:
“My own goals are always about just trying to find out new interesting things. The most exciting bit is progressive discoveries. I have made five or six discoveries in my career that would have had an influence on the field and would have helped other people make their discoveries. So the goal is to make progress the whole time towards greater understanding. What greater thrill can there be then to discover life itself? We work at the very molecular level – we work on cells, on DNA, on genes, on proteins. That, to me, is a wonderful adventure. It’s a great privilege to study life in that way, and to discover new aspects about life.”
“Progress towards greater understanding” - “A thrill” – “a wonderful adventure” - and “a great privilege” – that just about sums up, I think, what the approach in Trinity, and in all universities, should be towards knowledge and discovery.
Today in celebrating Luke, we celebrate someone who has discovered so much – and will discover so much more. Luke was quick off the starting blocks and is now at the height of his powers. We look forward to what he will next “forge in the smithy of this soul” – or in the lab of his soul is maybe more accurate………
It is, I think we are all agreed, ‘a thrill’, ‘an adventure’, and ‘a privilege’ to work with Luke. As your colleagues and friends, we are delighted to be part of what you call ‘progress towards greater understanding’. On behalf of Trinity I thank you for all you have done and will do for this university. And now may I ask every one to join me in raising a toast to Luke O’Neill.
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