IAS Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professor Public Lecture 26 May 2026

"The Challenges in Biomedicine and Agriculture"

Understanding how the human body—and especially the brain—works is one of the most important goals of modern science. This includes identifying all human proteins, learning what they do, and understanding how their malfunction leads to disease. These insights are essential for developing precise, targeted treatments. Key unsolved questions include how memory forms, why we sleep and age, and what causes Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders. I believe we now have the tools to tackle these problems.

Photosynthesis underpins agriculture and all biomass-based energy, but it is highly inefficient. While biofuels cannot compete with solar-based technologies for energy production, improving photosynthesis is critical to feeding a growing global population. Advances in genetic engineering could significantly increase crop yields in the future.

About the speaker [More info]: 

Prof Hartmut Michel has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, since 1987. He studied biochemistry in Tübingen and Munich, and received his PhD from the University of Würzburg in 1977 for work in bioenergetics. He is a member or foreign member of many learned societies, including the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Science), the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (London). 

In 1988, Prof Michel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, “for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre”. He has since expanded his work onto other membrane proteins, often of medical importance. He has been most successful with secondary active transporters, which are membrane-integrated proteins that enable the specific transport of substances like nutrients and building blocks across biological membranes.