THE first thing you notice about Sir Peng Tee Khaw, is how down to earth he is. The second is how much he loves what he does, and how he cannot stop talking about it.

Khaw Peng Tee received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours last year, for services in ophthalmology — only the second person in this field to do so. The first was Sir Harold Ridley, who conducted the first intra-ocular lens implant in the world.

Khaw is now the top man in glaucoma research, in the UK. His colleagues, however, are more excited about the honour than he is. “It’s not so much me; it’s that our speciality — which is a small one — has been recognised as being very important to people. For me, that’s quite a weight on my shoulders, because you feel you have to live up to all this history,” he says.

Khaw hails from a fairly prominent family in Malaysia. His father, Tan Sri Khaw Kai Boh, was part of Tunku Abdul Rahman’s Cabinet (Minister without Portfolio, Minister of Local Government and Housing, and finally, Special Functions Minister). But because of his father’s humble and rather hard beginnings, Khaw and his siblings were brought up to let neither wealth nor success, go to their heads.

Khaw’s grandfather had died, when his father was very young (less than 10 years old), and, as was usual in those times, the relatives descended on the widow, to divide the children up. Peng Tee’s father heard them talking, so he ran away and hid, until they had gone. He ended up being the only one living with his widowed mother. And when she became ill, he worked to support her, mostly by tutoring other children.

“My dad didn’t ram his history down our throats, but it was there, all the while, like a backdrop to his life, and we were influenced by its importance,” Khaw remembers.

His father ensured that his children never took anything for granted. “We were always brought up to be aware that we were fortunate. I don’t know if we were wealthy. But we were always aware that we had to be frugal, and I don’t think that’s ever changed.”

His mother, who had lived through the Japanese Occupation, was constantly on the alert for disaster. “She always kept a bundle of clothes in her wardrobe, that she could carry away at short notice, because you never knew when you would have to run away,” he chuckles.

Both his parents were averse to ostentation. “Even when we were in government, my mother used to say, ‘Step back, don’t push yourself forward’. And that’s always been a very good lesson in life.”

Khaw was born in Singapore, in 1957. His family moved to Kuala Lumpur soon after, and he studied at St John’s Institution before leaving for the UK, to complete the rest of his secondary school education there.

His father died when he was just 14 years old, and he was faced with a life-changing decision: whether to continue with his course and become a lawyer, or switch disciplines and study medicine. “You won’t believe this, but I went to an old Indian lady, who was a very famous palmist in Brickfields, and asked her to read my hand.”

The old lady studied his palm, and said: “You’ve come here, because you have a very difficult decision to make.”

He almost snorted in contempt. You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to figure, that one out. But then, she surprised him. “You can’t decide whether to be a doctor, or lawyer,” she continued.

That impressed him. “And then, she looked at me and said, ‘You must be a doctor. You have the mystic cross on your hand. In fact, you have several. And that means healing’.”

But what exactly is it, that he does? “My special interest is a disease called glaucoma, which is when pressure in the eyeball crushes the nerve at the back of the eye. This nerve sends electrical signals to the brain, so if it doesn’t work properly, you can’t see.”

Glaucoma affects between 70 million and 80 million people in the world, and 10% of those are blind, as a result of it. “So, that’s quite a lot of people. It’s as if you landed in London, and every person you met was blind. In fact, that is equal to, or more than the population of some of the smaller countries. So, it’s a huge disease and a very important one.”

There are three ways to treat glaucoma — eyedrops, and laser or surgery, to make new channels for fluid in the eye to flow out, so that pressure is reduced. “I suppose, my contribution is to make the surgery a lot safer. I call it the Moorfields Safer Surgery System, after the hospital in London, where I work.”

Although the knighthood is a huge recognition, he feels it is just a means to an end — more awareness of the problem and more money poured into research, to come up with even more effective treatments.

“We’ve been working on ways to reduce scarring [of the eye]. The Moorfields System teaches you to use these [anti-scarring] drugs in a way that is much safer, so you don’t get long-term complications. Earlier, complications resulting from misuse of these drugs were in the order of 20%. Now, it’s maybe 1%. So, it’s a big difference.”

But Khaw is not content to rest on his laurels. Now, he’s going for an even more audacious goal, one he dubs the 10-10-10.

The first 10 relates to 10mm of mercury. “Our blood pressure is measured in mercury. In the eye, there is usually a higher limit of pressure. The studies we and others have done, have shown that if you can get the pressure down to 10, which is a lot lower than 21, for most people, the damage to the nerve stops. So, the first part of the goal is to get the pressure down to 10.”

The second 10 relates to the time to come up with this solution: “Most people with glaucoma are in the older age range, so if we are able to lower the pressure in their eyes, and stop their glaucoma, it will usually see them through, for the rest of their lives. We aim to be able to do this in 10 years.”

The third 10 relates to the time taken to perform the surgery. “This is the most ambitious 10: to do it in 10 minutes.”

Khaw’s goals are enough to take your breath away, but he is fairly relaxed and confident about them. “In medicine, we don’t aspire high enough. This is incredibly aspirational. I’ve done some calculations and if we achieve this goal, it could stop several million people in the world, from going blind. And if you multiply that, by the other lives that are affected by one person going blind… well, it’s huge.”

Khaw runs the national medical centre that specialises in eye research, in the UK. “There are 12 national medical research centres in the UK, and every five years, we have to compete for funding,” he notes.

His centre, which is No 1 in the world at what it does, has no problem on this score. This is because it combines a world-class hospital, with world-class research facilities. “Most people misunderstand the function of research. They think it’s a nice-to-have, and that it doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

He begs to differ: “It really changes people’s outcomes. Everything you see in medicine, is a result of research. In ophthalmology, it’s been revolutionary.”

His boss, the UK’s chief medical officer Dame Sally Claire Davies, recognises the importance of research. So much so that she has insisted that all the national centres have world-leading universities combined with world-leading hospitals.

“She said to compete to be a national centre, both your hospital and your university has to be world-leading, and [additionally], they have to work to show that they are actually together rather than just being next door to each other,” Khaw says.

The system works. “With our centre, for instance, 70% of the really powerful research that we do is done between the hospital and the university. That’s the highest in Britain. What this means is that we work really closely as a hospital and a research centre.”

For instance, his research centre performed the world’s first gene therapy on a patient with retinal problems. “So, if you have a retinal effect and you’re going blind, we put a gene into your retina so that you can see again.”

They could do that because the hospital has thousands of patients with rare genetic disorders that the researchers could screen to find one suited for the therapy. And it has the lab technology to create the genes and the vectors (something you package the gene into to get it inside a cell).

“It is pretty space age,” Khaw admits. “And we’re also working on stem cells for retinal diseases. That sort of stuff doesn’t happen if you don’t combine world-leading science with world-leading hospitals and Moorfields is the No 1 site in the world today for eye research and the only medical centre that’s No 1 in the world, which is a bit unusual. Not many centres are bigger or better than the Americans’. It’s a big responsibility to make sure that we stay operating at that level.”

So, it’s no wonder Khaw was knighted by the Queen.

Moorfields Eye Hospital has affiliations with centres around the world but so far, not one with Malaysia. “Research services here haven’t developed as much as they need to. I mean, we’ve had people who are now working in Malaysia who had part of their training with us, but that’s about it,” says Khaw. “Malaysia has huge potential, but there are many other things it has to do first. Research is not something you do by accident; you have to target it, you have to enforce it, you have to make it a priority.”

The other part of Khaw’s job is showing people how important research is to them so that they support important initiatives; in other words, fund-raising. “We built an eye hospital in London entirely from charity sources,” he points out.

He urges researchers to come out of their laboratories and take pains to popularise what they do. “Because otherwise, I don’t think the public will understand how important your work is. You need to convince the public that research is really life-changing because they are the ones paying for it.”

From all these big-picture issues, we go to his personal finances. How does he manage them? Here, for the first time, Khaw, who has been in full throttle explaining his research and some of the latest findings, hesitates.

“Stuff is not a great priority for me. It’s what I do that is really important in my life. I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s really important that you have a nice place for your family and that they’re financially secure, but there’s a limit. I meet a lot of people, and a lot of my patients are wealthy, and we talk about these things. And at the end of the day, we agree that there’s a limit to the amount of things you need in your life,” he says.

Khaw tries to explain himself more clearly. “Let’s put it this way; as human beings, if you think about the things that give you the greatest joy and satisfaction, in some ways they are related to resource — I use the word ‘resource’ instead of money — but actually, they are related to the effort that you put in. They are not actually related to the financial total all the time. It’s nice to get a big grant, but the real challenge is actually achieving something with it. The great satisfaction in life comes from the personal things — your family achieves something, your patients get better — these are the things that really stay with you,” he says, summing up his philosophy.

Khaw was brought up to be frugal. He doesn’t believe in spending a lot of money on what he wears or eats. “I’m not saying that money isn’t important. Of course, it is. You can’t do big science nowadays without having the resources. But when you speak to people who are very wealthy, you realise it’s all relative. You buy something because it’s relative to what someone else has. As one of my patients says, ‘I don’t want to be the richest man in the graveyard’. And that’s why he supports our initiatives. Everybody wants to feel like they’ve made some difference in the world.”

Quod erat demonstrandum (that which has been demonstrated).  

This article was first published in the February 2014 issue of Personal Money — a personal finance magazine published by The Edge Communications.