Newsletter No. 41

CUHK Newsletter No.41 April 1993 people would have higher expectations of medical services. The sickest - those suffering from traumas, road accidents, severe infections, cardiac arrest, pneumonia, and major operations such as open heart and cancer surgery - should no longer be managed in ordinary wards by doctors and nurses untrained in intensive care. Other major themes for discussion in the four-day event included organ transplant, infections, trauma, and medical ethics in dealing with dying patients. Professor i al Inaugural Lec t u r es on Liver Cancer and Data and I n f o rma t i on Management Two professorial inaugural lectures,respectively entitled 'Virusesand Liver Cancer: A Journey to a Far Country' and 'An Evolution ofData and Information Management', were delivered on 5th and 19th March separately by Prof. Philip JamesJohnson and Prof. VincentLum in Lecture TheatreL1, Science Centre. Viruses and Liver Cancer: A Journey to a Far Country Prof. Philip James Johnson, professor of clinical oncology, focused his lecture on the mechanism by which the hepatitis B virus causes cancer. According to Prof. Johnson, half the world's population have been infected by the hepatitis B virus, 350 million people are long-term carriers, and about half of the male carriers will eventually die of primary cancer of the liver. No where is the problem more prevalent than in Hong Kong where, at the Prince of Wales Hospital, an average of 10 new cases are seen each week. Hepatitis B viral infection is far from dying out, although a safe and effective vaccine which can prevent transmission from mother to child has been available for more than a decade. Prof. Johnson explained that effective vaccination was being held back by insufficient funds in high incidence areas in Africa, by a lack of political will to provide the vaccine to the deprived in certain affluent countries, and by cultural resistance to the idea of vaccination in other places. An Evolution of Data and Information Management Prof. Vincent Lum, professor of systems engineering, described in his inaugural lecture how the computer generally managed its data and how the demands from various applications prompted computer scientists todevelop database management systems. Great success in data management had been achieved ever since magnetic diskettes replaced magnetic tapes as the storage medium, he said, but the same kind of success was not found in information management. The key difficulty, he explained, lay in the complexity of information, its extraction, its representation and its derivation. He then went on to show the current approach to develop methods for information management in the form of knowledge-base or expert systems, and concluded his lecture by presenting a view of the future of data and information management. 4