Charlie Loke: Contributions from Tennis Court Road—Past, Present and Future

Abstract

0143–4004/03/$-see front matter and almost every volume of Trophoblast Research has contained his reviews. Yung Wai Loke (known to everyone as Charlie) was born in Penang, an island off the West Coast of Malaysia. His family fled to Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion and he remembers the dog fights overhead before Singapore was captured in 1941. The remainder of the war was spent under the Japanese occupation in Kuala Lumpur living on a diet of brown rice. After the war he was despatched to England, a journey taking three days by air, and was educated at the Leys School and then King’s College in Cambridge. He then moved to St Thomas’s Hospital and qualified as a doctor in 1960 but, after spending a year as a houseman, he left England to return to Malaya where he worked as a Pathologist. It was there that his life was influenced in two important ways; he reduced his golf handicap to four and developed an interest in hydatidiform moles and choriocarcinomas, both common tumours in the Far East. There were strong pulls to settle permanently in Malaya and join the family business (his grandfather had emigrated from Southern China and founded the tin and rubber industries in Malaya), but in 1967 Charlie felt he should return to Cambridge. He was appointed as a Demonstrator in the Department of Pathology where he stayed for the next 35 years. In one of his earliest publications, arising from work performed in Malaya, he counted Barr bodies in placental tumours and found they were all XX in chromosome constitution and inferred (naively as it now turns out) that female placentae are more prone to the development of trophoblast tumours than males (Loke, 1969). Charlie’s long interest in trophoblast had begun. He became fascinated by how the allogeneic nature of choriocarcinomas might influence their behaviour (Loke, 1975) and the extension of this question to the normal placenta became his main intellectual preoccupation. Is the placenta discerned by the mother as self, nonself, missing self or surrogate self? How does this happen? Trophoblast cells are extraembryonic, arising from trophectoderm as the first differentiated cell of the embryo. The placenta is neither mother nor fetus, but provides an interface, a crucial intermediary, a no man’s land between these two genetically different individuals. There is an analogy with this concept in Charlie himself, buffered between England and Malaysia yet a To whom correspondence should be addressed at: Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QP, UK. Tel.: 44 1223 333727; Fax: 44 1223 765065; E-mail: am485@cam.ac.uk Figure 1. Charlie Loke, Melbourne, Australia, October 2002.