Prof. Ondřej Šeda, head of the Institute of Biology and Medical Genetics, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and General University Hospital in Prague
Prof. Ondřej Šeda, head of the Institute of Biology and Medical Genetics, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and General University Hospital in Prague
It
is no exaggeration to say that the First Faculty has been the cornerstone of my
professional life. Although since 1993, when I started at the Fist Faculty as a
freshman, I spent many years outside the Czech Republic, I have never lost the connection
to the ‘Number One’. Towards the end of my master’s studies, Professor Vladimír
Křen lured me into the world of genetics and basic research, which I have not
left since. I did my doctoral studies also at the First Faculty, although I
spent over half of that time in the laboratories of the University of Montreal
where we investigated genetic models created at Albertov. Already as a doctoral
student, I started helping with teaching and over time, some of my teachers
became my colleagues. I came to realise what it is that makes the First Faculty
unique: it is a community of people, professionals – doctors, scientists,
teachers, but also students – who are regularly willing to go beyond their
personal agenda and contribute to an atmosphere that does not emerge just of
its own, just by bringing together excellent professionals. Each time I came
back to the First Faculty, it was with an increasing sense of gladness, because
in the light of perspective how things are done elsewhere, I see the vast
potential to whose realisation I have been trying to contribute my little bit
in recent years. Our institute has in its name not only genetics, which in the
meantime came to permeate almost all medical specialties, but also medical
biology. That is why in our work, we bring together experts in submicroscopic
aspects of the living, experimental geneticists, and physicians, conduct the
full range of laboratory diagnostics, and engage both in basic research and
research that has direct application in clinical practice. In doing so, I
believe we are drawing on the broad concept of medical biology articulated by
Professor Bělohrádek
but updated for the twenty-first century, fully in the spirit of the First
Faculty transcending the boundaries of institutes and particular fields.