ZOOLOGIST Dr Lawrence Williams is the consummate scientist. You get the feeling, on meeting him, that research is as vital to him as taking his next breath.

“I have a passion for research. I love it. It is my lifeline,” said Williams, who is now conducting cancer research using the guinea hen weed plant. “If I stopped doing it, I don’t know what I would do, I would die.”

Currently employed as a research consultant to Jamaica’s Scientific Research Council (SRC), Dr Williams overseas the exploration efforts of five young men and women employed to that agency.

“As someone who has gone through a lot of that research, I guide them, help them not to make mistakes,” he told the Sunday Observer.

Williams earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1987, having completed undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI) with a major in Zoology and a minor in Chemistry.

He said that it was while he attended Calabar High School in Kingston that he discovered his love for Biology, which later opened the door to Zoology.

“Biology was my strongest area in high school, so when I went to the university I found Zoology very interesting,” said the St Elizabeth-born scientist, who stands five feet two inches in height and who wears glasses because he is short-sighted.

It is that interest which led him to research, a decision he has never regretted. After leaving the UWI with his first degree, he was employed to the SRC to do research on natural product pesticides.

A little over two months into his work, he was seconded to the UWI to do graduate work in the same area. So meticulous was his work and so interesting the findings, he said, he was able to make the transition into doctoral studies, earning his PhD in 1991, having researched the biological activity of the Jamaican breadfruit.

After that, he returned to the SRC where he worked for three years before going back to the UWI to lecture in human anatomy in the Department of Medical Sciences. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Alexander von Humbolt scholarship to do post-doctoral studies on the guniea hen weed (petivera allliacea), at the Hohenheim University in Germany. He was assisted in this research by professors Harold Rosner and Wolfgang Kraus.

Their investigations yielded the compound dibenzyl trisulphide, which has so far been shown to cure cancer – at least when applied to cancer cells inside a laboratory. Among the cancers the compound has been found to cure are brain (neuro blastoma), bladder (primary bladder carcinoma), breast (mammary carcinoma), fibrous (sarcoma), skin (melanoma), and small cell lung cancer.

Williams, 43, has yet to start a family of his own but is in no hurry to do so. Right now, his attention is focussed on making a breakthrough in his cancer research, after being back in Jamaica, from Germany, for close to three years now.

“I am thinking about that (starting a family) seriously but maybe it is going to take a little time for us to settle down and start,” he said. “I know that studying takes a lot of your time and you don’t want to give up something that you have worked for so easily. So you just have to wait until the right time comes.”

Williams, the second of his parents’ five children, is supported in his endeavours by his parents, with whom he lives.

“My father helps me to collect the plant sometimes,” he said. “I get a lot of moral support from him. He is very proud about the work I have done so far. My mother is also happy about it.”

His father is a former construction worker and his mother, a dressmaker. Both are in their 60s.

Dr Williams believes that there is a need for increased local investment in scientific research to propel Jamaica toward development.

“We need more research institutions and we need to fund those institutions properly,” he said.

One way to make this happen, he suggested, was through the granting of tax holidays to local private sector companies in exchange for their investment in scientific research.

“Maybe you can get that in the form of a tax holiday. The money that they save from that tax holiday could be invested in research,” he said.

Williams’ interests, meanwhile, extend beyond research – although it is that which is most precious to his heart – to include hiking, music, volleyball and travel. Already his travels have taken him to Antigua and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean as well as England, Germany and France in Europe and Japan in Asia.

williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com