Axel Ullrich, visiting scientist and director, Singapore Onco Genome Laboratory

‘Right place, right time’ could be the title of Axel Ullrich's biography. He moved to the epicentre of genetic engineering at the field's genesis, joined one of the most successful biotechnology companies in its early stages, and is now preparing to participate in one of the largest, centralized expansions in life-science research (see CV).

Plotting a course through such events has always come easily to Ullrich. After completing his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in Germany in the early 1970s, he watched genetic engineering begin to find its feet, and he knew exactly what to do. “I didn't even have to think about it,” Ullrich says. “The United States was the place to go.” Apart from being attracted by the scientific opportunities and better funding, Ullrich thought that living across the Atlantic would be a good way to learn English.

But it was not his command of a new language that impressed scientists around the world in 1977. It was his publication of the first transfer of a mammalian gene — encoding for human insulin — into bacteria, a result of two years' work at the University of California, San Francisco. “Holding the sequence of insulin in our hand for the first time was a great moment,” Ullrich recalls.

A year later, Ullrich left the university to join the nascent company Genentech, a forerunner of the biotech industry. There he developed the first genetically engineered medicine, human insulin, made by bacteria, and also got increasingly interested in cancer research. His work helped to bring the cancer drug Herceptin to the market in 1998. But initially Genentech didn't pursue the drug, so Ullrich returned to Germany as a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry near Munich. “It was not easy for me to adopt to the more rigid German scientific community,” he says. “But, in retrospect, it was the right choice.”

This month Ullrich took on a new challenge. He moved as a visiting scientist to Singapore's ‘Biopolis’ to work for A*STAR — the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, which charts the course for the city-state's science and technology. There he will set up a group to carry out large-scale genomics dedicated to cancer-gene discovery. After his year is over, it will become apparent whether he was again in the right place at the right time.