What the First Faculty Means to Me

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.