“Much of my career has been about taking chances as they came along”, Tien Yin Wong, Director of the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI), told The Lancet. “When younger doctors and students ask my advice, I tell them that you cannot plan your life too much.” After completing his medical degree at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the possibility of specialising in ophthalmology—a fairly new specialty in Singapore in the early 1990s—did not come into view until quite late in his studies, says Wong.