Prof Luke O’Neill: The viciousness of anti-vaxxers surprises me - but a lot of them are just frightened

Immunologist Professor Luke O'Neill

I grew up in Bray, County Wicklow. My mother was from Bray and my dad from Manchester. He was conscripted into the Second World War. His mother was from Bray and came home after the war. My dad came to visit her and met my mother. He stayed in Bray.

My earliest memory is being three years of age at my paternal grandmother's house. I vividly remember her dropping a feather and getting me to watch as the feather slowly floated down. I remember being absolutely fixated on this gentle little feather falling. I was just so curious... I think that says something about where I’ve ended up.

I had a really good science teacher in secondary school and I became very interested in biology, but I never imagined I would become a scientist. My best subject in school was English, so I wondered about being a writer or a journalist. But by the time I got to fifth year, I figured Biology was more interesting than English. These days I do more writing, so my interest in English has come back and proved useful.

I wasn't expecting to become a household name, not in a million years. Scientists wouldn't be known like that or recognised in the streets. It’s been a funny development, there are lots of us now, worldwide, that have become known because of our work during the pandemic. It’s not a bad thing because we want to get the message out about how great science is, but it is strange — people say hello to me now on the DART or in the shops.

The nastiness can surprise me at times. I've had a fair bit of that from anti-vaxxers. It surprised me because I didn't expect it to be so vicious. It is often based on fear or anxiety. Some of them are genuinely malignant, but a lot of them are just frightened. I don't engage with it — I don’t see a lot of it because I block people.

The greatest challenge I've faced in my personal life was my mother passing away. I was just 17 at the time. It was a huge shock to the system, losing your mother at that age. It is easily the most difficult thing I've gone through, but it was also the making of me, which is a strange thing to say. My sister, who is eight years older than me, had moved to England by then, so it was just me and my dad... two bachelors. We became very close.

My proudest achievement in life is my two sons, Stevie and Sam. They're the best thing that's ever happened to me.

My goal in life is to make a difference in people's lives. I would love if one of my discoveries resulted in new medicines and new treatments if my work made a difference to people's health. I sold my company Inflazome to a big drugs company called Roche in 2020. They are now running clinical trials with two of our anti-inflammatory drugs and I am waiting for those results. There is a chance our drug could be used to treat conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Asthma, Cardiovascular disease, Inflammatory Bowel Disease… if they work, that's what I'd like to be remembered for — discovering a new medicine.

The person I turned to most is my wife, Margaret. She is a biochemist, so we often have discussions about science — even this morning we were discussing the latest data I got back, and she was giving feedback. She'd be quite critical... which is good for a scientist, because you want criticism of your work, that helps you get closer to the truth. She's been a great advisor to me over the years. In many ways, scientific language is a totally different language. It's like I am speaking German, luckily she speaks German too!

The life lesson I would like to pass on is to just keep going. You can’t beat perseverance. Life will kick you back the whole time but you have just got to keep getting back on the horse. The key piece of advice I give students is to just keep at it. If you keep at it, it usually works out.

The thing I am best at is immunology. As a scientist, I need evidence for these things, and I am in the top 1% of immunologists in the world... so I must be good at it.

There have been a couple of moments in my life where I considered taking a different fork in the road. When I was finishing my PhD in London it was the height of the Thatcher years in England and many of my contemporaries left science and went into finance. I did an interview for a job in finance, and I almost took the job. 

Then there was music. When I was in Cambridge I was in a band and we were offered a European tour of folk festivals and stuff. I said no to that because I was in the middle of my research. Some of the guys in the band were on the dole and were incensed because they really wanted to go. They slag me about it still, we missed our chance at the big time.

• Luke O’Neill is a world-renowned immunologist and Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin. He is one of more than 50 household names who have lent their voices to national housing charity Threshold’s ‘Listening Library’, a collection of audio stories for adults and children alike. 
• The library features two subscription options — Spoken Words for adults and Bedtime Stories for children — at a cost of €20 each for unlimited access, with funds raised from subscriptions going towards helping Threshold to protect families across Ireland from homelessness.