HK Nobel laureate speaks of struggle with dementia

Nobel Prize winner Charles Kao said Thursday he found communication hard because of Alzheimer's, as academics queried why it took the jury so long to honour the physicist's ground-breaking achievements.

Kao, a former vice chancellor of Hong Kong's Chinese University, won the Nobel Prize for physics this week for work on fibre-optic technology that helped pave the way for the Internet revolution.

In an interview with KTSF 26, a Chinese-language TV station serving the San Francisco area in California, the 75-year-old Kao said he sometimes found it difficult to talk.

"I myself am not very good now," he said at his home in Mountain View near San Francisco, referring to his dementia brought about by Alzheimer's.

"Saying what I want to say from my heart, it's very difficult to do."

Kao, who holds British and US nationalities and has a home in Hong Kong as well as the United States, said he was "very happy" at receiving the award.

The Shanghai-born scientist will attend the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm in December, his wife Wong May-wan said in the interview.

But Kao's disease has led to speculation in the Hong Kong media that he may be unable to deliver the lecture that Nobel laureates typically present on a subject connected to their award-winning work.

Wong told KTSF 26 that she had found it hard to come to terms with her husband's progressively worsening condition.

"I was under a lot of pressure, because I knew what this person was like before," she said.

"This disease has changed him, it is like he's gone. (I) had cried for some time. Now (I am) used to it. I knew this person was not the same person as before."

She said Kao was still physically fit, and was capable of taking care of himself and playing tennis with her regularly.

The scientist's former colleagues in Hong Kong have said the Nobel jury took too long to honour his work.

Former Chinese University vice chancellor Professor Ambrose King said at a party to celebrate Kao's award Wednesday: "It would be good if the award came a year earlier. However, it is still not too late for him."

Kao shared the prize with fellow physicists Willard Boyle and George Smith, who invented a sensor that is the digital camera's "electronic eye". The three will share the prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (1.4 million dollars).

Leading physicists Cheung Nim-kwan, chief executive of the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute, and Yang Chen-ning, who received the Nobel Prize in 1957, have also questioned the time it took to reward Kao.

"Optical fibre was already used on a global scale in the 1980s. His achievement should have been recognised much earlier," Cheung said this week.

Kao's groundbreaking research in fibre optics -- the use of glass fibres to transmit vastly greater volumes of data using light rather than electrical pulses over copper wire -- helped to spur the Internet revolution.

Kao's central thesis in his research, which he started in the 1960s, was that removing imperfections in the fibres would dramatically change how data could be sent.

That opened up technology now used to send emails, text messages, photos and other data.

Kao's wife Wong said he may donate part of the prize money to an Alzheimer's charity in the United States and to Hong Kong welfare group St James' Settlement, which works with the elderly.