Lam was born in Hong Kong on 26 November 1959 and was educated at the
King's College. He graduated from the
University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1984 and became a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine. He became chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1998. He founded the C-MER Eye Care Holdings and became the company's chairman and chief executive. By 2017, C-MER Eye Care had eight ophthalmologists in Hong Kong and 24 physicians at Shenzhen hospital which brought him more than HK$80 million revenue in 2016. He was awarded Ten Outstanding Young Persons Selection of Hong Kong in 1994 and Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World in 1995. He was first elected to the
Election Committee through the Medical Subsector in 1998 and was elected again in 2006. In the
2008 election, he was elected as Hong Kong deputy of the
National People's Congress (NPC) in 2008 and became an
ex officio member of the Election Committee since 2008. He was picked as one of the torchbearers in the
2008 Summer Olympics torch relay in Hong Kong. During the
2019 pro-democracy protests, Lam and a few hundred fellow Hong Kong doctors and nurses signed a letter expressing support for the
Hong Kong Police Force's crackdown on the protesters, as a counter campaign against a group of medical workers who staged a protest against
police brutality. Lam first ran in the
Legislative Council election in 2000 in the
Medical functional constituency but was defeated by
Lo Wing-lok. He became one of the 51 candidates running in the 40-seat
Election Committee in the
newly overhauled 90-seat
Legislative Council of Hong Kong in the
2021 election. Though Hong Kong medical schools teach in English, Lam in July 2022 criticized the requirement that English be the language of instruction for a program that recruits doctors from medical schools outside of Hong Kong. ==Personal life==