DURANGO — Before Discover magazine named her one of “The 50 Most Important Women Scientists,” before she became president-elect of the International Society of Vaccines, before she was nicknamed by her former students “The Mother of DNA Vaccines,” Dr. Margaret A. Liu was a kid growing up in Durango.
An outstanding kid, to be sure. Co-valedictorian of the Durango High School Class of 1973, named a U.S. Presidential Scholar and recipient of a Boettcher Scholarship — a free, four-year ride to any school in Colorado — her teachers knew she was going places, said Bobby Wright, former DHS principal and her former math teacher.
Where she has gone is the top of the heap in the vaccine world.
She logs between 100,000 and 250,000 frequent-flyer miles every year, organizing or speaking at conferences, often presenting findings from the almost 150 research papers she has co-written. In the private sector, she has run labs and research groups of up to 150 people, and she has been an adviser to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on its vaccine program.
A holder of six patents for everything from synthetic hepatitis C genes to polynucleotide tuberculosis vaccines, Liu advises doctoral and postdoctoral students as a foreign adjunct professor in the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and as an adjunct full professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
Her main job these days is consulting in vaccines and immunotherapy for biotech and investment companies, universities and governmental scientific research councils, including the Chinese National Engineering Laboratory for Therapeutic Vaccines. Therapeutic vaccines would cure, or at least ameliorate, diseases such as cancer, diabetes and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Vaccines, of course, are now in the news a lot.
“I find it amazing, sometimes,” she said while visiting Durango recently, “that affluent mothers are refusing to vaccinate their children when mothers in poorer countries would give anything to be able to vaccinate theirs. I’ve worked with the World Health Organization and other groups to figure out how we get the 80 poorest countries to the table much sooner.”
Why does she think there’s such a backlash against vaccines in developed countries?
“Vaccines are a victim of our own success,” she said. “We have forgotten the devastation of infectious diseases. People have forgotten that so many kids, particularly infants, would die.”
People also don’t understand that some of the diseases, even if they don’t kill a child, can leave lasting disabilities and health problems, she said.
The U.S. is in a unique position, she said.
“We’ve been protected by geography from world wars and pestilence,” she said. “But we forget in today’s day and age that people travel around. There are countries in Europe that have very low vaccination rates. The recent spread of measles happened because someone apparently contracted it in Belgium and then visited Disneyland.”
