Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of features about local women as we celebrate Women’s History Month.
By Ann Butler
Herald Staff Writer
Before Discover magazine named her one of “The 50 Most Important Women Scientists,” before she became president-elect of the International Society for 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.
What is a DNA vaccine, and is it available?
“We first worked on influenza A, and HIV is like influenza in that the envelope mutates incredibly quickly, but inside, the functional proteins don’t mutate nearly as fast,” she said. “So for HIV, for example, the vaccine can generate T-cells that recognize those bits of proteins.”
Accelerated mutation is why the flu vaccine is more effective some years rather than others because some years, the match between the strain used to create the vaccine is closer to what circulates in other years, Liu said. A DNA vaccine would be effective across many strains.
Right now, some of the results of Liu’s work are available only for animals, but several are in clinical trials.
“The most effective vaccine for many diseases is going to be complex and may involve multiple technologies,” she said. “It will involve both broad antibody as well as T-cell responses.”
In the news
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, citing measles complications such as deafness, pneumonia, encephalitis, cognitive disabilities or a syndrome called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, where a person can die of complications up to seven years after the original illness.
“People say, ‘My kid might have a bad reaction to the vaccine,’” Liu said. “Why aren’t they more afraid that their child will be the one who dies of measles? Especially because many people have immunodeficiencies.”
Is it a problem of a lack of science education?
“I think it’s that people think they know better than their doctors, they like conspiracy theories and they like getting their news from the Internet,” Liu said.
People worry about getting the disease from the vaccine, as we’re seeing in countries such as Nigeria and the polio vaccine.
“If you get the polio vaccine in the U.S., there’s no chance of getting polio because we use the injectable inactivated virus vaccine, so there’s no live virus in the vaccine,” Liu said. “In poorer countries, they can’t afford injectables, and the weakened virus in the oral polio vaccines can revert to wild polio. But they really don’t understand the risk to society. If only one kid gets polio, people may decide the polio vaccine risk isn’t worth it. But it’s a massive risk to society.”
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.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
Liu: All in the Family
Dr. Margaret A. Liu is the middle sibling of three, and along with her older sister, Ingrid, and younger brother, Paul, was raised by their mother, Esther Tsong Tzu’Chiu Liu, an immigrant from China who earned master’s degrees in English literature and library science before earning a doctorate in education. Their father, Hsin Kuan “Harry” Liu, who had a doctorate in engineering, was killed in a car accident when Paul Liu was only 7 weeks old.
After being widowed, Esther Liu brought her family to Durango from Fort Collins when she was hired to be the children’s librarian at the Durango Public Library. She raised her children with a stress on education and a belief in serving others.
“I really do credit Durango for our success in school,” Margaret Liu said, “particularly Mrs. (Roberta) Barr at Mason (Elementary School), who had eight too many students in our grade and pulled us out to teach us herself.”
In a “life happens while we plan” kind of moment, she intended to attend Yale University, but an unexpected Boettcher Scholarship changed that.
“I called Colorado College in April of our senior year and said, ‘Can I come?’” she said.
She would end up graduating from Colorado College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in chemistry. The college awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2002.
All three Liu children were offered Boettcher Scholarships, although Ingrid Liu declined hers to attend Harvard University. All three earned Doctors of Medicine – Ingrid at Stanford University and the two younger Lius at Harvard.
While both his sisters were U.S. Presidential Scholars, Paul Liu was named a Marshall Scholar and earned a Master of Philosophy in philosophy and physiology from Oxford University in England before beginning medical school. Margaret Liu was given a Rotary Foundation Fellowship for Overseas Study in the Fine Arts and attended the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris for a year between college and medical school, passing the juries for a diploma to teach piano.
But their paths diverged from there. Ingrid Liu, who also earned a Master of Public Health in gerontology from Johns Hopkins University, teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, supervising residents, and she is a practicing geriatrician at Harbor-UCLA Hospital.
Paul Liu became a well-known surgeon. He now is chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Brown University in Rhode Island and does research on wound healing, working with mathematicians at Oxford to do the modeling. He goes on frequent mission trips to perform reconstructive surgery in places such as Haiti, Kenya and Mexico.
Margaret Liu has spent more than 30 years researching and consulting on the next generations of vaccines.
abutler@durangoherald.com
Liu’s career at a glance
Margaret Liu’s résumé spans the gamut of scientific work in her area of expertise. Here are a few of the highlights:
Professor: Has been a lecturer, clinical and research fellow and instructor at schools such as Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and University of California, San Francisco.
Honorary lecturer: Has been invited to deliver several endowed lectures, including at Cambridge University in England and Columbia and New York universities.
Researcher: Has received six patents, co-authored almost 150 research papers, been the senior director for virus and cell biology at Merck Research Laboratories, vice chairman of Transgène and served as executive vice chair at the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, South Korea.
Principal investigator: Has reviewed grant proposals and results for the National Institutes of Health.
Consultant and advisEr: Has worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the American Foundation for AIDS Research Committee on AIDS Vaccines for Developing Countries and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on bioterrorism and implications for biomedical research. Currently advises National Engineering Laboratory for Therapeutic Vaccines in Shanghai and the International Society of Vaccines in Seoul, South Korea, among several others.
Editor and editorial board member: Has worked with peer-reviewed publications such as Molecular Medicine Today, Gene Therapy and Regulation (founding editor), The Journal of Gene Medicine, Molecular Therapy and Viral Immunology, Vaccines and Emergency Microbes and Infections, as well as writing or editing texts in the field.
Conference organizer: Has organized more than 15 international meetings including a Nobel Forum in Sweden, Challenges of Global Pediatric Vaccine Development in Capetown, South Africa, and Emerging Infectious Diseases in Suzhou, China. Professor Dr. Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn of Thailand invited Liu to join her to lead the Special Opening Segment of the First Joint Meeting of Ministers of Environment and Health from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2007.
Herald Staff
