{"id":16242,"date":"2020-09-04T14:00:28","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T20:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/?p=16242"},"modified":"2020-09-04T14:41:10","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T20:41:10","slug":"two-doctors-in-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/2020\/09\/two-doctors-in-the-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Doctors in the House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alumni Siblings Get Up Close With COVID-19<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\"Margaret<\/a>

Margaret Liu \u201977. Photo by Bryan Oller<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Paul<\/a>

Paul Liu ’81<\/p><\/div>\n

When I ask Margaret Liu \u201977<\/strong> if she\u2019d be open to a COVID-related interview, she says I should be speaking with her alumnus brother, the surgeon, \u201cwho\u2019s been on the frontline of actually caring for patients.\u201d When I ask Paul Liu \u201981<\/strong> for an interview, he tells me the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just that her technology may be responsible for a vaccine,\u201d he says, laughing.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, both have played, and continue to play, important and interesting roles in this pandemic.<\/p>\n

An M.D. with an honorary Doctorate of Science from CC, Margaret is renowned across the world in the fields of gene-based vaccines, immunotherapy, and global health. She\u2019s been given the moniker, \u201cthe mother of DNA vaccines,\u201d due to her pioneering research 30 years ago, and these days she\u2019s working with the World Health Organization to write regulatory guidelines for DNA vaccines \u2014 a process that started way before COVID-19, but has since been accelerated. As chairman of the board of the International Society for Vaccines, she\u2019s also helping organize a series of virtual congresses that will provide updates about the various vaccines and address issues including safety, challenge studies, global supplies, and more \u2014 and being interviewed on similar topics by national media such as \u201cGood Morning America\u201d and National Geographic<\/em>. She also was a panelist on the CC Conversations virtual event<\/a> called \u201cFacing the Pandemic\u201d on July 16.<\/p>\n

With her background, she\u2019s clear that this is a \u201cvery scary pandemic. It\u2019s gone around the world and is continuing to increase in ways that we really haven\u2019t seen before.\u201d What\u2019s encouraging for her though is how people across the world are coming together to find solutions. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing in this type of precedent of companies all working together, first of all, this extensively, and not with the speed and timetables that everybody\u2019s talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s technologically feasible today, she says, is so different from the past \u2014 whether we\u2019re looking back to the Spanish Flu of 1918, or even the many polio vaccine attempts between the 1930s and 1960s. These days, one company might develop a certain technology, she explains, and another with different expertise can work with them on manufacturing.<\/p>\n

While the capabilities for companies to work together are helpful for finding a vaccine, there\u2019s still a long road ahead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s just a lot that\u2019s not known about the virus and about pathophysiology \u2014 how does it cause the disease, and why is it so different in different people?\u201d she says. \u201cThis really isn\u2019t just another influenza. People should never make that mistake and say, \u2018Oh, well, we have so many people who die of the flu every year. What\u2019s the big difference?\u2019 This is really a different pathogen, and so we really do need to make all the efforts we can both for a vaccine and for treatments.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to individual treatments, that\u2019s more of Paul\u2019s expertise. (He, like Margaret, obtained his M.D. at Harvard Medical School.) As the chair of the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Rhode Island Hospital at Brown University \u2014 and CC\u2019s 2016 Louis T. Benezet Award winner \u2014 he\u2019s been in a state in the Northeast that, as he says, \u201cgot hit pretty hard fairly early on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMostly, everybody thinks of nip\/tuck when they think of plastic surgeons,\u201d says Paul, \u201cbut we do a\u2028lot of reconstruction work and pediatrics work too.\u201d<\/p>\n

With his office practice \u2014 and elective surgery \u2014 shut down completely early on, he says it was all-hands-on-deck throughout the system. \u201cAs the hospital filled up, there was a real concern that we didn\u2019t have enough isolation beds, we didn\u2019t have enough ventilators, and we didn\u2019t have enough PPE.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and another surgeon began using 3D printers with Brown engineering students and other staff to print PPE. He cooperated in converting hospital units into hot and cold zones, and \u201cminimized contact\u201d with his family.<\/p>\n

For three months, \u201cI would strip out of my scrubs in the garage and run naked through the house until I got to my shower. \u2026 I felt that I was putting my family potentially at risk by going into the hospital every day, so we tried to be safe about those sorts of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul also helped Rhode Island Hospital draw up staffing plans to convert the convention center into a field hospital. \u201cThat was a prodigious effort where they made 550 extra beds, each with its individual hardwired oxygen supply and negative pressure. \u2026 And, fortunately we didn\u2019t need it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell … let me rephrase that: we haven\u2019t yet. We\u2019re keeping it up and potentially fully operational until mid-or-late winter when we\u2019re sure that we have survived the combination of influenza and COVID.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alumni Siblings Get Up Close With COVID-19 When I ask Margaret Liu \u201977 if she\u2019d be open to a COVID-related interview, she says I should be speaking with her alumnus brother, the surgeon, \u201cwho\u2019s been on the frontline of actually caring for patients.\u201d When I ask Paul Liu \u201981 for an interview, he tells me…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1388,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[63],"class_list":["post-16242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer-2020","tag-peak-profiles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16242"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16441,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242\/revisions\/16441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}