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Why the interest in vaccine research?
The vaccines came out of results in the lab long after I'd been working in the laboratory.
What was your initial interest in science?
I think that was too long ago.
Do women still face discrimination in the sciences?
It's much harder for women. There are many more women at the entry stages than at the professorial stages. But that's changing with time.
From your successes with SIV, do you believe a human AIDS vaccine is in reach? What's the timetable?
I think our recent results using DNA vaccine as a prime and a recombinant pox virus vector as a booster are really very promising, and if I were in the context of a company like Merck, I think that the vaccine would potentially be realized in four to five years. Working out of academia, there are many more hurdles to be overcome. And realistically, there's a good chance I'll never have a chance of taking it that far.
Why?
Well, we aren't a corporate structure. We don't have the divisions that help you get a vaccine to trials.
What's it like being a research scientist at this level? What's your average day like?
Most of my job now is organizing and raising money and writing, and then there's a lot of travel, just to participate in meetings and on committees. So it's mostly organizational writing and travel. Essentially no work in the laboratory any more.
Do you miss being in the lab?
There are different stages to a career. The hardest thing is when you give up working in a lab, you no longer are solving the day-by-day lab problems, but then you end up solving a different kind of problem, which are more the organizational problems, the logistical problems.
What's been the seminal moment of your career to date?
The DNA vaccines were definitely the seminal moment- when we realized that they worked, which was our first experiment.
Are you working on DNA vaccines for anything else?
We're doing it mainly for viral diseases. We're doing it for influenza, for measles, which is still the third-largest killer of children in the world, and for AIDS, which has now moved to the fourth-largest killer of people in the world overall.
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