Merigan joined the faculty at Stanford in 1963. His first sabbatical leave was spent at the MRC Common Cold Unit in Salisbury and London, England in 1970 with David Tyrell and Sir Christopher Andrews under a Guggenheim fellowship. He received the Borden Award for outstanding research from the
Association of American Medical Colleges in 1973. Another overseas sabbatical was spent studying basic aspects of interferon with Professor Charles Chany in Paris. He became involved in administration at Stanford and headed the Division of Infectious Diseases for 28 years and founded the Stanford University Hospital Clinical Virology Laboratory in 1969, then one of the first of its type in the world. In 1988 he founded the Center for AIDS Research at Stanford which he directed for almost 20 years. The antivirals he collaborated in the development of include those directed against herpesviruses (CMV, VZ, and HSV), hepatitis B, papovaviruses, rhinoviruses, HIV, and rabies. They were carried out not just at Stanford but on 6 of the 7 continents of the world. His interferon studies included finding the first positive treatment results in hepatitis B and cytomegalovirus infections and multiple sclerosis. This encouraged others to find even better effects with immunomodulators in the latter disease with less toxic drugs. He directed the studies that allowed the licensing of the first drug active against CMV, gancylovir. Here he observed that treating CMV also decreased the incidence of fungal and other infections and improved the graft. His group also developed, tested, and held patents through Stanford University on the methods for monitoring the effects of treatment of HIV which are still used today. Due to his involvement in the study of
HIV/AIDS, he also became involved in government initiatives; he was a principal investigator and initial chair of the Primary Infection (HIV) Committee in the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) AIDS Clinical Trials Group. This committee under him evaluated the first active antiviral drugs against HIV and proved the better action of combination over monotherapy of HIV infection in large-scale multinational studies. He served on several NIH study sections, FDA Committees, and as a member of NIAID's Board of Scientific Counselors. He held grants from that Institute continuously from the day in 1963 he started at Stanford until he retired nearly 45 years later. In 1988 he received a ten-year MERIT grant award from the NIAID and received the Maxwell Finland Lectureship award from IDSA. He gave a number of named endowed lectureships in the US and elsewhere and also on several occasions testified before
congressional committees on the subject of oncoming needs for federal funding for both AIDS and cancer research. His testimony led directly to Tip O’Neil's putting forth a bill which both houses of congress and President Reagan quickly signed off on creating the NCI's Frederich Cancer Center. His work with CMV led to his advising on the Polish Pope John Paul's care after he was shot. His advice to Singapore's Lee Quan Yu to further develop his biotech university led to one of the world's best schools in that area. In 1980 Merigan became the first George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine and in 1981 was elected to the
National Academy of Medicine. He was made a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
American Society for Microbiology,
Infectious Diseases Society of America, and
American Society of Virology as well as elected into honorary membership in the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research in 2001 . Merigan was also interested in entrepreneurship throughout his career and served on the scientific advisory boards of a number of
big pharma and biotechnology companies, Including those of
Cetus Corporation in 1979. In 2022 he and his then wife Sue started funding the Sue Merigan Student Scholarship aimed at Stanford undergraduates and medical students interested in training in infectious diseases research. ==References==