Thomas C. Merigan

Thomas Charles Merigan (born January 18, 1934 in San Francisco) is an American virologist and the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Emeritus at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Merigan's research first focused on human viral pathogenesis, basic and clinical studies of interferon, and then developing the first systemically active antiviral drugs including those effectively treating HIV/AIDS, several herpesviruses and hepatitis B. He is also credited with helping to develop the use of interferons as antiviral, immunomodulating and antitumor therapies. Merigan joined the Stanford faculty in 1963 and assumed full emeritus status in 2007. In 2004 he was also identified as one of the 250 most cited investigators in clinical medicine over the last 20 years by the Institute for Scientific Information. Merigan also was ranked 23rd among the 1000 top US microbiologists by Research.com in 2022. His papers were cited over 37,000 times. Two of his books went into multiple editions- one into a 4th edition and the other into a 3rd. He was a board member of 28 journals and a member of 23 learned societies. He had over 95 fellows, students and research associates with whom he wrote 576 papers, 26 books and published symposia and 11 patents. Seven of his students became fulltime faculty in the Stanford School of Medicine. He told his life story in a book entitled Pioneering Viral Therapy, a Life in Academic Medicine, published by Amazon/Kindle/CreateSpace in 2017.

Education Merigan was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated B.A. with honors in 1955. He attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society and received his M.D. with honors in 1958. He did his internship and residency on the Harvard medical services at Boston City Hospital and then moved to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda where he trained for 3 years in protein chemistry in Nobelist Christian Anfinsen's laboratory.

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.