An Interview: The Woman in Charge: Margaret Hamburg

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg shares her thoughts on recent health initiatives and the regulatory role of government.

By Geng Ngarmboonanant


Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg has served as the 21st commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since May 2009. She graduated from Harvard Medical School and previously worked as the assistant secretary for policy and evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Politic: I want to start with a question that you probably receive often – what were the early influences on your career? Why did you decide to go into healthcare, or rather, the intersection between healthcare and public policy?

My interest in medicine evolved very early. I had two parents who were physicians, both professors at Stanford Medical School. I grew up right on the Stanford campus, and the parents of many of my friends were either physicians or scientists or in related fields. It looked like interesting and important work to me. When I started college, I began to realize that there were many other things I could do, but I always found myself coming back to medicine, and ultimately decided that was what I really wanted to do.

But I hadn’t really contemplated a career in public service until medical school, when I was very much influenced by the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. When I started medical school, nobody was aware of this new disease. In fact, when I was a freshman, I was taught that the era of infectious disease threats was over with the advent of antibiotics and vaccines and good sanitation practices–and that the future of medicine was chronic disease–and then watched this initially mysterious and devastating disease emerge, with no one knowing the cause, what to call it or how to treat it.

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