Vogt, Marguerite

Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1913, Vogt received her medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1936 and worked at a private brain research facility in Germany until 1950. She immigrated to the United States to work with Max Delbruck at the California Institute of Technology, then joined Renato Dulbecco, also at Cal Tech, to develop a method to culture the polio virus. In 1962, she and Dulbecco accepted positions at the newly formed Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. For the next thirty years, Vogt studied viruses, leukemia and the process of aging in cancer cells. She died in 2007.

Biography

Marguerite Maria Vogt was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1913, the second of two daughters to Oskar Vogt and Cécile Vogt-Mugnier. Her parents were neurologists at the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Berlin. Her father, Oskar, also a neuroanatomist, was summoned to Moscow to examine Lenin's brain in 1925. Both daughters were directed by their parents into science at an early age. In the early 1930s, Marguerite's older sister, Marthe, was a neuropharmacologist, with a MD from University of Berlin and an additional doctorate in chemistry. In the 1930s with the rise of the Third Reich, Marthe eventually relocated to Britain to work at the National Institute for Medical Research.

At age 14, Vogt wrote her first scientific paper on drosophilia, fruit fly mutations in embryo development. She went on to receive her MD from the University of Berlin at the age of 23 and continued research with Boris Ephrussi in Paris. By 1937, her parents were forced to leave Berlin by the Nazis, although with the help of the industrialist Krupps family, the elder Vogts established a small private research facility for brain research in the Black Forest near Neustadt, where Marguerite stayed until 1950.

In 1950, she was offered a position at the California Institute of Technology to work with Max Delbrück, continuing her work on the structure and function of the ring gland and early homoeotic mutants. Delbrück later suggested she join Renato Dulbecco, then a young faculty member developing a culture method for the polio virus. Together they were able to successfully grow the poliovirus in vitro and plague purify it, an essential step for vaccine production. Vogt subsequently published the paper, "Virus-Cell Interaction with a Tumor-Producing Virus" (1960).

In 1962, she and Dulbecco were recruited to the newly founded Salk Institute for Biological Studies, continuing her research on tumor-causing viruses. She was appointed as a research professor at the Salk Institute in 1973, an independent faculty level position. For the next thirty years, she continued to study viruses, leukemia, and the process of aging in cancer cells, largely aided by her colleague Martin Haas, a biologist and former student.

Vogt's research collaboration with Dulbecco on how DNA tumor viruses replicate and transfer a virus's genetic material, supported the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with David Baltimore and Howard M. Temin. Although Vogt never received broad recognition for her research, her published papers are widely cited by prominent reseachers in the bioscience field.

Vogt continued her daily research on cell immortalization at the Salk Institute well into her eighties, steadily funded by the National Institutes of Health. She published her last paper in 1998. In 2004, she was named Remarkable Woman of California, as part of an exhibition at the California State History Museum in Sacramento.

Marguerite Vogt died in July, 2007, in La Jolla, California.

References cited:

"Marguerite Vogt", Wikipedia.

"Scientist at Work -- Marguerite Vogt; A Lifetime Later, Still in Love with the Lab", NEW YORK TIMES, April 10, 2001.

"Marguerite Vogt, 94, Dies; Biologist and Researcher on Polio Virus", NEW YORK TIMES, July 18, 2007.

Forsburg, S.L., "Remembering Marguerite Vogt", 2007.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~forsburg/vogt.html