Gerges

When nobody else wanted the job, Marguerite Vogt stepped in.

Working from early morning until late at night in a small, isolated basement laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Vogt painstakingly handled test tubes and petri dishes under a fume hood: incubating, pipetting, centrifuging, incubating again. She was trying to grow a dangerous pathogen: poliovirus.

It was 1952 and polio was one of the most feared diseases in America, paralyzing more than 15,000 people, mostly children, each year. Parents wouldn’t let their children play outside, and quarantines were instituted in neighborhoods with polio cases.

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Scientists were desperate for information about the virus, but many were hesitant to work with the infectious agent. “Everybody was afraid to go to that little lab in the basement,” says Martin Haas, professor of biology and oncology at the University of California, San Diego, and a personal friend and collaborator of Vogt’s for over three decades.

Vogt, a brand-new research associate in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco, took on the task of attempting to grow and isolate the virus on a layer of monkey kidney cells. The method was called a plaque assay for the distinctive round plaques that form when a single virus particle kills all the cells around it.

Vogt didn’t tell her parents, both acclaimed scientists in Germany, that she was working with the virus. She later remarked that her father would have been very angry had he known of her poliovirus work, Haas says.

black and white image of Marlene Olsen with her toys
Marlene Olsen, age 4, was stricken with polio in the summer of 1955. The disease paralyzed many thousands of people each year, mostly children.
AP PHOTO
After a year of persistence, Vogt succeeded (and remained virus-free). In 1954, she and Dulbecco published the method for purifying and counting poliovirus particles. It was immediately used by other scientists to study variants of poliovirus, and by microbiologist Albert Sabin to identify and isolate strains of weakened poliovirus to make the oral polio vaccine used in mass vaccination campaigns around the world.

Perhaps even more importantly, the poliovirus plaque assay enabled scientists worldwide to analyze animal viruses at the level of individual cells, a field now known as molecular virology. Vogt and Dulbecco’s approach remains the gold standard for purifying and counting virus particles, including in recent studies of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The method, used to measure how infectious a virus is and isolate strains of a virus for further research, is ubiquitous in labs around the world.

Albert Sabin giving a young child the polio vaccine, while another child waits
Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine (he is shown administering it to two children in 1966) relied on methods developed by Marguerite Vogt.
WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Throughout a career spanning three-quarters of a century, beginning with a publication when she was 14 years old, Vogt contributed extensively to our knowledge of the genetics of animal development, how viruses can cause cancer and cellular life cycles. Upon her death in 2007 at the age of 94, nearly 100 three-ring binders lined the shelves of her office, filled with notes on decades of experiments.

Vogt was known for her intense, inventive lab work, including what others have called her “green thumb” for tissue culture — the process of growing cells, viruses and tissues in a dish.

“Being a meticulous person, she worried about every detail of the process of cell culture,” says David Baltimore, biologist and president emeritus of Caltech who worked for three years in a lab close to Dulbecco’s. “That’s really important, because it is finicky. Long experience and precise handling are key to getting good data.”

Born in 1913, Vogt grew up in Germany surrounded by science. The younger daughter of two pioneers of brain research, Oskar and Cécile Vogt, she and her sister Marthe were budding scientists from their youth. Marguerite Vogt’s first paper, published in 1927, investigated the genetics of fruit fly development.