Marguerite Vogt, whose early work on polio virus characterized how the virus forms plaques in culture, died this month of natural causes. She was 94.



Vogt was a longtime professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. Her best-known work on polio was conducted in the 1950s, and for decades following she continued to study viruses and the genetics of cancer, only retiring from benchwork as an octogenarian.



"She was such a wonderful worker and wonderful person, I was very happy to be with her," Renato Dulbecco, a former collaborator of Vogt and a colleague at the Salk Institute, told The Scientist.

Vogt was born in Germany, into a family of scientists. Her father, Oskar, a neuroscientist, was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck Institute until he was ousted for political reasons, and her mother, Cecile, and sister, Marthe, were also neuroscientists.

Vogt earned her medical degree from Berlin University and in the 1950s she moved to Pasadena, California and worked with Dulbecco at Caltech on polio virus. Their best-known work in this field was the discovery in 1954 that polio virus forms plaques in tissue culture, published in a paper that has been cited more than 4,000 times. The finding was the basis for a widely-used quantitative assay for infection. Vogt's work "made it easier to measure viruses," Walter Eckhart at the Salk Institute told The Scientist. "It was a big advance in virology."

During those years, Vogt spent long, solitary hours in a hot basement laboratory at Caltech. "It shows the quality of her work that working for a year with polio virus she never got it," Martin Haas, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and longtime friend and collaborator of Vogt told The Scientist.

For 14 years Vogt and Dulbecco collaborated, primarily studying how viruses transform cells from normal to malignant. Dulbecco said Vogt was excellent at cell culture techniques and her contributions were "crucial to progress in the field." One of Vogt's most cited papers, referenced by other studies more than 300 times, characterized the oncogenic effects of polyoma virus in cell culture. Their discoveries contributed to a Nobel Prize Dulbecco shared with David Baltimore and Howard Temin for Physiology or Medicine in 1975.

In 1963 Vogt moved to the Salk Institute. She continued to work with Dulbecco until establishing her own lab several years later. During the 1970s Vogt continued to study viruses and also researched oncogene expression, leukemia, and the process of senescence in cancer cells. Vogt was still publishing papers through the 1990s; one study, with Haas and colleagues, identified two pathways for replicative senescence in fibroblasts and has since been cited 76 times.

Haas said that Vogt was an excellent scientist whose work was influential, but sometimes overlooked because of her subdued presence in the field. Haas said part of that was due to her notorious love of doing experiments. "She did the work in the lab and didn't give talks," Haas said. "She did not market her work."

Vogt was known for her passion for science and extreme dedication. "She came in early in the morning around six, working and reading, and by the time anybody else came in she was ready to tell people about her latest idea" Eckhart said.

Haas said Vogt was a strong athlete and accomplished musician. But above all, she loved to be in the laboratory, even spending time doing experiments during a vacation to visit Haas in Israel.

"What motivated her? Science. To discover, to acquire knowledge," Haas said.

Kerry Grens

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