Investor's Business Daily, September 18th, 2007
Biologist Marguerite Vogt succeeded by focusing singularly on her goal -- advancing science.
She studied how organisms develop, then applied insights to make important strides in polio and cancer research.
Several newer drugs and targeted therapies wouldn't exist now, scientists say, had Vogt and a fellow researcher's discoveries not been made.
Vogt's career spanned seven decades. She worked into her 80s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., still enthused as she followed new horizons.
Born in 1913 in Berlin, Vogt grew up in an intellectual household that helped foster her interests. Her father, mother and sister were all neuroscientists. Vogt started doing experiments on fruit flies at age 14. She got a medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1937, then launched in-depth research.
She did what she loved, which gave her the fortitude to succeed in difficult circumstances.
Around the time of World War II, Vogt began probing compelling biology questions. The answers provided a view of how and when cell development happens in animals and laid the foundation for Vogt's later work trying to understand cancer.
Davy Jones, a toxicology professor at the University of Kentucky's college of medicine, ran across a mention of Vogt's early work two years ago. He grew enthralled.
"I realized this huge amount of important literature she'd published scientifically back in the 1940s," Jones said. "It was not electronically accessible, plus it's in German. I spent a number of months translating it -- it's mind-blowing the discoveries that she had made that we were not taking advantage of."
Vogt was working amid what Jones calls a golden era of endocrinology in the 1930s and '40s.
"The people studying humans and animals -- and even insect development -- were asking basic questions: How does an embryo develop arms and legs? How does a caterpillar turn into a butterfly?" he said. "Popular techniques in that day involved the discovery of hormones that might be signaling an animal to develop in one way or another."
Vogt studied the fruit fly -- which Jones calls the lab rat of the insect world -- to see what tissues glands developed from and what kind of developmental effects hormones exerted. How and where Vogt did this work is notable -- she employed cutting-edge techniques in a bare-bones environment.
"Most of her work was done right during World War II, and understand she had a laboratory and institute out in a forest," Jones said. "How did she manage to do that?"
Before the war, Vogt's family set up their forest laboratory after fleeing Berlin and the Nazis. Jones says Vogt, focused on getting results, adapted to her situation. Wartime resources were limited, so Vogt used low-cost, low-maintenance subjects -- the flies.
"She combined that with ingenious experimental design," Jones said. "It was very interesting to me to watch her mind develop the hypotheses, test them, develop ingenious experiments that confirmed some and refuted some, and that led to the next experimental process. She was able to extract the most information out of a limited resource system."
It helped that she could do surgery on tiny flies.
"Her hands were capable, her mind was very clever," Jones said.
Vogt came to the U.S. from Germany around 1950.
"She wanted to make a fresh start," said Susan Forsburg, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California who knew Vogt. "She was all about the future."
Vogt began work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and collaborated with fellow scientist Renato Dulbecco. Aided by Vogt's knowledge of animal cell cultures, Dulbecco and two other researchers won a Nobel Prize in 1975 for discoveries about how cancer develops. The work detailed how tumor viruses interact with cellular genetic material.
Early on, Dulbecco and Vogt worked to culture poliovirus. Their growth and purification techniques proved essential in producing vaccines to prevent polio, a disease that was crippling and killing thousands annually.
Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine, and in the early 1960s Vogt and Dulbecco went to the Salk Institute in San Diego.
"They were at the forefront of the field of trying to understand how viruses cause tumors in animals," Walter Eckhart, director of the Salk Institute Cancer Center, told IBD.
The crucial work attracted dozens of biologists to the Institute to study in the lab Dulbecco and Vogt established. The new arrivals thrived in Vogt's charismatic presence.
"How she shared credit was really wonderful," said Eckhart, who started postdoctoral research at the lab in 1965. "She'd get all excited when somebody else had a result. ... She read a publication (about a scientist who had) solved the problem she was working on. She took that publication around ... and said, 'Look, isn't that wonderful?'"
Vogt shared knowledge, keenly aware that her field needed many capable researchers to advance.
"She was a person everybody went to, to find out anything they didn't know how to do," Eckhart said. "She knew all the techniques."
Some of today's cancer drugs and therapies arise from work Vogt and Dulbecco did, Eckhart says.
"We know a lot about cancer now that we didn't know, say, 40 years ago," he said. "What she and Dulbecco did helped start a whole field. Oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes ... a lot of that (modern knowledge) comes out of initial work he and she did."
The National Cancer Institute funded some of Vogt's research.
"She had her own research grant till the late 1980s, so that supported her research program," Eckhart said. Then she stopped paying her own salary from it. "She gave that up from the research grants so the money could go to someone who had no support."
For the next few years, Vogt self-funded her research, paying for a technician and supplies.
"She scrimped and saved for a rainy day and finally accumulated a lot of money she could use," Eckhart said, recalling how Vogt built frugality into her unique daily routine.
"She would get up very early in the morning around 5, eat breakfast and read some Russian. She loved to teach herself Russian," he said. "She would take the bus around 6 -- she was well-known to the people on the bus and, though she was a senior citizen, insisted on paying full fare because she felt she could afford it."
The bus would let her off a mile from the institute. She'd jog with her backpack the rest of the way.
Forsburg came to work at the Salk Institute in 1993.
"Marguerite was 50 years older than I, and at that time was working in the lab with a work ethic that would put most of us younger folks to shame," she said, recalling Vogt as gracious and dedicated.
Vogt died on July 6. She was 94.
