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Marguerite Vogt Collection
MSS 0688
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Creator:
Vogt, Marguerite
Title: Marguerite Vogt Collection,
Date (inclusive): 1925 - 2001
Extent:
3.80 linear feet
(6 archives boxes, 1 card file box, and 5 oversize folders)
Abstract: Collection of Marguerite Vogt, prominent molecular biologist and virologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
She is noted for her research in the development of a polio vaccine and studies linked to the genetic nature of cancer. Her
collection contains professional correspondence with such notable scientists as David Baltimore, Karl Habel, Georg Melchers,
and Howard Martin Temin, in addition to personal correspondence with friends. Also included are scrapbooks containing photographs
of the Vogt family, friends, and colleagues from 1925 to 1937, while Marguerite Vogt still resided in Germany. Additionally,
the collection contains audiorecordings from interviews done in 1996-1997 with Marguerite Vogt, Martin Haas, and Marthe Vogt
by Igor Klatzo for the book authored by Klatzo, CECILE AND OSKAR VOGT: THE FOUNDERS OF NEUROSCIENCE. The files also include
a partial typescript for Klatzo's manuscript.
Repository:
University of California, San Diego. Geisel Library. Mandeville Special Collections Library.
La Jolla, California 92093-0175
Collection number: MSS 0688
Language of Material:
Collection materials in English
The audiorecordings located in Box 7 are restricted. Users must request a listening copy to be produced.
Not Available
Marguerite Vogt Collection, MSS 0688. Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD.
Publication rights are held by the creator of the collection.
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
Scope and Content of Collection
Collection of biologist and polio researcher Marguerite Vogt. The collection includes correspondence with colleagues and
friends and family photograph albums. In addition, the folders include miscellanous biographical materials and audiocassette
tape interviews with Marguerite Vogt, Marthe Vogt, and Martin Haas.
The folders are arranged in four series: 1) CORRESPONDENCE, 2) PHOTOGRAPHS, 3) MISCELLEANOUS MATERIALS, and 4) AUDIORECORDINGS.
SERIES 1: CORRESPONDENCE
The CORRESPONDENCE series contains personal and professional correspondence to and from Marguerite Vogt with members of the
scientific community and friends. Notable correspondents include David Baltimore and Howard Temin, Nobel Prize winners in
1975. It is arranged alphabetically.
SERIES 2: PHOTOGRAPHS
The PHOTOGRAPHS are attached in bound scrapbooks with a few other folders containing loose photographs of family, friends,
and colleagues, 1925-1943. The folders are arranged alphabetically.
SERIES 3: MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS
Arranged alphabetically, the MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS includes a partial typescript for the published work by Igor Klatzo,
CECILE AND OSKAR VOGT: THE FOUNDERS OF NEUROSCIENCE, a few postcards addressed to Marguerite Vogt, and a typescript of a song.
SERIES 4: AUDIORECORDINGS
The AUDIORECORDINGS are audiocassette tape oral interviews conducted by Igor Klatzo with Marguerite Vogt, Martin Haas, and
Marthe Vogt between 1996-1997. The tapes are arranged chronologically.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.
Vogt, Marguerite -- Archives
Vogt family -- Archives
Molecular biologists -- United States -- Archival resources
Virologists -- United States -- Archival resources
Poliomyelitis -- Research
Cancer cell -- Growth -- Research
Salk Institute for Biological Studies -- Archival resources
Baltimore, David
Habel, Karl, 1908-
Melchers, Georg
Temin, Howard Martin