German-born Marguerite Vogt, polio and cancer researcher at Salk, dies at 94

Marguerite Vogt, a pioneer in the fields of polio and cancer research, died at her home in La Jolla, California, a colleague said Monday. She was 94.

Vogt, who continued coming to work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies until about two years ago, died Friday of natural causes, said Walter Eckhart, who directs the institute's cancer center.

Vogt and Salk researcher Renato Dulbecco completed groundbreaking studies of how the polio virus forms plaques in cell cultures, research that assisted in the development of polio treatments.

She and Dulbecco later explored how a type of tumor virus transforms ordinary cells into cancer cells. These studies provided some of the first clues to the genetic nature of cancer.

Dulbecco was awarded a Nobel Prize for the research he completed with Vogt, who never won a national science prize herself but was known among her colleagues as an enthusiastic mentor for younger scientists.

"She loved science very much," Eckhart said. "She lived and breathed it."

Vogt was born in Germany, where her father directed the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck medical research institute. She worked at the institute after earning a medical degree, but her family members were forced to resign their posts during the Nazi era because of their ties to scientists in Russia.

Vogt emigrated to the United States in 1950 to work as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology before moving with Dulbecco to the Salk Institute in 1963 as one of its first senior scientists.

Vogt never married and had no children. She told The New York Times in 2001 that she felt she had to choose between being a scientist and being a wife and mother.

"Science was my milk," she told The Times.