Isabel Morgan
Isabel Merrick Morgan ( also Morgan Mountain) ( born August 20, 1911 † 18 August 1996) was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University, which - in a research group with David Bodian and Howard Howe - developed an experimental vaccine, the monkeys protected against polio. She was the daughter of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Lilian Vaughan Sampson.
Academic career and work in polio research
Isabel Morgan made her exams at Stanford University and wrote her doctoral thesis in bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania. She went to the 1938 Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and conducted research in the laboratory of Peter Olitsky ( 1886-1964 ) on vaccines against viral diseases such as polio and equine.
1944 joined Morgan - at the suggestion of David Bodian - a group of virologists at the Johns Hopkins University and began with attempts to inoculate monkeys with dead polio virus. She grew polio virus in the nervous tissue, and slew them with formaldehyde. After vaccination with the killed viruses, the animals were injected with live polio virus in high concentrations survive.
Morgan's work was an essential link in the development chain to a polio vaccination with killed virus, which culminated as the generally accepted in 1955 in recognition of Jonas Salk's vaccine. Married Isabel Morgan conducted its research, no one knew that something could bring more than live virus protection against polio. Morgan's work in polio research lasted only from 1944 to 1949, all the more remarkable is its effect in such a short time. Oshinsky emphasized its reluctance to take the next logical step, namely the vaccine trials in humans. Your work in polio research gave her high praise among viruses researchers. In January 1958, she was included in the Polio Hall of Fame in Warm Springs (Georgia ) - honored - the only woman besides 16 men.
Work in the research laboratory of Westchester County and the Sloan- Kettering Center
1949 Isabel Morgan left Johns Hopkins and married the former Air Force Colonel Joseph Mountain, who was employed in data processing in New York. The couple moved to Westchester County and Isabel Morgan worked in the research department of the County Administration. After their marriage, Isabel Morgan took the polio research on never. However, they published articles about polio in professional journals.
When her stepson Jimmy Mountain was killed in a plane crash in 1960, she gave up her job in the County Administration, studied biostatistics at Columbia University and graduated with a master's examination from. She then worked as a consultant in the Sloan -Kettering Cancer Institute in Manhattan.
Isabel Morgan died in 1996 at the age of 85 years.
Sources and notes
The main source for the product is:
- David Oshinsky: Polio: An American Story. Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0195152948th