1. Isabel Merrick Morgan was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University, who prepared an experimental vaccine that protected monkeys against polio in a research team with David Bodian and Howard A Howe.
22 Facts About Isabel Morgan
1. 2.
Isabel Morgan then worked on epidemiological studies on air pollution.
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Isabel Merrick Morgan was born 20 August 1911, in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
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Isabel Morgan's parents were Thomas Hunt Morgan, a geneticist, and Lilian Vaughan Sampson, an experimental biologist.
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Isabel Morgan's mother gave up her scientific career to raise all four children until they were each old enough for her to return to her husband's lab.
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Isabel Morgan's sisters married other scientists, while her brother became an engineer.
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Isabel Morgan graduated from Stanford University, gained a Masters from Cornell University in 1936, and wrote her doctoral thesis in bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania, titled Histopathological changes produced in rabbits by experimental inoculation with hemolytic streptococci and certain of their component factors.
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Isabel Morgan joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1938.
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In 1944, Morgan joined a group of virologists, including David Bodian, and Howard A Howe at Johns Hopkins.
10.
Isabel Morgan began experiments to immunize monkeys against polio with killed poliovirus grown in nervous tissue and inactivated with formaldehyde.
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In 1948, Isabel Morgan published a paper, with herself as the sole author, that challenged this scientific consensus.
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Isabel Morgan's work was a key link in the chain of progress toward a killed-virus polio vaccine, one that culminated in the approval of Jonas Salk's vaccine for general use in 1955.
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David Oshinsky suggests that Isabel Morgan's research was a year or more in advance of Jonas Salk's when she left the field in 1949.
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Until Isabel Morgan did her work, it was believed that only live viruses could convey immunity to polio.
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Additionally, Isabel Morgan's research played a role in evaluating the need for "booster" doses of the polio vaccine.
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In 1949, Isabel Morgan left Johns Hopkins and married former Air Force Colonel Joseph Mountain, who was a data processor in New York.
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The couple moved to Westchester County and Isabel Morgan took a job with the county's Department of Laboratory Research.
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Isabel Morgan did not continue her previous polio research, in part because she was uncomfortable with trials that tested polio vaccines on human nerve tissue of children.
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Isabel Morgan did however publish further articles relating to polio, in which she is credited as Isabel Morgan Mountain, PhD.
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Isabel Morgan's husband died in 1970 she continued research on cancer until 1979.
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Isabel Morgan died in 1996, two days before her 85th birthday.
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Isabel Morgan was and remains the only woman who was so honored for her research work.