Isabel Morgan

Isabel Morgan (also Morgan Mountain) (1911–1996) was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University, who - in a research team with David Bodian and Howard Howe - prepared an experimental vaccine that protected monkeys against poliomyelitis. She was the daughter of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Lilian Vaughan Sampson.

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Academic career and research work on polio

Isabel Morgan graduated from Stanford University and wrote her doctoral thesis in bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania . She joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1938.
There she worked in Peter Olitsky’s lab and did research work on immunity to viral diseases, e. g. polio and encephalomyelitis.^[1][2]
In 1944 Morgan - induced by David Bodian - joined a group of virologists at Johns Hopkins and began experiments to immunize monkeys against polio with killed viruses. She grew poliovirus in nervous tissue and inactivated it with formaldehyde. After vaccination with the inactivated virus the monkeys were able to resist injections with high concentrations of live poliovirus.
 

Her polio research work gained her high recognition among polio experts. In January 1958 she was inducted - as the only woman among 16 men - into the Polio Hall of Fame at Warm Springs, Georgia.

Work in Westchester departmentand at the Sloan-Kettering Institute

In 1949 Isabel Morgan left Johns Hopkins and married former Air Force Colonel Joseph Mountain, who was a data processor in New York. The couple moved to Westchester County and Morgan took a job with the county's Department of Laboratory Research.

After her marriage Isabel Morgan never returned to polio research.She did, however, publish articles on polio.^[3] When her stepson Jimmy Mountain was killed in an air crash in 1960 she gave up her job at the County Department and got a master's degree in biostatistics from Columbia University. She went on to work as a consultant at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in Manhattan.
Isabel Morgan died in 1996 at the age of 85.

Sources and References

The main source of the article is:

• David Oshinsky: Polio: An American Story. Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN 0195152948.

External Links

Publications by Isabel Morgan (retrieved from Google Scholar) in

• JEM
• Journal of Immunology