Isabel Morgan, “Unsung Hero” in Eradicating Polio
Isabel Morgan was born in 1911, in New Bedford, Massachusetts to two accomplished scientists (her father Thomas Hunt Morgan went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1933). She grew up to be a virologist and an “unsung hero” in the fight to eradicate polio.
Morgan received her A.B. from Stanford University in 1932, M.A. from Cornell University in 1936, and Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1938. For six years, she worked at the Rockefeller Institute, studying encephalitis viruses. There, she faced gender-based discrimination: receiving less pay than men doing the same work as her and limited opportunities for career advancement, a common experience for women in science at the time.
Her work with Peter K. Olitsky at the Institute garnered attention from David Bodian at Johns Hopkins University. In 1944, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and joined Bodian’s poliomyelitis laboratory. From 1944 to 1949, Morgan, Bodian, and another scientist Howard Howe worked on typing the strains of the poliovirus. They discovered all three strains were dangerous and named one strain after Brunhilde, a chimpanzee involved in their polio vaccine experiments.
Her team worked to immunize monkeys against polio, and after five years, they became the first to successfully inoculate monkeys with a killed virus vaccine. A killed virus could never induce the virus, making it safer than a weakened live virus, but scientists had doubts about a killed-virus vaccine’s long-term efficacy. Many of the virologists of the time believed a vaccine could only be created with a weakened live virus. Morgan and her colleagues proved them wrong.
Morgan provided another critical piece in the puzzle. In the 1930s, Maurice Brodie had shown that killed-virus vaccines could produce polio antibodies but was discredited for a lack of statistical evidence and reproducibility of his results. In 1948, Morgan published a paper reviewing past attempts at producing killed-virus vaccines, including Brodie’s, and describing the successful long-term immunization of monkeys with a killed-virus vaccine by her team. She showed that killed virus from two of the three strains of polio her team typed (Brunhilde and Lansing) produced immunization against those strains. This publication provided the killed-virus polio vaccine with new and vital credibility.
In 1949, at the height of her career, she stepped away from polio vaccine research, wary of the next step in research and development: testing the polio vaccine on children. Scholars believe that she was a year or two ahead of Jonas Salk, another prominent virologist, in the race for a vaccine. Salk is credited today with creating the first effective vaccine against poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis).
That year, she married her husband Joseph Mountain and moved to New York in 1950. She largely disappeared from the polio research space, except for accepting her palace as the only woman inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame in 1958. Morgan continued to pursue research in microbiology at Columbia University and earned her M.S. in biostatistics there in 1961. She then worked at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research as a consultant in biostatistics before retiring in 1980 and passing away in 1996.
“The important thing to remember about her is that the science of polio was the science of building blocks. It wasn’t just Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin… Other people did so much of the research that these two scientists built upon.” — David K. Oshinsky
