Not a textbook case
Cécile Vogt-Mugnier: Neuroanatomist ahead of her time
This week, in honor of Brain Awareness Week, Neurocracy will profile trailblazing and influential scientists who are often overlooked in neuroscience history.
Born in France in 1875, Cécile Vogt-Mugnier was educated at Paris Medical School under the mentorship of famed French neurologist Pierre Marie. With her husband Oskar Vogt, she published many groundbreaking papers describing brain anatomy. The Vogts’ most lasting contribution to neuroscience, the theory of pathoclisis, postulated that particular brain regions are affected differently by neurological disorders and trauma. This led them to study specific cell types in different areas in the brain. All told, the duo characterized nearly 200 regions in the cerebral cortex, the largest single structure in the brain, that controls higher cognitive functions.
Although the accomplishments and discoveries of Cécile are often associated with the work that she did with her husband, she was an accomplished researcher in her own right. In her independent research, Vogt-Mugnier was the first to describe the structure of a critical brain region, the thalamus (involved in regulation of sleep, consciousness, and sensory processing), its subregions, and its connections to other brain structures. In addition, her early research in Paris linked the basal ganglia, a brain region now known to play a key role in the control of motor function, to movement disorders such as Huntington’s disease.
Much of the Vogts’ research was carried out at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Brain Research (now the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research), of which Oskar was the director. After the Nazi government rose to power, the Vogts were forced to resign and move their research to the private Brain Research Institute in Southern Germany. The institute was funded by a longtime associate of Oskar, Nazi sympathizer Gustav Krupp, a connection that would permanently tarnish the family’s legacy
Both of the Vogts’ daughters became prominent scientists. Marthe Vogt was an influential neuroscientist who studied neurotransmission (the process by which neurons signal to one another) at Babraham Institute in the UK. Younger sister Marguerite was a cancer biologist and fly geneticist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, recognized for her pioneering work in polio and cancer research.
—A.I.
