Born: 20 August 1911, United States
Died: 18 August 1996
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Isabel Merrick Morgan Mountain
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Isabel Merrick Morgan was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University who was key in developing an experimental vaccine that shielded monkeys from polio. Working with David Bodian and Howard A. Howe, her team identified three types of poliovirus between 1944 and 1949 necessary for a comprehensive polio vaccine. Morgan’s experiments involved using killed poliovirus in nervous tissue, inactivated with formaldehyde, to immunize monkeys against polio. This approach led to monkeys resisting live poliovirus injections, marking the first successful use of a killed virus for polio inoculation in monkeys. Her work challenged earlier beliefs about virus immunity.
In 1948, Morgan published a paper solely authored by her that challenged prevailing scientific views. She played a crucial role in advancing the progress toward a killed-virus polio vaccine, culminating in Jonas Salk’s vaccine approval in 1955. Her research also contributed to understanding the necessity of “booster” doses in the polio vaccine.
After her marriage in 1949, Morgan shifted away from polio research due to discomfort with testing polio vaccines on children’s nerve tissue. She then focused on epidemiological studies on air pollution. In her later years, she became a consultant in cancer therapy studies at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute.