Background
She was the daughter of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Lilian Vaughan Sampson.
She was the daughter of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Lilian Vaughan Sampson.
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, such as polio and encephalomyelitis. In 1944 Morgan joined a group of virologists, including David Bodian, at Johns Hopkins, where she began experiments to immunize monkeys against polio with killed poliovirus grown in nervous tissue and inactivated with formaldehyde.
After vaccination with the inactivated virus, the monkeys were able to resist injections with high concentrations of live poliovirus.
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. Until Morgan did her work, it was believed that only live viruses could convey immunity to polio.
In January 1958 she was inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame at Warm Springs, Georgia. She was and remains the only woman who was so honored for her research work.
The couple moved to Westchester County and Morgan took a job with the county"s Department of Laboratory Research.
She did, however, publish articles on polio. She went on to work as a consultant at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in Manhattan. Morgan died in 1996, two days before her 85th birthday.