Marthe Louise Vogt (1903–2003): world-renowned neuroscientist #

The chemist and medical doctor Marthe Louise Vogt, born in Berlin, left Germany after the National Socialists seized power. She found a second home in Great Britain. There, she researched the chemical transmission of nerve impulses and earned international recognition for being the first to demonstrate the presence of neurotransmitters in the brain.

Marthe Louise Vogt was born in Berlin on 8 September 1903, the first child of the married doctors Oskar and Cécile Vogt. Her parents were prominent brain researchers at the neurobiological laboratory of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, now Humboldt University of Berlin. The laboratory directed by Oskar Vogt (1870–1959) later became the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch, which is now based in Frankfurt am Main as the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. Marthe Louise’s sister Marguerite was born ten years later. She too went on to achieve worldwide recognition as a scientist. While Marthe Louise Vogt made a name for herself in neuropharmacology, her younger sister is considered a pioneer of tumour virology.

After completing her school-leaving examinations, Vogt enrolled at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1922 to study medicine and chemistry, specialising in biochemistry. Her academic teachers in chemistry, Wilhelm Schlenk (1879–1943) and Friedrich Adolf Paneth (1887–1958), inspired her to use chemistry to answer medical questions.

After completing her studies and a practical year at a hospital and at her father’s institute, Vogt received her doctorate in medicine in 1928. She then worked in the working group of Carl Neuberg (1877–1956) at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in Berlin. Just one year and five months after receiving her doctorate in medicine, Vogt earned a second doctorate, this time in chemistry. For this dissertation, entitled “Studies on the formation and behaviour of some biologically important substances in the three-carbon series”, she had investigated carbohydrate metabolism. She then took up a position as an assistant at the Pharmacological Institute in Berlin, under Paul Trendelenburg (1884–1931). After his early death, she worked in the Neurochemistry Department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, founded by her father.

Like her father, Vogt was opposed to National Socialism. In 1935, she left Germany and, with the support of a one-year Rockefeller Fellowship, joined the National Institute for Medical Research in London. There she conducted research alongside Henry Hallet Dale (1875–1968), who, together with Otto Loewi (1873–1961), received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936 for discovering and explaining the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. The two scientists revolutionised neuromedicine and also influenced Vogt’s scientific career.

After her research stay with Dale, Vogt found new positions at the Department of Pharmacology in Cambridge, England, and at the College of the Pharmaceutical Society in London. In 1946, she seized the opportunity to establish her own working group under John Henry Gaddum (1900–1965) at the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Edinburgh. When Gaddum moved to Cambridge as director of the National Institute for Animal Physiology, now the Babraham Institute, she followed him. From 1960 to 1966, she headed the institute’s pharmacology department. She continued working there after retiring until her eyesight deteriorated so severely that, in 1990, she decided to move to California to live near her sister Marguerite in La Jolla. Marthe Louise Vogt died on 9 September 2003, aged 100, in San Diego, USA.

As a neuropharmacologist, Vogt made important contributions to the physiology of the neurotransmitters acetylcholine, adrenaline and noradrenaline. She was the first to demonstrate the presence of neurotransmitters in the brain. In doing so, she made a substantial contribution to clarifying the function of muscle relaxants and psychotropic drugs. Her research also helped to improve understanding of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Vogt’s scientific achievements were recognised with numerous medals and honorary doctorates. In 1952, around five years after becoming a British citizen, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the venerable academy in London. Until then, few women had received this distinction. In 1983, Vogt became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. She is also remembered in her birthplace: since 2001, the Berlin Research Association has awarded the Marthe Vogt Prize annually to support early-career women scientists.

Literature
W. Cuthbert in: Marthe Louise Vogt. 8 September 1903 – 9 September 2003, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 51, 1 December 2005


H. Bielka: History of the Medical-Biological Institutes in Berlin-Buch, Springer, Berlin, 2002

U. Trendelenburg: Persecuted German-speaking pharmacologists 1933–1945, Frechen, Dr Schrör, 2006