News and Publications

The secret he knows is this: In a lifetime filled with such leaps of faith, all of which have worked out extraordinarily well, why not go for just one more? He'd been making bold moves ever since the summer of 1950 when as a teenager he woke up one morning and walked away from his East German home to reinvent himself in the West.

Although his parents visited him in West Germany during the 1950s, Vogt never returned to his family home until after the destruction of the Berlin Wall. When they finally came to visit him in California, long after he'd become a prominent oncovirologist and an American citizen, they still did not understand or appreciate how he'd chosen to live his life. Of course, science and California were not Vogt's first choice. He originally told his father he wanted to be a monk. "I was very rebellious as a teenager," he says. "My father wanted me to become a doctor so naturally I told him that I was going to study philosophy and become a monk. But after my first year, I went into science. My father said, 'Well, that's a start.'" His father wasn't the only one caught in the crosswinds of Vogt's dramatically determined choices. The shift to virology happened just as suddenly, after he'd chosen electrophysiology for his doctoral thesis and a zoology professor as his supervisor. It was 1955. Vogt was studying at the University of Würzburg on a scholarship that provided tuition and living expenses wherever he decided to go for graduate studies. That summer he'd come across a book on viruses and it hooked him. The main attraction, aside from the fact that it was a new field and still wide open, was its quantitative approach.

EMERGING FIELD OF VIROLOGY

"It wasn't an observational approach like you have in conventional biology. You counted, measured, and used formulas to discover the characteristics of viruses. I liked the precision of it." His supervisor was not as enthralled, especially when Vogt told him he was going to a private institute instead of continuing his graduate studies at the university. It was a risky choice for a young man in Germany to make. There was little active virology research at the time and only one place where it was actually studied -- the Max-Planck-Institute of Virology in Tübingen. Moreover, private institutes were not appreciated by German academics, a prejudice that emerged with full force when graduate exams -- administered by those same university professors -- were given. His former supervisor never forgave him. Then there was virology itself, which was concentrated in the study of animal viruses that could only be grown in chicken eggs. There was no significant cell culture methodology and virtually no understanding of how viruses replicated. Two events coincided to change that. First was the creation of the plaque assay, a new method of producing and assaying animal viruses in a culture -- a quantum jump in laboratory technique. Then in 1953, Watson and Crick demonstrated the molecular structure of DNA and the importance of nucleic acids became clear to everyone.

Vogt's first exposure to that groundbreaking discovery happened by chance. He was being interviewed for admission to graduate school, sitting across the desk from the director of the Max-Planck-Institute who was holding and turning a peculiar plastic model. It was a model of the double helix. "He asked me if I knew what the model was and I had no idea. He smiled and told me I'd better learn it." Vogt did learn it. Two years after that first encounter, he got to meet James Watson. The future Nobel laureate was a visiting lecturer at the Institute and Vogt was impressed by how young he was -- just a few years older than Vogt himself. He was impressed with Watson for other reasons. Above all, Watson was an American, an abstract concept that had become thoroughly imprinted on Vogt's personality. In fact, he had already made up his mind to live and work in the United States, a place he had never been before. "You must understand," he says, "I felt very much at home in America without ever coming here." Part of the attraction was from talking with the American scientists who came to Germany to study and lecture. The rest of it came from books. "I read all of Ernest Hemingway and that taught me about the American character and life," he said.

THE MOVE TO AMERICA

In Germany, Vogt quickly found a supporter in Harry Rubin, a Berkeley virologist with a reputation for quirky independence who told him that if he could find a fellowship, he could come to California. Vogt left for America in 1959 and never really looked back. "I loved the American West, especially California, because it was so completely different from Europe and so open." After admiring the landscape from afar, he now found himself overwhelmed by the actual experience. In response, he began to paint it, immersing himself in its vast canvas of distance and color. Since then, his landscape painting has become a second career that comes close to matching the success of his first. It has certainly captured his soul.

Each autumn, Vogt makes the journey north to Washington State, to a remote island where he closes up his small cottage for the winter after a summer of intermittent painting. It is where the other half of his life -- the part he calls his anchor -- takes place. It's where he paints some of his landscapes of the American West. Like his love of science, Vogt's painting has its early roots in Germany. At Würzburg, he took Saturday classes with a painter who later became a life-long friend. Vogt apprenticed in his studio, idolized Cezanne as the father of modern painting, and still sees himself as a throwback to an earlier age when painters worked with easel and brush in plein-air to capture the light and color of what they saw.

A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LAND

"It's very old fashioned," he says, "nobody goes out and paints landscapes anymore." Perhaps. But there is more at work here than simple artistic desire, something that Vogt fully admits borders on the mystical and the religious. It is his complete immersion in the land itself, a solitary experience that is quite different from the day-to-day collaborations that are part of modern science. "I love to interact with people but being alone, communicating with the landscape, gives my life a balance in so many ways. I love the California desert landscape to an extent that it helps define who I am. It is a landscape that I understand, that I feel a part of. My relationship with it is very intense." When he describes that relationship, his words are similar to his description of America and the desire of a young man to make the leap to the one place where he knew on faith he belonged. That sense of elation, even gratitude, is reflected in his watercolors with their feeling for shifting shapes and colors of the American West.

His current work at TSRI centers on the expression of genes in cancer, delving into the fundamental mechanisms of how proteins, acting as the master switches that turn genes off and on, become corrupted and produce cancer cells. Vogt describes them as the last component in a complex sequence of signals that are responsible for cancer behavior. It is the end result of a lifetime spent looking at things no one else was interested in or understood. By the time Vogt made his way to California in the late 1950s, the study of virology had expanded, based partially on the discovery that a tumor virus could transform a normal cell into a cancerous one in culture. Tumor virology was a new field, albeit one that attracted few followers, among them Vogt and his mentor, Harry Rubin. "We worked on avian tumor viruses, they were widely thought of as esoteric with little or no relevance to humans," he says. "Everyone said they were interesting as models but had no direct impact on people. Harry and I thought they provided a really nice niche where we could work in peace." In truth, they had no idea what was important in tumor viruses and what wasn't. To a great extent, they were following Rubin's determined path away from the mainstream, leaping into terra incognita.

FROM A NORMAL CELL TO A CANCEROUS ONE

"We had no idea how a virus could turn a normal cell into a cancer cell. It took us nearly ten years just to figure out the right questions to ask," according to Vogt. He continues, "Initially, few people thought retroviruses were important. But in the late 1960s, Howard Temin and David Baltimore discovered a unique enzyme that turned RNA into DNA and the riddle of retroviral replication was solved. That set us free to look for oncogenicity -- the way tumor cells were created from normal cells."

"We found the first tumor-inducing genes in the genetic material of retroviruses. These oncogenes turned out to be hitchhikers that had their origin in the host cell itself. They were once useful and important regulators of cell growth but being incorporated into a virus changed them into dangerous cancer-inducing genes," Vogt explains. He discovered a number of these cancer genes; he still scrutinizes the genetic material of viruses and of cells for new ones. But his main interest now is to discover the mechanisms by which these biological switches so profoundly alter the growth behavior of cells. He also wants to apply the genetic knowledge of cancer to the development of novel therapies that will be effective in the treatment of the disease. Vogt believes that the unique resources of TSRI make this a realistic goal. "Scripps opened my eyes to new worlds," he says. "The fact that we have chemistry and structural biology departments is critical. It was a genius decision to build these into the scientific fabric of the Institute. It's the ideal environment for my work, and I think it points the way to the future of cancer research."

When Vogt made the leap to TSRI in 1993, the Institute had a reputation as a "tough place" where researchers were expected to create their own agendas and to develop their own sources of funding, a discipline that seems custom-made for Vogt, a man who's followed his own lead nearly every day of his life. "People told me I was crazy," he says, still laughing at the reaction. "But I trusted the people at Scripps to help me make the transition, and that trust has been rewarded several times over. I knew it would be the ideal place for me, and it is."