Peter K. Vogt

Peter K. Vogt Professor of The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, U.S.A. He is an American molecular biologist, virologist and geneticist. His research focuses on retroviruses and viral and cellular oncogenes. Vogt received his undergraduate education in biology at the University of Würzburg and in 1959 was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen for work done at the Max Planck Institute for Virology in Tübingen. From 1959 to 1962 he was Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow in the laboratory of Harry Rubin at the University of California in Berkeley and started work on Rous sarcoma virus. He taught microbiology and molecular biology to medical and graduate students at the University of Colorado in Denver (1962–1967) and the University of Washington in Seattle (1967–1971). In 1971, he joined the University of Southern California as Hastings Professor of Microbiology and in 1980 assumed the chairmanship of the Department of Microbiology at the School of Medicine. Since 1993, he has been a Professor at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. He became Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Scripps in 2012. At the beginning of his scientific career, Vogt studied mechanisms of retroviral cell entry and the role of viral surface proteins in determining host range.[8][9][10] He defined related groups of viral surface proteins and their corresponding receptors on the cell surface. During his time in Seattle, his focus shifted to the genetics of retroviruses. Together with his associate Kumao Toyoshima, he isolated the first temperature sensitive mutants of a retrovirus and in collaboration with the biochemist Peter Duesberg discovered the first retroviral oncogene, src. His work on mutants of the Rous sarcoma virus enabled Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus to isolate DNA sequences that represent the src oncogene and to demonstrate the cellular origin of oncogenes. In his extensive studies on avian retroviruses, Vogt discovered oncogenes that play important roles in human cancers, e.g. myc (in collaboration with Bister and Duesberg), jun (with Maki and Bos) and p3k (with Chang).