On September 20, 1948, John Enders, Frederick Robbins, and Thomas Weller successfully cultivated the poliovirus in non-neural tissue — a breakthrough that made the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines possible. They received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954. The junior colleague who had laid the groundwork for the cell culture technique was not included.

Alice Miles Woodward had spent the previous decade developing and refining mammalian cell culture techniques that the Enders laboratory built on. Dorothy Millicent Horstmann's work is a cleaner case.

Horstmann was born in 1911 in Spokane, Washington. She trained in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and arrived at Yale in 1944 to work on poliomyelitis. In 1952 she published findings demonstrating that poliovirus circulated in the blood — viremia — before it reached the nervous system. This was a fundamentally contested question in polio research: the dominant theory held that the virus traveled directly along neural pathways. Horstmann's viremia finding changed the understanding of how polio infected the body and was essential to developing a vaccine that could intercept the virus in the bloodstream.

Jonas Salk credited her work as "indispensable" to the vaccine. Her name appears in the acknowledgment sections of papers that reshaped virology.

She remained at Yale for the entirety of her career, rising to full professor and becoming the first woman appointed as a master of one of Yale's residential colleges. She was not nominated for the Nobel.