100 years exploring life, 1888-1988 : the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole

Abstract

dominant research-oriented Naples Zoological Station in Italy and other European labs, the Americans sought to establish a teaching as well as a research laboratory, a place where landlocked and uninitiated students could experience scientific investigation with living organisms at the seashore.As the founders wed their two goals together the MBL emerged.That MBL has trained a hundred years of biologists, directly and indirectly.Each summer hundreds of students come from all over to take courses taught by teams of hundreds of internationally known lecturers (yes, there really are at least as many lecturers as students).One-time students often go on to become lecturers in their turn, or they help to start and sustain other marine laboratories and schools elsewhere, many of which have carried on some of the MBL tradition.So the MBL is just that: the Marine Biological Laboratory, with a life of its own and an identity that defies neat and tidy circumscription.It is a place where people learn to love being part of the process of doing science, and where the science benefits too.And it is an exemplar for community research in biology, a hotbed of intense, dedicated biological research.It is a place where one can look out into an audience gathered for a lecture and see two new MacArthur Fellows sitting next to each other, where National Academy of Sciences members abound, where there are several NIH Merit researchers together, where department heads and Nobel Prize winners congregate.More importantly, it is a place where those recognized by such external distinctions sit and discuss the same lectures and the same research data or course outlines as young assistant professors, eager graduate and undergraduate students, enthusiastic high school students, and sometimes even the children.For this is a place to learn the sharing and cooperation that makes cross-fertilization of ideas possible, to ignore or overcome the boundaries existing elsewhere in the research world.It is a place to return to and to work for and to care for.This book is a story of the MBL, told through the words and images of its people, both past and present.

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