1 SEPLO00 TOEO o
MCA A
4817 473HS
“NOBSKA
LIGHT HOUSE
Marine Biological Laboratory —
Swope Center a8
_NMF Aquarium
National Marine
Fisheries
0 Va ¥ MILE
% ‘. 1926-1937
MERKEL H. JACOBS ce
1938-1949, ae xe rie
‘CHARLES PACKARD —
1950-1965 oe
PHILIP bag ARMSTRONG _
ee 1966-1969
)_H. BURR STEINBACH
1970-1975 .
JAMES EBERT Bk
pO haa Pe MPR RR EER a
_ KEITH PORTER
7 i ore
eam ks _ JAMES EBERT
1978-1986 3
PAULGROSS
1987
RICHARD WHITTAKER
(Acting Director)
1988
HARLYN O. HALVORSON
100 Years Exploring Life
1888-1988
The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole
sa
-_
100 Years
Exploring Life, 1888-1988
The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole
Jane Maienschein
Department of Philosophy
Arizona State University
Selection and arrangement
of photographs by
Ruth Davis
Archivist, Marine Biological Laboratory
Jones and Bartlett Publishers
BOSTON
Editorial, Sales, and Customer Service Offices
Jones and Bartlett Publishers
20 Park Plaza
Boston, MA 02116
Copyright © 1989 by Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the
material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Printed in the United States of America
10) 29.58) 7 1G 5) TAS Se 2 at:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maienschein, Jane.
100 years exploring life, 1888-1988 : the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole/
Jane Maienschein with selection and arrangement of photographs by Ruth Davis.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
ISBN 0—86720—120-—7
1. Marine biological laboratory (Woods Hole, Mass.) — History.
I. Title.
QH91.M237 1989 88-8529
574'.072074492 — dc19 CIP
Printing of text by Lancaster Press, Inc.,
Lancaster, PA.
Contents
Foreword vii
Preface xiii
Arriving in Woods Hole 1
Friday Evening Lectures 3
Louis Agassiz 6
The Anderson School at Penikese 9
Summers in Woods Hole’ 11
The Origin of the Marine Biological Laboratory 19
Living Here 27
Housing 29
Whaling and Fishing 31
Commercial Resources 33
The Science School 39
Food 40
Weather 45
Buildings and Budgets 49
Buildings Old and New _ 51
Funding and Control 64
The Library and Publications 73
The Library 75
Publications 82
Rare Books Room and Archives 84
The People 87
Students 89
Administrators 92
Edwin Grant Conklin and Charles Otis Whitman = 93
The Tradition of Research 96
Leaders 98
MBL Personalities 99
Cooperative Administration ina Community 101
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Jobs and Fellowships 102
Minorities at the MBL 104
MBL Staff and Children 112
Doing Science 117
Collaboration 120
Early Days of Marine Biology 122
Techniques and Equipment 124
Problems 126
Organisms 131
Collecting Organisms 134
Out of the Lab 151
Boating Trips and Beach Parties 153
Marriages 157
The Beach 157
Drama _ 159
Music 160
The MBL Club 162
Singing 164
Walking, Biking, and Running ~—-166
Fourth of July, Diving, and Sports 167
Gardening 169
Sailing 170
Meals, Movies, and Diversions 170
Friends and Relatives 175
Thanks for the Memories 185
Sources and Acknowledgements 185
Epilogue 189
The Marine Biological Laboratory Directors — Front Endpaper
Nobel Laureates Affiliated with the Marine
Biological Laboratory Rear Endpaper
Foreword
IMAGINE A WARM SUMMER NIGHT in mid-August. You are standing on a dock at
midnight in the light of a full moon, peering down into the dark water below.
The surface of the water ripples as if it were alive. As your eyes grow
accustomed to the moonlit darkness, you realize that the water is alive. You
are watching the mating ritual of thousands of writhing, swirling polychete
worms as they seek out their mates under the influence of the full moon's
light. A timeless event unfolds before you, connecting you back to primeval
oceans, where ancient progenitors of these polychetes repeated a similar
ritual, before any human eyes were there to see. Before you is an expression
of life at its most fundamental, its most dynamic, its most breathtaking. Like
thousands of students of marine embryology who stood on this dock before
you, you will always remember this scene and the institution that led you to
it: the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
In 1988 the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) celebrated its centen-
nial. As it enters its second century, the MBL not only looks back to a great
past, but forward to a great future as the United States’ premier biological
research institute. It is therefore fitting that its unique story be told at this
time. In this well-researched, sometimes humorous, always human “biog-
raphy” of this eclectic institution, historian of science Jane Maienschein has
caught a glimpse of what it is that has made the MBL so special to all who
have spent any time there.
Essayist Lewis Thomas has described the MBL as a “National Biological
Laboratory,” an institution that brings together each summer a collection of
biologists from across the United States and abroad. From its founding in
1888 onward, the MBL has indeed served as a gathering spot for biologists
who come to Woods Hole not only to work with their favorite marine
organisms, but also to converse with each other and exchange ideas in a way
that seldom happens in the more limited confines of university biology
departments.
Almost from the beginning, the MBL attracted international as well as
American investigators, becoming increasingly a ‘World Biological Labora-
tory” since the turn of the century. Unlike its European counterparts, where
the focus has always been almost exclusively on research, often by only the
most established senior investigators, the MBL has always had a diversity of
programs and personnel. There is, of course, a major emphasis on re-
search. In addition, however, the MBL has always been equally devoted to
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
teaching, running a number of summer courses for graduate students or
others seeking to learn about a field or refresh that knowledge. Nobel
laureates and high school teachers have been involved in the same MBL
course during a given summer.
Through its research and its courses, the MBL has served as a nerve
center for the development and propagation of biological knowledge in the
twentieth century. For this distinction it owes a debt to the great European
biological stations established a generation earlier: Roscoff and the Stazione
Zoologica in Naples (1872), Villefranche-sur-mer, and Plymouth, England
(1888), among others. It also has roots in two earlier American precedents:
the Annisquam Laboratory of the Woman's Education Association of the
Boston Society of Naturalists (established 1879), and Louis Agassiz’s Anderson
School of Natural History on Penikese Island (established 1872). Like every
great centenarian, the MBL has drawn upon this heritage to create its own
unique personality. The biographical history of that personality is the subject
of Professor Maienschein’s volume.
While everyone who has spent any time at the MBL agrees it is unique,
it is not so easy to capture and characterize that uniqueness for others.
Some have emphasized the intellectual atmosphere, the constant interest
and attention to science, and the thirty-five or more Nobel laureates who
have at one time or another been directly associated with the institution.
Others have emphasized the MBL’s playful and relaxing aspect, referring to
it as the “summer camp for biologists.” Still others have emphasized its
social and sociological side, the fact that the MBL has nurtured the creative
development of countless biologists in this country and abroad over the
century, and that many people’s affiliations later in life came from contacts
they made with colleagues at the MBL as students or young investigators.
(Many biologists even met their spouses at the MBL, either in courses or
through research work.)
But, of course, none of these qualities by itself fully captures the
MBL's uniqueness, since the MBL is, in a sense, a combination of all of
them. It is a place where lots of science gets done — often very good science.
In the early 1900s, for example, T. H. Morgan brought his fruit flies from
New York to Woods Hole every summer just because the atmosphere for
doing research and for exchanging ideas was so exciting. More recently,
neurobiologists from NIH, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Cali-
fornia have used marine invertebrates, such as slugs, to study the neuro-
logical basis of behavior. The MBL is, indeed, a center for much of what is
at the cutting edge of biological research today. At the same time, it is very
much a place where people combine play and work, where discussions
about repeated sequences of DNA, or neurotransmitter mechanisms, are
punctuated by swimming, tennis, or boating. Yet the conversations are
always resumed, often with fresh insights brought about by periods of
FOREWORD
Lie ix
relaxation and play. It is also a place where careers are made, and where
new associations, professional and personal, are formed. Many collabora-
tions have resulted from joint research work begun, or largely carried out,
at the MBL. The uniqueness of the MBL lies in its combination of so many
vital qualities.
I recently discussed the subject of the MBL's uniqueness with my
colleague at Washington University, Viktor Hamburger, student of Nobel
laureate Hans Spemann in the 1920s and himself an eminent embryologist,
who spent a number of years as instructor, and later director, of the
embryology course at the MBL (1936-46). I asked Professor Hamburger
what he thought were the unique features of the institution. He replied that,
for him, the uniqueness lies in the pastoral setting that allows people to have
ongoing conversations with colleagues undistracted by the constant inter-
ruptions of daily life in the university. In addition, Hamburger noted, the
MBL provides scientists the opportunity to observe each other’s experi-
ments first-hand, and to discuss different interpretations of data on the
spot. The MBL provides an opportunity for doing science and for thinking
in a relaxing atmosphere that fosters creativity. To Hamburger, this is the
secret of the MBL’s uniqueness — that it spawns creativity.
My own experience with the MBL dates back some twenty years when,
as a graduate student in history of science, I discovered one of the Labo-
ratory’s most unique features: its magnificent library. Even though I was a
student at Harvard, which has one of the most complete libraries in the
world, I still found the MBL Library to be a special treat. Not only were the
library’s journal holdings more complete in many cases than Harvard's, but
they were much easier to use. All numbers of every journal are housed
under one roof and are arranged alphabetically. The library is open
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and no one checks you in and
out or stamps the books you borrow; the library runs on the honor system
and works surprisingly well. Few books are lost, stolen, or misplaced.
Another very special feature of the MBL Library is its reprint collection:
300,000 individual reprints, arranged by author and covering all aspects of
biology between roughly 1880 and 1966. For a historian, this is a goldmine
of information.
After spending my first summer using the library full-time, I discov-
ered—in a way close to my own heart—one of the MBL Library's most
treasured features. Here was a complete set of the Journal of the Royal
Microscopical Society, or the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London,
dating back to volume 1, in 1665, sitting on the shelves for browsing. (Some
of the older, more valuable and fragile items have now been removed to the
newly-renovated Rare Books Room and Archives.) These same journals had
been perused in the past by Lillie, Morgan, Conklin, Harrison and other
greats in early twentieth-century biology.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
In the two decades since, I have never failed to feel the excitement of
this library each day—as much, perhaps, as the embryologist still feels each
time he or she looks at a developing ctenophore or sea urchin embryo. I am
reminded of the tribute Stephen Jay Gould paid to the MBL Library in his
book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, written partly in Woods Hole over a decade
ago: ‘Where else could an idiosyncratic worker like me find a library open
all the time, free from the rules and bureaucracy that stifle scholarship and
‘protect’ books only by guarding them from use. It is an anomaly in a
suspicious and anonymous age.”
It is difficult to capture these many and varied facets of the MBL's
personality in one book, especially one aimed at a general audience of
nonspecialists. If you have spent one or more summers at the MBL, you
know some of the magic that it holds. But to someone who only knows of
the MBL, or is just learning about it, the qualities that make it so special to
its friends may seem elusive, almost mystical.
It is a testament of Jane Maienschein’s knowledge of the MBL and to
her historical and verbal skills that she has captured much of the magic of
the institution in a very down-to-earth way. She has truly written a biography
of the laboratory. Professor Maienschein has chosen to write not so much
of the Nobel laureates or of the detailed scientific accomplishments that
have made the MBL's first century so eminent, but of the people—the
everyday people, scientists and nonscientists alike—who have made up the
life of the Laboratory and created its very special personality.
This is the story of an institution written in highly personal terms. The
Nobel laureates are there, as they should be. So, too, are the directors,
trustees and others who have given special parts of their lives to guiding and
managing the institution. But it is the working scientists and support
staff —the collecting crews, the technicians, even the doyens of the Mess
Hall—whose story Professor Maienschein paints with such clarity and
humor. The work-a-day activities of people from every facet of MBL life
occupy the main focus of Professor Maienschein’s attentions. It is, after all,
the activity of everyday people that makes up the real spirit of any institution.
That spirit existed from the beginning at the MBL, before there were Nobel
prizes or year-round administrative staff. In many ways, it would have been
easier to write a book that traced only the illustrious individuals who figured
prominently in the MBL during its first century. The more difficult task,
which Professor Maienschein has carried out so well, is to portray that
history in terms of on-going, everyday activities.
Although Jane Maienschein has served as principal author, in a very
real sense this book is a collaborative effort. Some of the collaborators are
long deceased, but their voices are heard in the quotations from archival
sources, both published and unpublished, that Professor Maienschein has
included. Others of the collaborators are still very much with us, and they
FOREWORD
Lh xi
have collaborated by providing interviews and personal recollections that
always add so much to historical accounts.
Certain collaborators have added their own very special touches. In
particular, MBL archivist Ruth Davis, along with Robert and Millie Huettner,
has been invaluable in selecting the photographs to illustrate the volume.
This history of the MBL, therefore, is the work of a team of researchers, and
presents the best of their collective effort.
As a result of this collaborative approach, Professor Maienschein’s
book is unique in its own right. It is intended as a living testament to an
institution with a special mission and a special history. It is not a sequel to
or replacement of F. R. Lillie’s book, The Woods Hole Marine Biological
Laboratory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1944), which has been
reprinted in a special edition for the MBL centennial by Lancaster Press.
Nor is Professor Maienschein’s book an official centennial eulogy, an essay
in self-aggrandizement of the sort that often accompanies the celebration of
institutional anniversaries. Rather, it is what any good biography should be:
a loving but frank portrayal of a special friend.
Like all celebrities, the MBL has had its ups and downs. The ups have
far outnumbered the downs, but the downs have been there nonetheless:
the perennial financial problems, disagreements within the corporation
about its own mission, and even controversial proposals to have the MBL
managed by other institutions. But the MBL has managed to come through
these bad times more or less unscathed, retaining, as Jane Maienschein
shows so well, its essential magic.
This book is aimed at the specialist and the nonspecialist alike. It is
written so as not to presuppose any particular background, or any famil-
iarity with biology or the MBL itself. As a personal history, it should be
accessible not only to biologists who know the MBL first-hand, but also to
the curious reader, the Cape Cod visitor, or the foreign dignitary who wants
to know something about American scientific research institutions. It may,
therefore, disappoint some research biologists, who might wish that there
were more detailed descriptions of the scientific work of the past or present
at the MBL. It may also disappoint some staunch MBL regulars, who would
like to see more details of local history and institutional lore. It may even
disappoint that special breed of modern historian of science, the institu-
tional historian, who prizes quantitative data— graphs and tables of num-
bers of investigators per summer, numbers of dollars spent, square footage
of lab space utilized. All that would be largely irrelevant, however. It would
not reveal nearly so well as does Professor Maienschein’s more personal
account what it is that really makes up the spirit of the MBL. No book can
be all things to all people. One must take this portrait of the MBL on its
own terms.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
A special feature of Professor Maienschein’s book is the many and
varied illustrations that accompany it. This book is really more of an-
“illustrated biography” than a standard history. Included are many unusual
photographs and prints taken largely from the MBL Archives and selected
with great care by archivist Ruth Davis.
In line with Professor Maienschein’s overall approach, most of the
photographs are candid, rather than posed, portraits. The illustrations
attempt to capture the liveliness, the spirit of intense work, humor, play, and
family that make up so much of life in the MBL community. Selected from
all periods of the MBL's history, the illustrations attempt to show, in
contemporary terms, the kind of scientific work, physical atmosphere, and
personal relationships that existed in 1888, 1910, 1940, 1980. If a picture
is worth a thousand words, Professor Maienschein has lengthened her
text considerably by including this array of fascinating and informative
illustrations.
In conclusion, this institutional biography is written from the perspec-
tive that could only have been written by a professional historian who also
has an extended and loving relationship with the MBL. It is as fitting a way
as I can imagine both to look back over the MBL's distinguished past and to
glance forward to its equally exciting and promising future.
Fall 1988
GARLAND E. ALLEN
Preface
THE MariNE BioLocicaL LABoraTory began in 1888. As first director Charles
Otis Whitman said, it was a mere germ, only barely fertilized. The first year
brought a simple cellular form with only seventeen “ids in its protoplasmic
body—two instructors, eight students, and seven investigators (all begin-
ners). The two instructors could be likened, with no great stretch of the
imagination, to two polar corpuscles, signifying little more than that the
germ was a fertile one, and prepared to begin its preordained course of
development.” This fertile germ then underwent various cleavages and
began to assume a multicellular shape. With growth, it advanced to the
tadpole stage. It encountered troubles along the way, just as any growing
individual does. Fortunately, these troubles have never proved fatal.
Whitman saw the MBL as a living being. It still is today—a being made
up of all the cellular individuals who visit and work there. The life of the
organism is part of the life of the individual members and visitors. This book
is about the MBL’s first one hundred years of life.
This work represents a biography of the MBL, which has had a life very
like any other individual, with its cycles of adolescence and growth and
maturity and maybe even metamorphic stages as well. Indeed, this is really
an autobiography, a reflective sketch of a full and rich life told through
recollections and reflections recorded within the archives and the people of
the MBL. This is only one of the many autobiographical stories that could be
told; other times and other efforts will bring additional perspectives. If
anyone feels that something has been left out, he or she is invited to write
down those stories and facts and deposit them in the MBL Archives. This
story reflects what lies in the current public and archival record.
As an autobiography, this is not the sort of study that provides a litany
of vital statistics and details from birth to death in precise, chronological
order with everything in its proper place. Rather, this is an effort to present
the spirit of the MBL's life, that spirit of cooperation and cross-fertilization
of ideas that makes science a living process. This interactive life is some-
times pervaded by a certain untidiness and even unreality. Recorded mem-
ory occasionally may bring seemingly insignificant details into sharp focus
or forget others. Sometimes the past comes into clearer focus than the
present. So be it. The life recounted here is an important one, and the
quirks of the storytelling mirror are quirks in the life itself and in its records.
What, exactly, is the MBL? Biologist-writer Lewis Thomas has called it
a virtual National Biological Laboratory for the United States because so
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
much of import has been accomplished here, by so many leading biologists
from all over the country. Yet the MBL is not officially that. It is not funded
by the government, nor does it have direct governmental connections. It is
an independent research and teaching laboratory, owned and governed by
its scientists, and it has been so since the early years. The MBL welcomes
biologists from all over the country and from many foreign countries; one
recent year brought representatives from over 325 American and nearly 75
foreign institutions.
This rich diversity of scientists clearly goes beyond any self-conscious
sense of unique national identity or externally imposed purpose. Rather, the
MBL is a group of first-rate individual scientists, working in concert with
their own goals. These goals converge on producing the best biological
research possible, so that the underlying purpose is one of advancing
science. The MBL is a haven for science and as such serves as a special
resource, nationally and internationally. It is more a valuable treasure than
a national laboratory in the most familiar and limited sense.
Yet what, exactly, is the Marine Biological Laboratory, and where did it
come from? It is mostly Marine. The majority of researchers still use marine
organisms. Some of these are not strictly local; a few could easily be flown
back to Idaho or Kansas and need not be studied on the spot; and a small
number of workers do not really even work with marine organisms. The
MBL has embraced a wider variety of life forms as the evolution of biological
work has carried researchers elsewhere. Yet the bulk of work at the MBL
remains marine and directed at marine-based research problems concern-
ing development, heredity, physiology, and evolution.
The work is also largely Biological, though not exclusively. Chemistry
and physics creep in as they relate to biological questions. Historians have
begun to join the group of researchers, carrying out their own historical
research projects using the unique collection of resources available. After
the recent inaugural history course in connection with the MBL's centen-
nial, several of the students cancelled their vacation plans in order to stay
and do research in this surprisingly outstanding library. Occasional artists
arrive, and journalists, and sociologists, to carry out their own brand of
research, not in biology but about biology and biologists. Yet Biology remains
the central mission.
As a Laboratory, the place also has evolved to embrace a wider range
of work centered on biological research. Some of the researchers at the
MBL actually use the library as their laboratory, a few even making the
mistake of never going outside to explore the variety of life there. Some take
the institution as their lab, looking over the shoulders of scientists to
investigate the process of doing science. But most still come to the MBL to
carry out their laboratory work in biology, experimenting on marine organ-
isms as they have for a full century. In recent decades the MBL has become
PREFACE
Dh XV
a year-round laboratory as well, with some outstanding researchers choos-
ing to pursue their life’s work here. One recent wintry day, someone put
warm woolen hats on artist Elaine Pear Cohen’s fine sculpture of scientists
talking, which represents the MBL spirit and resides at a major corner in
town. It evidently appeared that the scientists needed additional warming
resources to continue through winter.
At first the MBL was just a summer operation. It began in 1888 as part
of America’s response to the general move toward research at the seashore.
Little was known of marine life before 1800, but that began to change from
two directions. The laying of transoceanic telegraph cable brought many
questions about marine life. Common opinion had held that the pressure of
water would prevent any life from existing at very great depths in the seas.
People expected to find neat layers of different sorts of living beings, below
which would lie a layer of skeletons from those human bodies lost and
buried at sea, and below that perhaps a layer of gold coins, and anchors, and
other items lost overboard. Yet when the deep sea cables broke and were
hauled up for repair, they had numerous living organisms securely at-
tached. Life forms must be able to live down there after all, and the drive
quickly developed to explore those depths and to discover those living
organisms ‘‘where no man had gone before.” Perhaps the sea even held
very simple and primitive organisms that would help to illuminate the
perfection of nature's design, thought researchers in the middle of the
nineteenth century, before Darwin.
In the late nineteenth century, after Darwin had put forth his evolution
theory and after German biologist Ernst Haeckel had convinced so many
people that the right way to pursue biological science was to trace the
evolutionary relationships of organisms, biologists moved to the seashore.
Haeckel believed that all of life arose from very simple primitive organisms
resembling single cells. The question was, which organisms appeared first
and which later, and through what series of changes? The key, Haeckel
convinced a number of researchers, lay in marine organisms. Sea life, he
believed, was more primitive and therefore more basic in evolutionary
history. Studying the similarities and differences, especially of early embry-
onic development of a range of marine organisms, became the accepted
practice in biology. Besides, knowing the phylogenetic history, as it was
called, would reveal the ancestors of the vertebrates and of man. This, after
all, is something we care about. So to the seashore they went.
Those few hardy pioneers therefore moved to the seashore to inves
tigate the structure and function of the various peculiar aquatic species.
They asked: what lived in the water, and how did those forms relate to
terrestrial organisms? What could marine life reveal about the marvelous
diversity and distribution of life? The European approach to the sea cen-
tered on facilitating research into just such questions. In contrast to the
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
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 sea-
shore. 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 re-
search data or course outlines as young assistant professors, eager graduate
and undergraduate students, enthusiastic high school students, and some-
times 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.
J.M.
NOTES*
Charles Otis Whitman on the beginning of the MBL, Laboratories and Marine Research,” American Zo-
“Address to the MBL Corporation,” August 11, ologist (1988) 28: 1-34.
1903, Whitman Collection. On the Naples Zoological Station, see Charles Kofoid,
Lewis Thomas on the MBL as a national laboratory, The The Biological Stations of Europe (Washington,
Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), pp. 7-34.
58-63.° Also more recent articles by Christiane Groeben,
On early marine work, see the symposium papers by such as ‘Anton Dohrn—the Statesman of Darwin-
Keith Benson, Ralph Dexter, Jane Maienschein, ism,” Biological Bulletin special historical edition
and Robert Terwilliger, ‘The History of Marine (June 1985), 168 Suppl.: 4-25.
*Materials are in the MBL Archives unless otherwise noted.
Arriving in Woods Hole
The Yalden sundial, given in 1934 by Charles R. Crane. MBL Archives.
Rs A at iT Se St ns
a a LS
The Scientists, sculpture by Elaine Pear Cohen, at the corner of
School and Water streets. Photograph by Sally Bruckner, courtesy of
Elaine Pear Cohen, MBL Archives.
James P. McGinnis injecting a lobster, 1958. MBL Archives.
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE Lh 3
else
RIDAY NIGHT in the summer, the cars roll into Woods Hole. Eager families
arrive for their ferry reservations to Martha’s Vineyard. They have waited a
long time for this week to come, and they arrive early in anticipation.
Steamship Authority officials direct their cars into line. But hours remain
before the scheduled departure. The family locks the car and wanders the
streets of Woods Hole, this little piece of land at the bottom of Cape Cod. The
main street takes them past restaurants, specializing in seafood of course,
then past the grocery store. But what are the red brick buildings? Is there
some business or factory here, they ask? Only the business of science.
As they move down the street, they may see a sundial on a little plaza
near the water. An MBL benefactor, plumbing magnate Charles R. Crane,
gave the Yalden sundial, which was designed to keep extremely accurate
time — reportedly to within one-half minute throughout the day— for Woods
Hole’s particular location. A lobster provides the sundial with its local Cape
Cod flavor and a scientific twist. There is a small hole in the lobster, it is said,
because the stone engraver obtained his specimen from the MBL Supply
Department rather than from a local fisherman. Reportedly Harvard biolo-
gist George Howard Parker initially told the engraver that the claws were not
lifelike enough. He recommended a visit to the supply department. The
chosen model had a little hole in the back of the carapace, where it had been
injected. So does the sundial’s lobster.
Friday Evening Lectures
Very few of those waiting for the ferry make the turn past the lobster down
MBL Street, to the brick and wooden buildings and to the Eel Pond. Those
few who do so on a Friday night will see people converging from all
directions on the main lecture room of the MBL, in the Lillie Building.
Individuals trickle in from the library floors above, some with books in hand.
Groups of people wander over from the laboratories across the street or
down the hall, often chattering away about what is working or not
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Crane Building from the old Cayadetta dock, August, 1923.
Norman W. Edmund Collection, MBL Archives.
a
OU
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE
Lillie Auditorium during the 1940s, with
director Charles Packard sitting in the
center background. MBL Archives.
7
-
~
a
a
Charles Otis Whitman, first director of the
MBL and architect of its form of
governance of, by, and for the scientists.
MBL Archives.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
working in the lab. Some people drive in from their cottages, often trans-
porting those whose age has made them feel no longer comfortable walking
the familiar distance at night. Bicycles roll up carrying young researchers,
students, and maybe even a few teenagers. Assorted people sail or row in
after a day on the water. Maybe a couple will even be returning by ferry from
a day on one of the islands.
These people are all gathering, as the MBL community has gathered for
one hundred years, to hear the week's Friday evening lecture. Some nights
the subject may be so technical that a few tired listeners doze off after their
long day in the lab. At other times a brilliant lecturer will enchant everyone
with carefully chosen examples, beautiful slides, and a persuasive explana-
tion of why this work matters. This latter type of lecture is what the Friday
evening lectures have always been about.
From the very first years, director Charles Otis Whitman felt that even a
specialized modern laboratory such as the MBL should have a time when the
entire community would come together to consider the major scientific
problems of the day. Individuals should learn from each other, he urged.
People should cooperate even as they pursue their separate research.
Regular lectures to address the key problems, as well as to discuss the most
effective methods of approach and the best available explanations, should
also be able to illustrate to the public what marine biological research is
about.
With time those lectures have become somewhat more specialized and
more technical, but always with emphasis on presenting the latest concerns
of the day. Recent years have spawned additional series of general lectures,
by journalists on one day and by historians and philosophers on another.
Discussing science forms an essential part of MBL life, so the visitor should
not be surprised to find all those people moving willingly inside to sit in a
lecture hall and listen, even on a perfectly gorgeous and inviting summery
afternoon or Friday evening.
In fact, the tradition of lecturing to the public as well as the scientific
community about biological topics has been a major part of American
culture and science for a long time. Boston in the nineteenth century had its
naturalist Louis Agassiz, who may well have initially helped to inspire the
MBL’s Friday evening series.
Louis Agassiz
Agassiz came to this country from Switzerland in 1846 to give a lecture tour.
He loved to travel and to explore the world and had somehow heard about
the delights of lecturing in America. No one worried that his English was not
perfect. Science was gaining popularity, and the word that he was a fine
speaker was enough for an agent to book a tour for him. In Boston Agassiz
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE Lie 7
Louis Agassiz at the blackboard.
MBL Archives.
spoke to a crowded audience of 1,200 people. When he occasionally had to
pause and grasp for the proper English word, he also grasped the chalk and
began to draw. Sometimes using both hands, Agassiz drew organisms that
came alive on the board behind him, entertaining the audience further.
Naturalists in the nineteenth century had to draw, because they often
spent a high percentage of their time meticulously depicting what they had
seen in order to communicate it to others who had not. Naturalists who
could not draw had serious trouble. Or those who found painstaking
watercolor work carelessly washed away by drops of seawater falling from
wet hair after a swim could lose a precious investment. They could not
simply photograph what they saw, not until the very end of the century, and
then only with poorer clarity than the eye could see. They did not have the
remarkable advanced technology, such as video microscopy, being devel-
oped today. The photographer that the MBL first added to the staff in 1897
did not replace practical everyday drawing for quite some time.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
A tremendous popular success, Louis Agassiz liked the United States
and determined, after the death of his first wife, to settle in Boston. There
he married Elizabeth Cabot Cary, later president of Radcliffe College. In
1847 he became established at Harvard University, where he founded the
Museum of Comparative Zoology. Always an opponent of evolution, his
students once suggested to him that a debate between evolutionists and
nonevolutionists might prove illuminating, all in the spirit of open scientific
discussion and the search for truth, of course. Agassiz reportedly responded
“rather evasively’ that “personally I like Mr. Darwin very much; he is my
friend.’ Someone then pointed out that ‘““Darwin’s son Frank [Francis] was
once told that Agassiz did not accept evolution. “That's all right,’ said Frank,
‘father does not believe in the glacial theory.’ ” Agassiz was very proud of his
glacial theory, which held that much of the geological change that the earth
has experienced has resulted from the cycling of glacial epochs. Apparently
Agassiz chose not to pursue the discussion further at that point.
) Three sketches from Frank Leslie's journal of
August 23, 1873, showing scenes from the
{ Anderson School of Natural History at Penikese:
Louis Agassiz at the blackboard with chalk in hand,
Wi gentlemen dissecting a fish, and a room in the
SY ladies’ dormitory. Drawings by Albert Berghaus,
_*; MBL Archives.
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE nN 9
In 1873 Boston, like much of America, was in the throes of popular
enthusiasm for science when Agassiz arrived. The publicity in the second
half of the nineteenth century for the notorious race for dinosaur bones by
Yale’s Othniel Marsh and Pennsylvania’s Edward Drinker Cope had inten-
sified public awareness of evolution theory and zoology generally. Nature
study had gained great popularity here and abroad. Furthermore, the public
wanted education in science, for themselves and for their children. Boston
school committees mandated that there should be more science teaching in
the schools, because there was little done officially, especially in biological
subjects.
But who was to teach science? Who was to teach biology? Because
biology at the time meant primarily natural history, and because natural
history of organisms cannot be learned simply by peering at textbooks, any
attempt to introduce biology into the schools meant having to teach the
teachers. “Study nature, not books,” Agassiz preached, explaining that he
would not allow textbooks into his classroom. But how were these school
teachers supposed to study nature?
In 1873 a student of Agassiz, Nathaniel Shaler, suggested that Agassiz
offer a summer course for teachers. Yet the great popularizer had too many
projects demanding his time and was no longer a young man. He was not
sure. Besides it would take money to set up a school. He had enough trouble
getting sufficient funds to keep his own Museum of Comparative Zoology
(MCZ) at Harvard going in proper style. And where would such a school be?
Giving a public lecture to generate support, he began to wonder out loud
about the possibilities. As he appealed to the Massachusetts legislature for
funds for the MCZ and for the summer school, it began to look as though
a school might be possible, on Nantucket Island.
The Anderson School at Penikese
Then some of the ever-popular Louis Agassiz’s concerns found their way into
the New York newspapers, including the Times and Tribune. In response, a
wealthy New York businessman, John Anderson, wrote to Agassiz offering
land on the island of Penikese, off the coast of Woods Hole, plus his own
house there for Agassiz’s personal use: a gift valued at $100,000. He also gave
$50,000 to serve as the base of a permanent endowment to open a summer
school of natural history for teachers.
As reported in Nature, Anderson wrote to Agassiz that the school “may
be destined in future ages not only to afford the required instruction to the
youth of our country, but may be the means of attracting to our shores
numerous candidates from the Old World, who may find here, in the school
to be established by you, those means of fitting themselves for the teaching
of Natural History by Nature itself. Which by a strange oversight, appears to
10 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island. The large building
(center left) housed laboratories on the first floor and dormitories on the
second. It burned to the ground in a spectacular fire in 1891. MBL Archives.
have been overlooked in the schemes . . . of education here.” Agassiz and
Anderson agreed to hold summer sessions on Anderson's Penikese property
and winter sessions in Cambridge, in effect making the school the educa-
tional branch of the MCZ. After Agassiz had accepted and the final official
papers had been signed in a fancy ceremony in New York, Anderson
declared the event as ‘‘the happiest moment of my life.”
The Anderson School opened in 1873 as planned, even though the
construction of the main teaching building and the dorms continued up
until the very last minute. Embarrassingly, too many people wanted to
attend, perhaps in part because the price was so reasonable, with no tuition
and only a percentage of the value of bedroom furniture to pay for room,
plus board at cost. At first Agassiz had expected few applications and had
simply accepted everyone who applied. But then some of the later applicants
looked much more promising than the earlier ones. So Agassiz wrote a
remarkable letter asking the earlier ones to surrender their places in favor
of those later and better-prepared students. Evidently, in the face of such an
unorthodox appeal, some did. The final select group of some forty students
included a number of women who were ‘very schoolma’my in appearance,”
and the ‘gentlemen were not one whit behind,” the press reported. The
press attended the school’s opening in force, for Agassiz recognized a good
show and invited them in. Students, relatives, and members of the press all
gathered in New Bedford* to take a special steamer to Penikese for a day.
Agassiz was giving a scientific party.
At the laboratory of the new school, he presented a dedicatory address,
which was widely acclaimed as “inspiring” and “beautiful” and as a ‘‘silent
prayer,” immortalized in John Greenleaf Whittier’s often-cited ode ‘The
Prayer of Agassiz,’ which reflects the ideals of the time:
‘Unless otherwise indicated, all places mentioned are situated in Massachusetts.
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE nN 11
On the Isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school... .
Said the Master to the youth:
‘We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are reaching, through His laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause...’
After the dedication the group enjoyed a feast. Then the reporters left the
island to file their enthusiastic stories praising this great moment in Amer-
ican education and in American science. Only then, as one student put it, did
the small group of remaining teachers-turned-students realize that they
were settled on a barren island only two-thirds of a mile long and one-third
of a mile wide. Without distractions, science would occupy the summer.
That summer's experience on that tiny island made a major difference
to American science. Among those inspired by the island school was Alpheus
Hyatt, destined to run his own teachers’ school for the Boston Society of
Natural History and to provide the motivating force for the founding of the
MBL. There was also David Starr Jordan, who became the first president of
Stanford University and sought to build it into a western scientific empire.
Also among the students was Charles Otis Whitman, who taught at Boston’s
English High School. During this summer of 1873, and the next when he
returned to Penikese as an advanced student under Agassiz’s son Alexander
(who took over the school for one year after Louis suddenly died), Whitman
decided to become a professional biologist. That meant he would have to go
to Europe to pursue a doctoral degree, with all the resulting difficulties for
one from a “sober and pious” but definitely not wealthy family from Maine.
But he had made up his mind, and Whitman was a stubborn and dedicated
man. He went to Germany in 1875, where he received his Ph.D. for work on
the embryology of leeches. After a two-year stay in Japan, he returned to the
United States. He directed the Allis Lake Laboratory in Milwaukee, chaired
the department at Clark University, and made his way to Woods Hole, full of
ideas and energy, and ready to head the Marine Biological Laboratory when
it began in 1888.
Summers in Woods Hole
Mt. Holyoke professor and former Penikese participant Cornelia Clapp
arrived in the very first year of the MBL, in 1888, and found a quiet, tiny
village. Ferry service from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard had begun in
1749, and hotels and summer estates had begun to appear by 1872, but only
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
a few tourists and summer visitors had arrived yet by 1888. It was not until
after the pungent guano works closed and was torn down after 1889 that
Woods Hole really began to attract a significant population of tourists and
others seeking refuge from the cities in seaside resorts.
In those days, one generally arrived by the train that first chugged into
Woods Hole in 1872, though by mid-century one could have arrived after a
pleasant overnight trip from New York by paddle-wheel steamer. Isabel
Morgan Mountain, daughter of Columbia biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan,
recalls that the family set out from New York for the summer in Woods Hole
in great style. They took baskets of plants to grow in their Woods Hole
garden, perhaps some mice to study, their English Setter, a pair of love birds,
and the usual assortment of baggage and children. By train, whether the
more local or the fancier “Dude” train, the trip took a little more than two
hours from Boston, straight into Woods Hole along a track that brushes right
up against the sand dunes and overlooks the water in a few places. When
autos first bumped their way down the Cape, the trip was considerably
longer; now it takes maybe one and a half hours, except on a Friday or
Sunday in the summer tourist season. Now that the train is gone, bicycles,
baby buggies, and pedestrians frequent the paved pathway where the tracks
once lay.
Taking the train to Woods Hole made an impression on many new-
comers, for there they often met other scientists and their families on their
way to the summer haven. Second MBL director Frank Rattray Lillie
reminisced in his unpublished autobiography that it was during the train trip
that he first learned what the MBL was really about. Lillie had signed up to
work as a graduate student at Clark University under Whitman. Whitman
had suggested that he get himself to Woods Hole for the summer to begin
work. As Lillie made his way from his home in Toronto to Woods Hole, he
learned from fellow passengers that he would be expected to enter into the
cell lineage research of the day. This work was dedicated to tracing, in a
variety of organisms, what happens to each cell as it undergoes a series of
divisions. The only real choice for a student, the others explained to Lillie,
was which ‘‘beast’” he would choose to study, and not which questions he
would ask or which techniques he would employ. Those were set. For the
sort of comparative enterprise that Whitman wanted, everyone had to
standardize as many factors as possible.
By the time Lillie arrived in 1892, the MBL community all found housing
in local boarding houses. The very first year, however, no one had made any
housing arrangements for the students, and the choices were slim. Nor was
there anywhere obvious to eat. In fact, when investigator Cornelia Clapp
first arrived there really was no MBL. The carpenters were still working
frantically on the one building and the director had not yet arrived. Even-
tually, the small group of students and instructors made arrangements for
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE Lie 13
Richard and Robert
Huettner at the train
station in Woods Hole in
1930. Photograph by
Alfred F. Huettner,
MBL Archives.
Although the date, location, and
person in this picture are
unknown, there is no question
about where the freight was
heading. F.R. Lillie papers,
MBL Archives.
14
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The Nantucket, sidewheel ferry
boat in Woods Hole Passage,
with Devil's Foot Island in the
foreground. MBL Archives.
rooming and boarding at one of the few houses willing to take in strangers
that first year. Or as Clapp reported, some took their meals in the “dark,
dingy hole” of a dining room at the railroad station. They then picked their
way through the glacial boulders toward the simple wooden building with
its general open laboratory.
By 1902, in contrast, when student Beamon Douglas spent the summer
at the MBL, it seemed to him that nearly every house in town eagerly took
in boarders. He reported that “the modest sum of three or four dollars a
week secures a large room, comfortable though simply furnished, with
sufficient lamp oil, bed linens, and water for the most exacting.” By then, the
homeowners were often so glad of the opportunity to take in additional
income for a few months that they rented out all available space to the busy
and generally well-behaved scientists and themselves occupied the unrent-
William Procter in front of Old Main, 1923. Photograph by
Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE Lh 15
_ ee
The embryology class,
1894. Left to right:
Henrietta L. Graves, Ellen
Appleton Stone, Gilbert L.
Houser, Wesley R. Coe,
Julia Haynes; second
row: Frances Crane (later
Mrs. Frank R. Lillie),
Charles S. Bacon,
instructors Frank R. Lillie
and Oliver S. Strong;
Cresswell Shearer behind
Lillie and Strong.
Photograph by Baldwin
Coolidge, MBL Archives.
able odd corners and closets. Douglas did not consider the prices unfair,
but he regretted the crowdedness. Because the families took in so many
roomers, Douglas felt that ‘association with them is not an unalloyed joy,
and the student usually prefers to limit his acquaintance to the members of
the laboratory mess.” As one of the popular autograph books of the day
suggested, ‘‘the Woods Hole landlord prefers his guests not to use his porch
to entertain their callers’ — another reason to stick close to the laboratory as
the number of marriages among students and instructors at the MBL testifies
to the interest in ‘“‘calling.”
A later story illustrates the sorts of concerns that the Woods Hole
community long held about those scientists. When one biologist announced
to his landlord that he intended to marry and return with his wife to live in
the same home, the man asked what the new wife’s name would be. When
informed that she would take her husband’s name, the landlord was
reassured. “Oh,” he said, ‘thank goodness that there are some people going
to be here not living in sin.”
Another feature of Woods Hole that has impressed visitors increasingly
in the twentieth century is the lush greenery and flowers. Because the
Cape’s winters are moderated by the water, the area does not suffer much.
16 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Old Main as it looked in
1892, set amidst the
moraine which forms this
part of Cape Cod.
MBL Archives.
The thick woods, protected by a series of agreements against wanton
development in Woods Hole, provide a lovely place to take an evening's
stroll—or to wish one could when the land is barricaded off as privaTe. Yet
as Henry David Thoreau had pointed out with regret in his book Cape Cod,
by the mid-nineteenth century the Cape had few forests any more. The
sheep had eaten what people had not burned or cut (and the gypsy moths
came along a few years later to carry out the last stages of deforestation).
Thanks to the Boston merchant Joseph Fay, who sought to attract other
summer residents to the area, the forests returned to Woods Hole. Fay
planted an impressive twenty thousand mixed pine, larch, spruce, and birch
seedlings to bring back the trees. Within fifty years, the forest around Woods
Hole had reached a second growth or oak stage, and in the twentieth century
the mature forests have returned, even though the population wishing to use
and enjoy them has also expanded.
Today, as from the beginning, the MBL researcher typically first arrives
in Woods Hole along with the ferry visitors in the summer. The streets are
filled with “ice cream people,’ dressed in shorts or bathing suits and
wandering casually about the streets slurping drippy cones; and “lobster
people,” whose bright red skin shows that they have spent a little too long in
the sun on Martha’s Vineyard and who want one last lobster dinner before
heading home; and children, impatient to board the ferry because there
seems to be little for visitors to do in Woods Hole; and dogs, black dogs.
No helpful signs indicate which way to turn. If one has arrived by bus,
the best bet is to walk away from all the people gathered around the ferry
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE Li 17
dock. If arriving by car, one often waits for the upraised drawbridge (which
replaced the old arched bridge around 1910) to go back down and thereby
complete the main street over the Eel Pond. The new arrival then moves
cautiously down the street toward what must be the MBL. Of course,
sometimes it is not the MBL because the newcomer first passes the buildings
of that other major Woods Hole research center, WHOI (the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution). Finally, the researcher finds MBL Street and
feels secure in the knowledge that this, at last, is the right way. But then, if
driving, where does one park? For, since the automobile first arrived in
Woods Hole, success has filled the parking lots with cars offering an ever
more impressive range of license plates. Somehow, with careful planning,
remote parking lots and shuttle buses, and “ethical parking” (don’t take
even a foot more than you need), they all fit in.
After a student or researcher arrives today, finds a place to stay, and
has had time to walk about and explore the landscape a bit, the question
asked back home may resurface. Why do biology by the seashore? Why
come to a marine laboratory anyway? Why Woods Hole and why the MBL?
Some have expressed scepticism about the excuses for going to the sea. The
British zoologist E. Ray Lankester, for example, found that ‘spasmodic
descent upon the seashore” particularly suspect and too like a mere
summer vacation. Today a few admit that they do not really need to be in
Woods Hole to do their work. Some marine organisms can be flown around
the country, as witnessed by the number of live lobsters leaving Boston’s
Logan Airport. But why not work at the seashore? The relative simplicity and
diversity of marine organisms makes them particularly useful for under-
standing life processes. Most researchers really do need to be beside the
Windswept and bare,
Penzance as it looked in
1909. Gideon S. Dodds
Collection, MBL Archives.
18 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
a
idl
a
a
ra
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE 7% 19
<q The drawbridge into Eel
Pond, with the MBL
vessel Dolphin coming
through. MBL Archives.
seashore to get the fresh materials in sufficient quantities. The community
sense of life at the MBL stimulates the participants. The relaxed atmosphere,
the sense of open conversation, and exchange of ideas appeal. Their children
love it. Above all, the MBL is a unique center for intense biological research
in a community of leading researchers. They all return.
The Origin of the Marine Biological Laboratory
Why was Woods Hole the chosen location for the MBL? Actually, someone
who arrived before 1896 would have had to ask ‘why Woods Holl?” — its
official name until that time. Considerable debate about the name — whether
named by Norsemen or referring to a hill or someone's family name—
circled the small town. Then in 1896 the United States Post Office decided
that it would be Woods Hole, much to Whitman's annoyance as he had
named several local species “‘hollensis.”
Woods Hole was chosen for the MBL location essentially because of
Spencer Fullerton Baird and Alpheus Hyatt, both immortalized by streets
named after them in Woods Hole today. Baird served as first (and unpaid)
commissioner of the U.S. Fish Commission, as well as secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution. He was the sort of fellow who would walk twenty or
thirty miles while a young professor at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College just
to get a book. When Baird saw Woods Hole in his search for a permanent site
for the Fish Commission, he recognized its strengths. As lifelong MBL
embryologist Edwin Grant Conklin later put it, Woods Hole had wonderful
“natural advantages,” namely the “numerous harbors and lagoons, with
muddy, sandy, or rocky bottoms, while the coast is so broken by bays,
promontories, straits and islands as to afford the most varied habitats.” In
addition, the tidal currents churn up the food and oxygen supplies in the
water and produce bountiful collections of organisms from the nearby Gulf
Stream as well as the northern currents. The freshwater ponds provide
alternative supplies for materials, Conklin noted. Enthusing further, he
suggested that you “add to these things the fact that Woods Hole is readily
accessible by rail or boat, that the climate in summer is delightful, the
bathing excellent, the mainland and islands charming, the sound with its
continual procession of ships always varied and interesting, and you have in
Woods Hole not only an ideal place for a laboratory, but also an ideal place
for summer residence.” Given that Baird had spent some time exploring up
and down the coast and that he shared Conklin’s enthusiasm for this small
town (with its seventy-five buildings in 1871), it should not surprise us that he
chose Woods Hole for the Fish Commission operation.
Full of energy and ideas, Baird wanted to build a major research center
in Woods Hole. He had local friends who encouraged the enterprise and
helped to secure the land, including a plot right across the street from the
20 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
hi wey
they
GLa
Old Fisheries Building with Crane and Candle buildings behind, 1923.
Norman W. Edmund Collection, MBL Archives.
Fish Commission building intended for a future research laboratory. As it
became clear that the Fish Commission could not do everything by itself,
Baird encouraged others to join him with a teaching laboratory in Woods Hole.
Baird’s friend and Harvard graduate Alpheus Hyatt ran a teacher's
school of natural history up the coast in Annisquam. Hired by the Boston
Society of Natural History and supported by the Woman’s Education Asso-
ciation of Boston, the energetic Hyatt and his assistant and instructor
Balfour H. van Vleck had conducted a summer school each year beginning
in 1879. At first they met at Hyatt’s house, but after two years of that they
acquired another site. Sometimes the students proved less than inspiring.
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE nN 21
Once Mrs. Hyatt wrote to her husband, who was away at sea with a group
of students, that the students left in Annisquam, particularly the women,
were dreadful and that both she and van Vleck almost despaired of teaching
them anything. But a few prospective professional naturalists also happened
into the course, including Thomas Hunt Morgan (in 1886) who later became
a major figure at the MBL and the MBL's first Nobel Prize winner.
Hyatt kept the school going, despite discouragements, until the Wo-
man’s Education Association decided it was such a success that they should
no longer need to fund it. They had always insisted that they would try the
school as an experiment, and if it succeeded it should become independent.
That time had come. Hyatt was evidently ready for different arrangements.
He loved exploring and traveling and was a fine naturalist in the style of the
day, but perhaps he had had his share of discouragingly elementary students
by then. Besides, the waters of Annisquam were becoming seriously pol-
luted. Baird invited Hyatt down to visit, as he had before, and laid the
prospects before him to locate a laboratory and school in Woods Hole. The
Left: Spencer Fullerton Baird, first commissioner of the U.S. Fisheries, 1871-1887, and
founder of the Woods Hole Fisheries. Paul Galtsoff Collection of the Fisheries, MBL
Archives. Right: Alpheus Hyatt, first president of the MBL Board of Trustees. MBL Archives.
22 &
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Ley.
—— —
fF = -1
' Y
g wr yn) Se
rer F rrr YL 6 4
LW ius =p, WIA
le E ZZ
SS
S
mw
N
\
’
f
“a
.
~S
N\
Sketch of the laboratory
at Annisquam, made in
1884 by an unknown
artist. Windpower
provided the laboratory
with its water for aquaria.
MBL Archives.
land next to the Fish Commission remained available. Baird promised that
the Fish Commission would help with such potentially troublesome neces-
sities as supplying organisms and running sea water. The Woman's Edu-
cation Association agreed to donate whatever equipment and materials
Hyatt had accumulated for the school. Because Hyatt had already invested
considerable energy and money of his own in the Annisquam venture, the
new prospects for reinforcements in the form of personnel and funds must
have appeared very attractive indeed.
The enterprise took shape, with the expressed purpose of raising “such
a sum of money as will secure for teachers of Biology and the general student
ample opportunities for the practical study of marine forms. It is hoped that
a sufficient amount may be raised to offer additional facilities for original
investigation.” The group of supporters and future trustees set out to select
a site and to raise money for a new biological laboratory on Cape Cod. Woods
Hole may have appealed to them for financial as well as environmental
reasons since land here was cheap at this time.
In 1887 and 1888, as the planning took place, the town boasted its very
own guano factory, an ingenious business that turned local waste products
into valuable fertilizers and provided jobs for the townspeople. (The guano
came first from local ships returning from the Pacific islands, then from
nearby islands.) Begun in 1863, the Pacific Guano Company saved the town
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE Li 23
from the post-Civil War economic depression suffered elsewhere through-
out the United States over the next few years. As one man noted, “the
concept, and the product, reeked of ingenuity.” That was the problem.
Producing fertilizer was a great idea, and using otherwise worthless bird
droppings made sense, but it smelled awful. At its height, around 1879, the
factory employed 150 to 200 workers and processed 40,000 tons of fertilizer.
In 1887, it still served as a strong aromatic deterrent to tourist development,
but its end was near. Cheaper fertilizer elsewhere doomed the plant, so that
it closed in 1888, causing a local depression. 1887 and 1888 were good times
for the wealthy to move into Woods Hole, as the smell was leaving and
before the land increased in price and when the economic conditions would
have provided cheap labor for household help.
The group from Boston liked Woods Hole. They decided officially to
form the Marine Biological Laboratory, with Hyatt as first president of the
board of trustees, and to move to Woods Hole. With $10,000 raised over the
winter months, they incorporated on March 20, 1888.
They really did not have enough money to hire a director and a teacher.
First, the trustees sounded out Williams College biologist Samuel Clarke. He
responded to the effect that they must be crazy. ‘‘Let us consider some of
the points:” he wrote, ‘the offer is, for me to pay my expenses to Wood's Hole,
to continue paying my expenses through the summer and my return ex-
penses home; also to take all the burden of organizing the Laboratory,
Guano factory is to the left in back. The legend on the back of this picture reads: ‘This
point of land, sometimes called Refuge Point, was given to the U.S. Fish Commission by
Joseph Story Fay.’’ MBL Archives.
24
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
adjusting it to the conditions there and in Boston; the receiving of and
answering of applications, the reception and settling of those admitted; the
labor of giving lectures, arranging courses and providing material; and the
establishment and preservation of a cordial feeling between the U. S. Fish
Company and that of the Laboratory—as well as between all those in the
Laboratory.” He declined.
The trustees then decided to offer the directorship to William Keith
Brooks, who was probably the most well-placed biologist in America at the
time, with his professorship in zoology at the research-oriented Johns
Hopkins University. He had attended Agassiz’s Anderson School and had
then organized his own Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory for his students
at Hopkins. However, one member thought that Brooks might possibly
accept the position for no salary and bring the support of Johns Hopkins as
well. Optimistically, they offered Brooks the job. Then they waited; and
waited throughout the spring and into the summer months. The time came
closer to announce and then begin the first summer session in 1888. Finally,
Brooks declined. He saw no reason, he explained, to have another labora-
tory in Woods Hole. The Fish Commission was there. That was good enough
for his few professional students. And he really did not see the point of having
a teachers’ school.
Besides, it was clear from his actions at Hopkins that this shy and
retiring man did not want to teach biology to women. And women there
would be. That was understood from the beginning. In fact, the original
board of trustees included women from Boston. Natural history was re-
garded as a “safe” subject for women, and women teachers wanted to have
experience in the laboratory and the field just as much as men did. As long
as the purpose of the MBL was seen as educational and as providing a place
for both students and investigators to work together in a community setting,
women promised to play a significant role.
Today, women have indeed begun to fulfill that promise. Thirty to fifty
percent of students enrolled in courses are women, though a much smaller
percentage participate as course instructors or primary laboratory direc-
tors. In fact, after the early years the proportion of women students remained
well over half until the 1930s, when it dropped off radically, and has
gradually risen only in recent decades, as is generally true elsewhere in the
professions.
So, having to teach women and teachers, and a strong conservative — or
pragmatic — streak kept Brooks from accepting the directorship. The trust-
ees decided to make the next offer to Whitman, the only other American
who had directed a biological laboratory, though admittedly an inland
facility: the Allis Lake Laboratory near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Almost im-
mediately, Whitman accepted —at no salary. And he continued as director
until 1908, at no salary, and sometimes at considerable expense from his
1 | ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE 7 25
own pocket. Whitman had ambitions to build biology in the United States
and to gain a more important professional position than that at the Allis
Lake Laboratory, and he had a vision of what biology should be like and
what a marine laboratory could do. He worked hard and sacrificed much
to put that dream into effect, to create a unique national research place
where students, researchers, and scientific leaders could meet and com-
municate and exchange ideas. He wanted to create a vital organism that
would grow and mature. To him the MBL and Woods Hole offered the
perfect opportunity.
Modern visitors to Woods Hole often do not appreciate the reasons
behind the choices. Indeed most never have any sense of the very real
people and ideas behind those street sign names in town: Spencer Baird,
Hyatt, Whitman, Conklin, Clapp, Lillie and, yes, even Brooks. Tourists roll
through town all summer without ever realizing why all those people are
going to the Friday evening lectures and without understanding the striking
number of important contributions to biological science that have begun in
this spot.
Woods Hole as it looked in 1886, before the MBL began.
Photograph by Franklin Gifford. MBL Archives.
26 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
NOTES
One biography of Agassiz is by Edward Lurie, Louis
Agassiz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960). Another is by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, editor,
Louis Agassiz, Life and Correspondence, 2 vols.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886); pp. 765-776 dis-
cuss the Anderson school and the drain that it
caused on Agassiz’s life.
A series of pieces in the Tribune Popular Science in
1874 details the school’s coming into being, as do
articles in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
Nature, Science, and other journals of the day.
The centennial program for Agassiz’s school, Au-
gust 13-17, 1973, also included important discus-
sion of the school’s history. See also articles by
Ralph Dexter, especially ‘From Penikese to the
Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole—
The Role of Agassiz’s Students,’ Essex Institute
Historical Collections (April 1974) 110: 151-161.
The records of the Boston Society of Natural History
record the progress of the Annisquam school — its
success in attracting students, costs, teachers,
problems, and such.
Related discussion of the role of nature study and the
place of women in natural history appears there
and in most popular science publications of the
1860s and 1870s. A more sustained and scholarly
treatment of women scientists is Margaret W.
Rossiter’s Women Scientists in America (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1982); see especially pp.
86-99 on the MBL.
For more on Whitman, see Edward S. Morse’s Memoir,
National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Mem-
oirs (1912): 269-288, and an article by Frank R.
Lillie in the Journal of Morphology (1911) 22:
xv—lxxvi.
Lillie’s unpublished autobiography, dated 1926 (?), is in
the Lillie materials at the MBL.
Isabel Morgan Mountain has written an unpublished
history of her house, on the site of the old Morgan
barn. This discusses the fire and Morgan's exper-
iments. She has also generously provided other
valuable information and insights during an in-
terview in summer 1987.
Cornelia Clapp on the early years: ‘Some Recollections
of the First Summer at Woods Hole,” Collecting
Net (July 7, 1927): 3, 10.
Beamon Douglas, ‘‘My Summer in Wood's Hole,’’ New
York Medical Journal (1902) 76: 265-269.
Joseph Fay’s stories about the possible arrival of Norse-
men on the Cape appeared in the Collecting Net
and in “Track of the Norsemen,” 1873 (?). Also
recent historical publications about Woods Hole
consider such historical stories.
E. Ray Lankester on marine laboratories, “An American
Sea-Side Laboratory,” Nature (March 25, 1880):
497-499.
E. G. Conklin on the advantages of Woods Hole, “The
Marine Biological Laboratory,’ Science (1900) 12:
233-244, quotation p. 235.
Baird’s interests at Dickinson College are recorded in
the excellent archival collections there. On Baird
and the Fish Commission, see Paul Galtsoff's The
Story of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries Bio-
logical Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
(Washington, DC: Department of the Interior Cir-
cular, 1962).
On Woods Hole see Harris W. Clark, “A History of
Woods Hole and Adjacent Waters,’ March 1975,
MBL Archives.
Concerning relationships of the MBL to earlier Amer-
ican efforts, see Dexter (reference chapter 1, #6)
and articles in the special issue of Biological Bul-
letin (June 1985) 168 Suppl., especially Jane
Maienschein, “Agassiz, Hyatt, Whitman, and the
Birth of the Marine Biological Laboratory,’ pp.
26-34.
The letter describing the purpose of the prospective
MBL was written by the “Committee on Location”
(B. H. van Vleck, W. G. Farlow, and S. F. Clarke),
April 15, 1887.
Samuel F. Clarke discusses the directorship in a letter
to William Sedgwick, December 18, 1887, and in
the MBL trustees’ minutes from 1888. Discussion
of Brooks's hesitations appears in letters in the
Johns Hopkins University and the Museum of
Comparative Zoology Archives.
The only summary history of the MBL is Frank R.
Lillie’s The Woods Hole Marine Biological Labora-
tory (Chicago: University Press, 1944); reprinted in
Biological Bulletin (1988) 174.
iving Here
®
L
Day's work over: part of the
fishing fleet tied up at Sam
Cahoon's dock. MBL Archives.
2 | LIVING HERE
Ges THAT PEOPLE do come to the MBL to stay for a part or all of a summer,
what is life in Woods Hole like for them? We could say different things for
different people, of course. Some people have had lovely formal homes,
complete with servants, while others have been happier living in rustic
camp fashion. Some seek privacy away from the lab, others seek continual
involvement. Some live outdoors as much as possible, others inside. The
wealth of detailed descriptions of Woods Hole life—housing, eating, work-
ing, dealing with weather problems, and such — illustrates the richness of
summer living in this active small community.
Now new arrivals no longer have to take their chances scrambling about
town for housing when they arrive; there is no hope of such belated success.
Instead, they must plan ahead and make their reservations early, often by
February if they plan to stay all summer or to bring the family. And they need
plenty of money if they intend to rent a cottage in town rather than to secure
housing through the MBL itself. Rents for summer cottages have sky-
rocketed on the Cape in the past decades, especially as new building codes
for Woods Hole have prevented much of the sort of wanton and irresponsible
growth that has occurred elsewhere along the seashore.
If you were not too fussy, ten or twenty dollars covered a full week's
costs nearly up to World War II. In the early 1940s, that time of the three-
cent stamp, summer houses sold for about $3,000 to $5,000, while a student
could get a week's board at the MBL mess hall for seven dollars and a cot in
the simple but adequate Drew House for two dollars per week. No longer do
these prices apply! Nor do many people feel comfortable with the sort of
musical beds approach that Philip Armstrong, anatomist/embryologist
and later MBL director, recalled of his early years. When he was locked out
of his room in town, he headed for the men’s dormitory and plopped down
on any empty bed to sleep. When the occupant showed up, he simply
30 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
moved on to another. Others slept outside, on the roofs. People have since
then acquired a taste for privacy and also for baths and showers, which
were all rare in those early days at the MBL when even running water
remained a treat. :
Since those early years, the MBL has made an effort to provide housing
for its community, with the trustees perpetually concerned about how to
raise funds to provide sufficient dormitory space for students. At first stu-
dents and investigators alike boarded out in town. Then the development of
what had once been the small island of Penzance Point, after the demise of
the guano works, provided opportunities for those who could afford the
property in the growing resort community. Various other arrangements have
arisen to provide housing as well. One woman recalled when the men
students roomed on the lower floors of one house, and the women on the top
where they could dry their hair and hang up laundry in the sunny cupola
atop the building.
For a while in the early 1900s students found themselves rooming in the
old stone Candle House. The ‘Hotel Majestic” they called the structure,
though it smelled a bit odd and clothes had to be hung from rafters for lack
of closets. The building is beautiful now that it has been renovated and
turned into a modern and even air-conditioned administration building. In
the bunkhouse days that beauty was harder to see. Built in 1836 at the height
“Hotel Majestic,’ summer
quarters for many students
in the early days.
MBL Archives.
2 | LIVING HERE
At the fish trap,
1909-1910. Torpedo-
shaped car in the
foreground was used for
bringing back the squid.
It was towed behind the
collecting boat and
served to keep the squid
alive. Gideon S. Dodds
Collection, MBL Archives.
of Woods Hole’s whaling activity, the building had housed the quantities of
whale oil brought in to make spermaceti candles, before the discovery of oil
in western Pennsylvania and before gas lamps became popular in the 1850s
to replace whale oil as a source of lighting. The smell of whale oil lingered
into the bunkhouse days, and at times was tinged with the odor of the
formalin from the supply department downstairs in the basement.
Whaling and Fishing
Whaling and fishing had been prominent parts of Woods Hole life before
science and tourism came to dominate. Though the town never offered as
major an operation as Nantucket, Woods Hole did send out its whaling
vessels to collect oil in the early and mid-nineteenth century. After the MBL
began, fishing played an important part of Woods Hole life, as it did along
much of the New England coast. Old-timers and not-so-old-timers recall
fisherman friends, often extremely well-educated and fascinating people,
coming over for an evening chat after a good day and bringing along a
collection of quahogs, scallops, fish, and even a few odds and ends that they
thought the biologists might like — either to eat or to study.
New Yorker George Scott recalled one time when friends took him
along on a trip to do some bottom fishing. As Scott reported, ‘That trip gave
32
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
us everything: Hove to for a day in rough weather, and fishing ruined for
several hours by aggressive sharks tearing a hole in the bag of the net in the
trawl as it was brought in, letting out the fish which were devoured
voraciously.”’
Whaling provided good stories also. In 1899, Ulric Dahlgren (a Prince-
ton University histologist apparently of Viking descent) organized a sword-
fishing party. The vessel Vigilant had a traditional ‘pulpit’ at the bow for
watching the fish, and the remaining necessary equipment. Dahlgren made
up a party including embryologist Edwin G. Conklin, cytologists Edmund B.
Wilson and Thomas H. Montgomery, Japanese artist K. Hyashi, and a few
others. Expecting a two-day trip, they loaded food and water and set off for
the open ocean in the light wind. As the wind picked up, they sailed around
Gay Head and out to sea, accompanied by a rosy sunset. After a night
without much sleep, the group arose for a breakfast of bacon, eggs,
hardtack, and coffee, then sailed on. Soon came the excitement they had
hoped for. Spotting some sort of cetacean in the distance, they moved
toward it. When they got close enough, Dahlgren speared the creature
with a dart and iron but not the harpoon. It turned out to be a whale. The
whale was not happy and thus dived into deeper water, returning in a few
moments.
Dahlgren decided then that he would try to wear out the whale, and he
put out a dory. Two men set off in it, with two sets of oars and a 300-foot
piece of rope. They caught up with the barrel attached to the dart and iron
and grabbed hold. Securing the rope to their harpoon rope, they were thus
tied to the whale. The whale headed at full speed for open ocean, with the
dory and two biologists attached. Normally calm and collected, Wilson stood
on board shouting “I'd give a hundred dollars to be in that boat.” But then
the Vigilant fell behind and lost sight of the disappearing dory. While help-
lessly waiting for the men and dory to return, those remaining set about to
catch the swordfish they had intended to capture, but instead harpooned
a giant marine sunfish, Orthagoriscus mola. With some difficulty they
wrestled that fish on board, which distracted them for a while. They then
finally recalled their missing friends, who had disappeared more than
two hours before.
The men resolved to set out in the second dory in search of the first,
because the Vigilant was completely becalmed by then. But they had no oars
left. The first dory had left with both sets. They tried boards, which did not
work. Concerned about the two men with no food or water out in the hot
sun, they tried frying pans as oars, but the handles were too short. They then
found two brooms and set out, “sweeping the Atlantic.’ Fortunately, the
other men returned to sight and the sweepers could give up their absurd
effort. The whale had moved around so much with his diving and resur-
facing that the rope had frayed and broken. Dahlgren estimated that they
2 | LIVING HERE nN 33
had been towed about ten or fifteen miles before that though. As Conklin
reported, their evidence suggested that the whale was a finback, and prob-
ably even Dahlgren would have failed to wear him out.
This “fishing expedition of a lifetime” all ended by 11:00 a.m., much to
everyone's astonishment, as they observed that people back in Woods Hole
would just be going to church. As a student at Hopkins, then a professor at
University of Pennsylvania and later head of biology at Princeton, Conklin
loved telling stories: especially this one, where he stalked up and down the
beach wielding a harpoon. He also observed that the group never quite
wanted to embark on such an adventure again, even though the sunfish
provided a great wealth of parasites for a number of research projects back
in the lab. They all felt that a second excursion would be anticlimatic.
Commercial Resources
The more normal fishing enterprises also provided fresh fish in the shops
that used to line Water Street. Now, as in most of America, MBL folk
generally hop in their cars to drive to the nearest town, Falmouth, for the
bulk of their groceries, buying only smaller items in the small Woods Hole
store. But within the recent memory of many, Woods Hole housed a meat
market and several groceries, which provided a variety of fresh food. Sam
Cahoon’s fish business provided dockside seafood for the village, ‘‘a place of
distinctive and pleasant smell, which was a blend of fish and smoke and
34 A
Behind Sam Cahoon's
fish market on the dock,
where much of the
processing took place,
circa 1930. Photographs
by Alfred F. Huettner,
MBL Archives.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
steam,” the latter two from the train yard next door. Once a popular actress
was in Woods Hole for a visit. She rowed over to the town from Penzance
Point, the fashionable lower tip of Cape Cod, to get some fish; but she had
forgotten her money. She announced that she was the actress Katharine
Cornell, expecting her familiar name to be sufficient. The generous and
honest Sam Cahoon responded that, in fact, he had never heard of her but
that did not matter to him. “Give the lady her fish,” he said.
In addition to fish markets, the town had its drug store, dry goods shop,
and even its own hardware store, the latter run by Edward Swift. The
popular Mr. Swift recalled when the whaling ships were built in Woods
Hole, as well as when the first train had arrived and when the last train left.
In addition, a few informal businesses kept things happening at times.
Rumrunners during Prohibition added excitement, especially when they got
news of a coming raid and had to toss the wooden crates overboard for later
retrieval. Town boys tried to get there first. Woods Hole was a busy town, with
an active commercial life and a scientific population growing side by side.
World War I brought changes in Woods Hole. The Great War ended with
a heroic burning of the Kaiser at a grand bonfire, very inspiring to the
local youth. During the war, Woods Hole had a few exotic exiles, including
one Russian family who built their own house by hand, and the future
president of Czechoslovakia. Following the war, people began to build more
2 | LIVING HERE nN 35
houses, sometimes ordered prefab from Sears and Roebuck. Even this did
not provide for the influx, however, so that during the 1930s the younger
researchers found it difficult to find a place in Woods Hole and increasingly
looked elsewhere, as others have done more recently for the same reasons.
The second world war brought its own post-war building expansion
and relative financial security so that more people could afford to buy
summer housing, or even permanent housing. Nobel laureate Albert Szent-
Gyorgyi, for example, arrived during this time (in 1947). He had visited the
lab in 1929 but would not have recalled it in particular, he said, because he
had visited so many marine laboratories and had not spent long in Woods
Hole. Except that his hosts then had prepared a clambake, complete with
lobsters, for the distinguished European visitors who made their way down
the coast from the International Congress of Zoology in Boston. When
Albert Szent-Gyérgyi on the beach at
Penzance. MBL Archives.
36
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Szent-Gyorgyi suddenly had to leave Hungary in 1947, ten years after having
received the Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C, he recalled the lobsters
and the lab. Here was a laboratory where he could rent research space and
not have to owe anybody anything. He moved to Woods Hole for good and
made a great impact on the MBL. As recent director Paul Gross put it,
“During the height of his career, when I was a student here, he was for
many of us the paradigm of the scientist as the spearhead of culture.” He
was, in short, “the very model of a man.”
Szent-Gyorgyi rented a house for a year, then decided to buy. The real
estate agent was not much more optimistic than a realtor might be today,
insisting that there really was nothing to look at. Szent-GyOrgyi persisted, so
the agent drove the car around to point out the remote possibilities. When
he saw a boarded-up house on Penzance Point that he simply had to have,
the agent insisted that it was too big. In addition, Szent-Gyorgyi’s money was
all tied up in Hungary. He bought the house anyway, complete with furni-
ture, lovely china for twelve, glassware, and silverware, all from the very
gracious and generous former owners. Many MBL houses have been ac-
quired in similarly unorthodox manners, though seldom so fully equipped
and with so little immediate money down.
Yet that increased desire among scientists to own houses also put
pressures on the existing housing, so that there were far fewer places to
rent in town. The MBL was going to have to provide for its visitors. Today
those visitors may find themselves in any of an increasing number of
rooming houses owned by the MBL, and embryonic plans for a second
modern dormitory building are taking shape. Some of today’s housing is in
noisy old wooden buildings with rooms rambling everywhere, so typical of
remodeled Cape Cod houses. Others are brick buildings with rooms ar-
ranged along the long hallway in 1920s fashion, when the brick apartment
building was constructed in 1926 to meet the perennial housing shortage.
Inevitably, these will probably make way for larger and more modern
facilities that will use the space more efficiently or provide more laboratory
space as well.
Some visitors, including those who arrive for shorter times to use the
library or to work briefly in someone else’s laboratory, find themselves
assigned to the more modern Swope Center, built after the post-World War
II “marriage boom.” Swope features private bathrooms and a hotellike
atmosphere, quite a luxury compared to the old wooden dormitory days.
Swope also has a built-in wake-up calling system, despite its absence of
telephones. The bell tower next to the Eel Pond and associated with St.
Joseph's Church rings the traditional calls at 7 A.M., noon, and 6 p.M., thanks
to Frank Lillie’s wife, Frances Crane Lillie. In 1929 she presented the tower,
with its small chapel and garden areas, to Woods Hole, calling for the
regular ringing of its two bells, Mendel and Pasteur, The Mendel bell—
2 | LIVING HERE
The bell tower. MBL Archives. Richard Huettner,
son of the scientist-photographer, standing in the
doorway of the bell tower, 1930. Photograph by
Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
38
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
representing the patient biologist who carefully counted his sweet peas in the
monastery gardens and who saw the basic foundations of genetics forty
years too soon—rings first, calling “I will teach you of life,—and of life
eternal.” Pasteur, French chemist, microbiologist, and vanquisher of mate-
rialist ideas about spontaneous generation of life, responds, ‘“Thanks be to
God.” The 7 a.m. call gets everyone to the fixed-schedule breakfast on time
and back to work for another busy day.
In the increasingly expensive and tourist-influenced Woods Hole
Village, providing housing is essential for the MBL to attract researchers and
students. To attract instructors for the courses and advanced researchers
with children in a time of relative prosperity, where people are not used to
the crowded quarters and primitive conditions that most visitors endured in
the early years, the lab found it had to provide real housing instead of just
rooms. Thus, over the years, houses have been added on the old Fay
property or in Devil’s Lane.
In 1916 the Fay family, always friends of the laboratory, sold twenty-one
acres of wooded, hilly land to the MBL at a very favorable price. Called the
“Gansett property,” this land was laid out in lots with the understanding that
buyers must give the MBL first option on resale and that the trees must be
preserved. The Devil’s Lane property, acquired in 1925, had similar condi-
tions, though it originally included land that some thought might best be
used in the future to develop chemical and physical laboratories to operate
alongside the biological lab. The MBL sold parts of the Devil's Lane and
neighboring properties acquired later and has built some housing there
itself for rental purposes. As recently as 1986 twenty new houses joined the
earlier cottages at Devil’s Lane. Distinctly designed to remain inconspicuous
Some of the new houses
built for summer
investigators, 1986.
MBL Archives.
2 | LIVING HERE Li 39
The Children’s School of Science on
MBL dock, 1953. Photograph by
Alicia Hills. MBL Archives.
and essentially anonymous, they remain simple but adequate and have taken
considerable pressure off the already crowded facilities.
In both the Gansett and Devil’s Lane areas, as in much of the rest of
Woods Hole, the designers named streets after the early scientists. In 1986,
MBL biochemist Seymour Cohen and Ruth Gainer piloted a project, carried
out by a group at the Children’s School of Science, of providing a historical
guide to the people behind the street names in Woods Hole.
The Science School
The Children’s School of Science, known informally as the Science School,
is a unique Woods Hole institution. Housed in what was until very recently
the Woods Hole public school building, this summer school attracts chil-
40
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
dren back year after year. Special courses for different ages, a range of field
trips, and an informal atmosphere make kids want to go to school during
summer vacation.
The Science School began in 1913 with the efforts of Mrs. Wilson, Mrs.
Morgan, Mrs. Lillie, Mrs. Warbasse, Mrs. Conklin, Mrs. Calkins, Mrs.
Crampton, and others—a virtual who's who of MBL wives. They wanted
to provide summer supervision and activity, including singing and dancing,
but also an introduction to science, with nature study and even research. The
women joined in the organization and developed planning committees until
they hired a proper teacher for the program which opened for business in
1914. Every year thereafter the school has had a full schedule, with the
exception of 1916, when a polio epidemic kept it closed. The group decided
not to open at all that year, though they paid the teacher anyway. A few
people felt that they should close during World War II, but the leaders
decided that however few children there were, then more than ever they
needed some stability and activity. An impressive number of Children’s
School alumni have gone on to such careers as scientific research, teaching,
or medicine, happily encouraged by the school.
The summer school accumulated quite a nice library as well, for which
the regular winter administrators hesitated to take responsibility. So each
year, most of the summer school books were taken off to the Woods Hole
community library, once called the Social Library. Just a few remained
behind for the public school teachers to use during the year. The school had
eight grades for a while and then six. As Woods Hole children grew up, they
took the train (and later the bus) to the Falmouth school each day. Now all
the students commute to Falmouth for their full school careers.
Food
Returning to fundamental matters: the families, especially summer visitors,
must consider such obvious questions as where to eat. Those with cottages
can cook at home. If, that is, they have a car, are willing to walk or take a bus
to Falmouth, or like the limited diet allowed by the indispensable Food Buoy
on Woods Hole’s main street. They can enjoy the restaurant offerings in
town, or purchase a meal ticket or a single meal at Swope.
Not so many years ago, the majority of the community still ate at least
lunch in the dining hall. Even many people with houses often ate “in.” The
community was together then, and the students mixed comfortably with
instructors and the occasional Nobel laureate. Not so much any more.
Students eat there, along with those researchers who are staying only a
short time or who are single or who are staying in the dorms without
cooking facilities—or those rare, delightful few who want to carry on the
community experience of older times when everyone met over meals. The
2 | LIVING HERE WN a1
that the first permanent building, Crane, was dedicated. Ida H. Hyde Collection, MBL Archives.
The Mess in 1953. The face had changed, but the Mess was still used much as
ri oa
aati. f
;
F TITS AR ry ei
: Tiki
f)
. ae
Inside the Mess, 1953;
Mr. Martin checking
tables. Photograph by
Alicia Hills, MBL Archives.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
t
existence of so many alternatives elsewhere draws busy people away from
what used to be a life center of the MBL.
During the time of Old Main, the original set of attached, simple gray
wooden buildings built one at a time in 1888, 1890, and 1892, most people
at the MBL ate at the Mess. One young wife recalled that other women were
astonished that she chose to cook at home rather than to join the others at
the convenient Mess. She responded that her husband had married, in part,
precisely to get such home-cooked meals. He was not fond of the insti-
tutional food. Others recalled the food as very good in those early days,
especially the inevitable Saturday night baked bean dinner. Originally
housed along with several rooms for investigators in what had been the Fays’
gardener’s cottage at Little Harbor, the Mess soon moved nearer to the main
building. Rebuilding the Mess became a priority when it was destroyed
by fire in 1920.
The growth of the population demanded the flexible approach of the
Mess, with everyone eating together, family style. Sometimes notations on
napkins attested to the exchange of scientific ideas there. After meals,
people would continue the conversations begun inside. This was a time for
people to break from the individual research and to enter the community, to
eat in leisure and then to gather on the porch talking, to bring the parts
together into the living MBL whole.
2 | LIVING HERE
Modernized service at
the Mess in 1953. After
Miss Belle’s retirement,
meals were served, no
longer by waiters, but
cafeteria-style.
Photograph by Alicia
Hills, MBL Archives.
Once the Mess building was built, it served as the central meeting place
until replaced by Swope. Only once did the MBL crowd gather somewhere
else to eat for any length of time. During World War I, the Navy took over
some of the MBL's buildings, including the Mess. Woods Hole was a good
site because it already had the government's Fish Commission buildings
and the deep water that Baird had long ago selected to enable the Commis-
sion’s large ships to dock. In addition, the small town at the bottom of the
Cape was relatively isolated and secure. Yet when the Navy moved in for the
winter of 1917-1918, the MBL trustees vowed that they would make all
efforts to keep the place running the next summer. They believed that ‘‘it
is the duty of scientific men not called directly to war service to maintain
their scientific activities.”
In 1943, the Navy returned once again to set up a temporary base in
Woods Hole. They took over the old lecture hall, the old botany building, the
apartment house, and Penzance Garage on the wharf, in addition to the
Mess. MBL arranged for alternative boarding at the Nobska Inn, now the
Woods Hole Inn, which was not really large enough to hold everyone at
once. In addition, the general rationing and shortage of meat and butter
made the fare less satisfactory. Because somewhat less than half the usual
number of researchers and students had come to the MBL for that wartime
season, the effect was less serious that it might have been. Yet Woods Hole
it
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
old-timer Dot Rogers recalls that she had the only car around and had to
make many emergency trips to Falmouth hamburger stands to keep people
happy. Fortunately, the lab managed to sustain the usual assortment of
collecting trips, Friday evening lectures, and library facilities, even while
researchers ate elsewhere and had to forego special seminars from visitors
who could not travel without rationed gasoline.
At an earlier time, the Mess had been rather more formal. Each table
had a host, and the same group sat together through the season. The
tablecloths remained in place through the week. One host devised a plan
whereby anyone who spilled food onto the cloth would have to cover the spot
with an appropriate coin. At the end of the summer, they took the collected
money and had a fine party for all. Later Harvard biologist George Howard
Parker and his companions raised the ante so that the spill had to be covered
by a dollar bill, with the money used to buy jam and other luxuries— even
one season hiring an organ grinder, according to some perhaps fanciful
reports —to supplement the substantial but uninspired mess.
“Miss Belle” (Downing) ran the Mess for many years after 1940, and
insisted on white linen tablecloths and fresh flowers every day, even if she
had to go out and pick daisies herself. She determined where people would
sit. She mixed the senior scientists and the younger researchers and students
all together at a table, including developmental biologist Ernest Everett Just,
who was one of the very few black biologists at the MBL. This caused quite
a shock for one southern student, who recoiled at the expectation that he
would have to wait on a black man at dinner; it just felt wrong. Then when
Just asked him what he wanted to study and invited him to visit his lab, his
hesitation passed and his prejudice dissolved. No one thought of moving
after Miss Belle made her assignments, so people sat with the same group
long enough to get to know them. And they met people from all different
aspects of MBL life.
Students earned enough money to pay their expenses in courses by
waiting on the tables in those days before the disruption of war; eventually
economic necessity turned the operation into a cafeteria. Singing has always
played an important entertainment role at the MBL, and waiters found
themselves immortalized in numerous offerings. Even Alfred Romer, later
director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and Yale
biologist J. P. Trinkaus, an MBL researcher for nearly fifty years, earned
their way at the MBL as waiters. One set of verses to the tune of “John
Brown’s Body” went:
Johnny was a waiter at the Mess of MBL
And the trials of occupation there would be hard to tell
It was a busy life with him when everything went well,
Alas when it did not.
2 | LIVING HERE
cHoRUs: Oh, the joys (trials) of being a waiter
With everybody late or later,
While their appetites grow greater
At the Mess of MBL.
Early every morning when his dreams were at their best,
The alarm would sound beside him and disturb his peaceful rest
And with an awful effort he would manage to get dressed
and eat his breakfast first.
Then he would take his stand beside the table with his tray
And carry in the mackerel for breakfast every day,
And in and out the dining room would swiftly make his way
To bring the people food.
Trinkaus points out that the waiter had considerable power since he could
give the obnoxious people cold coffee or burned toast.
Today, the dining hall in Swope has no morning mackerel, as it once
routinely did, nor tablecloths nor waiters for everyday meals, and no as-
signed tables. No Miss Belle reigns in Swope. Whatever the advantages of the
more freewheeling system today, it is clear that something has been lost
socially. Today people may spend ten minutes, eating silently, or the stu-
dents may eat together at one table and the instructors together at another.
Social mixing at the MBL has become more haphazard as the style has
changed and the community has grown. Even in the winter, when storms
batter the Cape and occasionally close off the bridges and shut off the
population—even then people have lost the habit of comfortably sitting
down and talking with people they do not know.
Weather
In September of 1938 the Mess was closed for the winter season as usual,
but the MBL had not yet completely shut down. A few people remained
working in the laboratory. On the 17th they heard reports that a tropical
storm was headed from the Bahamas toward Florida. That storm then
moved northward on the 20th, toward Cape Hatteras, bringing high winds
and water. The conditions would deflect the storm out to sea from North
Carolina, the weather bureau reported. By midmorning of the 21st, the
weather station in New York realized from observing the rapidly dropping
barometer that a major storm was on the way north rather than out to sea.
But they had no authority to issue official warnings. Only the Washington
office could do that, and their information indicated no cause for concern.
With no preliminary warning of more than a seasonal gale, Woods Hole
did not worry. By 4 p.m. when the electrical power went out in the labora-
46
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The basement of Lillie, flooded during
Hurricane Carol, 1954. MBL Archives.
tories, notifying the scientists and other workers of something unusual, the
water had already begun to rise rapidly. Over the next few hours a storm
wave brought water rushing over the breakwater and into the Eel Pond next
to the MBL's main buildings. As the pond rose to levels no one remembered
having seen before, streets flooded and the supply building filled with four
feet of water.
Maria von Bertalanffy recalled even thirty years later the horrors of that
day. She and her husband, Ludwig, were working in the lab when they
noticed the storm suddenly brewing. They went outside to take pictures of
the dramatic skies and rising waves. Then they noticed that water was
actually rising in the streets and that their rented room on the first floor of
a house on Main Street might very well get wet. They decided to go home to
move things to safety. But as the winds and water rose rapidly, Maria took the
camera back to the lab first, intending to join her husband at home as soon
as she could. She returned to the flooded spot on Main Street and began to
cross the rising waters. As she struggled a voice urged her back, but she
ignored it. Then a powerful hand grabbed her, and the Coast Guard man
ordered her back to the laboratory building. A dozen or more people
huddled together there, each with his or her own worries. Soon someone
came and told them they would have to leave, to go across the street.
Evidently batteries in the basement had gotten wet and were emitting what
were thought to be toxic fumes. The group clung to each other to struggle
2 | LIVING HERE 7 a7
eee
across the street against 100-mile-per-hour winds and waited tensely in the
familiar Mess building well into the night for relief from the storm and word
of relatives and friends. News of drownings and of lost houses and boats
began to come in. Finally, relief arrived when the wind picked up from the
north; water flowed from the Buzzards Bay side through the streets of
Woods Hole and out to sea. Maria’s husband arrived safely, at last. Then it
was time for everyone to assess damages and to compare stories.
Water had rushed into the basement of the brick buildings. Chemicals
of all sorts floated around chaotically in the dark, deepening water. The
carefully gathered animals in the collecting cage next to the dock had
escaped as the high water released them. The reprints in the library base-
ment absorbed water, turning an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 of them into a
worthless, soggy mess. Main Street had had knee-deep water, and the
drawbridge foundations had shifted and cracked with the flood. But the
rushing water from Buzzards Bay pushed back to safety many of the boats
that had nearly been beached on Woods Hole streets.
In total, the MBL suffered only about $20,000 damage, and the Carnegie
Institution, which had befriended the MBL before, quickly came forth with
the money to make repairs and replace supplies. But outside the MBL there
were drownings and great financial loss. Individuals lost their boats or
suffered damage to the contents of their basements. There was also such
great devastation along the train track into Boston that no one around at that
Receding water in Eel Pond after Hurricane Carol had passed, 1954. MBL Archives.
48 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
time would ever forget it. The MBL bricked up windows in the basement to
keep out the flow of water in future storms, and the walls are waterproofed
periodically. Yet water can still rush right through the bricks in high winds.
Pictures hanging on many Woods Hole walls remind people that things have
not always been so tame as they seem on a peaceful summer day.
Looking toward Penzance
Point during 1938
hurricane. F. R. Lillie
papers, MBL Archives.
NOTES
Material from Philip Armstrong, George Scott, and Al-
bert Szent-Gyorgyi comes from taped interviews
at the Woods Hole Historical Collection (here-
after: Historical Collection). George Scott, Histor-
ical Collection interview, recalls the fishing ad-
venture.
Conklin was a marvelous storyteller who retold his
stories many times, so that a number of people
cite them. One published version of Dahlgren’s
whaling expedition appeared in “'M.B.L. Stories,”
American Scientist (1968) 56: 121-129; ‘The Whal-
ing Expedition of 1899,” pp. 121-126.
A number of people told me that Cahoon’s was next to
the train depot. Similarly, many people in per-
sonal communications recall the story about the
popular Sam Cahoon and Katharine Cornell.
Woods Hole during the wars is especially remembered
in the interview with Robert Kahler, Historical
Collection. Newspaper clippings and other notes
of various sorts in the Archives confirm the im-
pressions of what life was like during both wars,
as do MBL trustees’ minutes and annual reports.
Paul Gross, “Report of the Director,” 1986 annual re-
port, Biological Bulletin (1987) 173: 43.
Discussion of the bell tower and of other details about
the building and development of the MBL are
included in the MBL trustees’ minutes and the
annual reports. See also Collecting Net (July 6, 1929).
Most unpublished and published accounts of the MBL
prior to World War II, as well as the various inter-
views, mention the Mess and its importance as a
central place to gather, to see everyone, and to talk
interminably about science. Dot Rogers and Donald
Lahy recalled events related to the Mess during an
interview to clarify details in summer 1987.
Songs come from old MBL songbooks and single items,
largely undated, that people have sent to MBL over
the years.
An interview with Elsie Scott, Historical Collection,
provided information about the Children’s School
of Science, as did numerous items in the Collecting
Net.
Trustees’ reports for the war years record the official
actions.
The Falmouth Enterprise discusses hurricanes. Also, on
the hurricane of 1938, Maria von Bertalanffy,
“Hurricane in Woods Hole: Thirty Years Ago,’’ in
the MBL Archives.
Buildings and Budgets
Aerial view of Woods Hole showing the buildings of the three
scientific organizations: Fisheries, MBL, and WHOI. MBL Archives.
Los WAS on ae . % — an
The Swope Center, which opened in 1971. It houses up to 168
people in its 84 rooms, and the dining room seats 362 at one time.
Photograph by F. P. Bowles, MBL Archives.
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS Le 51
_—— — SSS OE
Fe PERSON ARRIVING at the MBL first encounters Swope, the check-in center for
the entire laboratory as well as a major dormitory and dining hall. Until
1981 check-in took place in the Lillie Building, and if one arrived after 5 p.m.
or on a weekend, he or she had to wait patiently until the watchman
returned from his appointed rounds. It is still easiest to arrive during a
weekday.
Buildings Old and New
The short-term or winter visitor will usually stay in the modern Swope
Center. With the increased housing demand after World War II, the MBL
decided to build a new dormitory. After various disagreements about
location and several changes of plan, MBL friend Gerard Swope, Jr. pur-
chased a piece of land on the Eel Pond. The replacement of the ‘‘Do-Re-Mi”
houses there with the large, concrete Swope building in 1971 made a major
change in the landscape of Woods Hole. As one nostalgic old-timer griped,
the place was getting to be less unique and more like any old ordinary
laboratory.
Students enrolled in courses congregate mainly in the Loeb and Whit-
man buildings next to the original site of Old Main. Landscaped with
outdoor tennis and paddle tennis courts, these buildings provide modern
lecture and laboratory space. The teaching laboratories are large, well-
equipped rooms not unlike the original general laboratories except in detail
and equipment.
There are advantages to the relatively modern design of the newer
buildings. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s the older buildings caused
trouble for the unsuspecting researchers who had begun to embrace the
new and exciting work with radioactive isotopes. The isotope containment
room where researchers kept experimental specimens was on the south
side, which climbed in temperature as the summer afternoon progressed.
The researchers kept their control samples back in their labs, away from
52 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Do-Re-Mi houses on the left, circa 1929. Photograph by Matthew Steiner, MBL Archives.
the isotope room so as not to contaminate them, but many of their
laboratories were on the much cooler north side of the building. People
obtained shockingly unexpected results until someone finally noted that it
was the five or more degrees Fahrenheit of difference in control and
experimental samples, due to the sun, that was producing the unexpected
variations. It took quite a bit of wasted research during that time to teach
some of the enthusiastic isotope physiologists to take better care in con-
trolling environmental factors. The new buildings have solved many of the
most obvious problems while maintaining the characteristic unpretentious
MBL style.
They have also managed to avoid the fire hazards that characterized
the early wooden buildings. MBL worker Robert Kahler recalled a time
when he was a boy and his family was returning from a picnic. They saw
men on a roof, pulling on a hose reel and trying to put out a dramatic fire
in the barn belonging to Columbia University embryologist Thomas Hunt
Morgan, which was located on a lot down Buzzards Bay Street from the
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS 7% 53
Equipment used in 1955 to
measure the electricity
produced by the squid neuron
by means of radioactive tracers
supplied by the Atomic Energy
Commission. Photograph by
Fritz Goro, Life Magazine.
Morgan home. The neighbors ensured that the rented cow escaped, he
recalled, though someone else pointed out that the experimental mice did
not fare so well. A cow seemed more important to the town residents.
Another time, the neighborhood awoke to the smell of smoke and the
flurry of activity as people rushed about. The sky glowed red from the
flames when the Mess burned. Everyone went to work to keep the burning
and flying embers from catching the whole town on fire. Even up on the
golf course, long glowing embers found their way from the intense fire.
54 rN
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The use of radioactive tracers.
In 1955 this was so newsworthy
that even Life magazine took
an interest. Photograph by
Fritz Goro, Life Magazine.
Evidently, oily rags in the Fish Commission’s machine shop had started
burning; then there was nothing anyone could do until the brand new fire
truck arrived. The water pressure was low, and even when the truck came,
they kept it at a distance because it was so new and nobody wanted it to
burn. Fires have become considerably less of a peril in today’s brick and
concrete buildings. Attention has been paid to protecting laboratory space
in particular.
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS Li 55
Instructors in the courses generally receive their own laboratory space
as part of their compensation for teaching. As invertebrate embryologist
Winterton C. Curtis noted when he was asked to travel from the University
of Missouri (not so easy in those days) to teach the invertebrate course in
1908, ‘‘the call of the MBL was always ‘the call of the blood’ for me. Then
too,” he added, “I needed the money.” Not that very much money has ever
been involved. Access to lab space clearly offers an extremely important
incentive. It not only eliminates a major cost, but it also provides the
opportunity for instructors to pursue their own research while teaching a
dedicated group of highly selected students.
At first, the MBL followed Baird’s model and the Naples model of
encouraging subscribers to the summer labs. A university would attain the
status of cooperating institution by paying for a table or a laboratory, then
send one or more researchers to occupy it. This meant the same labs for
the same people year after year, providing reassuring stability. With time,
more institutions such as Oberlin College set up scholarships allowing them
to send a student or investigator each year. Some Catholic orders reserved
space to send a priest or a nun each year to work at the MBL. The MBL
allocated space to those institutions that paid without regard for who could
use the space to best effect. Many of these programs have been discontin-
ued in recent decades for various reasons, including the MBL's desire to
exert greater control over who uses its limited resources. As a result, since
the 1950s, lab space has often been assigned on an economic basis. If you
can pay, you have a lab. If you can pay more, you have a bigger or
better-located lab, perhaps in the Whitman or Loeb Building. How to deal
with the requests, which often surpass available lab resources, has become
a problem for the administration and the Research Space Committee.
Though many of the new students have no idea who Whitman and
Loeb were, it is fitting that these more modern structures carry the names
of men who cared about the educational function of the MBL as well as
about research. Whitman always demanded that the MBL must include a
mix of investigation and instruction, whether in elementary natural history
or more advanced techniques and methods. The auditorium in the Whit-
man Building holds lectures for classes and special weekly seminars on
neurobiology, cell biology, and other topics of wide interest, as well as, more
recently, public lectures in the history of science and discussions of science
writing. Whitman would have approved.
Physiologist Jacques Loeb also would have liked the fact that his
building combines research and course work. Although personally contro-
versial in many ways, as historian Philip Pauly has recently shown, Loeb also
had a well-documented dedication to introducing sympathetic and com-
mitted young investigators to research. As the first instructor in physiology
at the MBL—indeed Whitman enticed him to set up the entire physiology
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Jacques Loeb with his family at their
home in Woods Hole. Conklin
Collection, MBL Archives.
department at the MBL—Loeb had the opportunity to introduce students to
new and exciting research not normally part of zoological or natural history
programs. One Woods Hole native recalled the times that Loeb impressed
the youngsters by heating glass over a bunsen burner and then bending it.
By the mid-1890s, Loeb’s study of the effects of altered seawater salt
concentrations and of artificial parthenogenesis attracted wide attention; by
1900, even receiving consideration in the popular press as well as profes-
sional journals. Students wanted to learn how to ‘control life” as Loeb had
done by artificially stimulating the beginning of the fertilization process with
chemical manipulations. One enthusiastic beginning student went to Loeb
“with more zeal than knowledge” and reported that in the sea urchin
Arbacia he had discovered that the eggs had an interesting ability to repel
other organisms. Loeb explained to him that the eggs have a layer of nearly
invisible jelly around them. He suggested that the young man apply india ink
to dye the jelly and make it visible. The next day, the enthusiast returned with
a marvelous discovery: india ink produces artificial parthenogenesis (or
makes the egg act as if it had been fertilized by sperm when it had not). Loeb
patiently pointed out that the fellow must have diluted the powdery ink in
tap water—which does produce parthenogenesis because it changes the
salt concentration of the water to an abnormal level. To Loeb india ink had
meant the powder; to the student, the liquid. That young man reportedly
learned to reflect more deeply about the hidden factors that might not seem
important but might turn out to be the keys to a major discovery. Loeb
helped to turn many eager students into scientists.
As his student (later University of California professor) W. J. V. Oster-
hout recalled, many students shied away from the sharp criticisms Loeb
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS Lie 57
offered at times but when they did finally approach him “they were won
over by his kindness and anxiety to be helpful.” The teaching laboratory
building at the MBL is therefore appropriately named after this outstanding
scientist, even though he spent much of his life in a research, rather than a
teaching, position.
In fact, the current Loeb Building lies across the street from, and
replaces, Loeb’s own laboratory building, built and equipped for him by the
Rockefeller Foundation after he went to work at the Rockefeller Institute for
Medical Research in 1910. The Rockefeller Foundation set up a suite of
offices for its own people as well, presumably the better to carry out their
fund-raising efforts on behalf of the MBL from 1919 to 1924. It was called
the Rockefeller Lab until its demise.
The communal class laboratories have always provided the opportu-
nity for students to work things out together. They can talk about the
problems or the new ideas they are having, then get suggestions or try them
out with colleagues working on similar research. This is the sort of oppor-
tunity for cross-fertilization that the MBL is all about. Late at night a visitor
can find earnest prospective biologists at work, worrying through some
problem or other and exploring how to get things to work next time. Such
dedication has typified student behavior throughout the hundred years,
although today’s enrollee experiences far more distractions at the MBL and
Laboratory in Old Main around the turn of the century. Standing in
the center is Leonard W. Williams, instructor. MBL Archives.
58 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The general zoology lab
in Old Main with Leukart
charts and drawing on
the blackboard.
MBL Archives.
elsewhere in the modern world. Easier transportation makes it all too
simple, for students today may forge out into the real world, whereas earlier
decades found them comfortably confined to Woods Hole. As long-time
MBL embryologist Cornelia Clapp wrote in 1888, it was even a bit dangerous
to venture outdoors at night because of the large boulders left by the glaciers
that had once covered the Cape. These cluttered the MBL land and kept
people indoors, at work.
In those early days, most of the students in the courses were neophyte
researchers. High school science teachers or college teachers without
much research experience, they delighted in the introduction to diverse life
forms and to serious science. More advanced students signed on as inves-
tigators and pursued their own work, directed by the senior staff. With time,
the students in courses have become increasingly advanced, and those
wide-eyed, eager beginners go elsewhere. Very few undergraduates popu-
late the MBL courses, though the recent program to involve high school
students in doing their own research at the MBL demonstrates that
seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds are perfectly ready for scientific work and
may even be more curious and more willing to try new and risky things
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS NX 59
William P. Procter
standing with his bucket
on the marsh of Great
Harbor. MBL Archives.
William Procter at his lab table in Old Main, 1923.
Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
than some older students. Students have an enthusiasm and resilience
which has benefitted the MBL throughout its 100 years.
In the early days of introductory courses, nearly everyone congregated
in the central classrooms or around the lamps at night in the laboratory to
draw and to record the observations of the day. If it was cold, they lit up
bunsen burners to drive off the chill. The shared general laboratory for
students made the close collaboration and exchange of ideas almost un-
avoidable. The initial wooden building was designed with lots of windows to
let in the light for microscopic work, and was organized around a central
site for seawater where organisms resided away from the disturbing
sunlight.
This century has brought photography, photocopying, and round-
the-clock lighting to allow microscopic observations at any time of day or
night. One no longer has to worry much about exposing the embryos to too
much sunlight, which might speed up or artificially alter development. The
laboratory designs in the new building reflect the advances, because win-
dows no longer have to function as the major source of light for micro-
scopic work. But people do continue to make changes, such as adding
aluminum foil to create light-controlled environments or air conditioning for
midafternoon comfort.
The buildings now are designed with separate lab spaces for research-
ers. People from different parts of the country working on similar but
different problems find themselves not shoulder to shoulder or through
only an open door from others, but in the next lab. In the earliest years in
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Old Main even people in the separate thin-walled rooms upstairs knew what
the others were doing. Now researchers have more privacy, enough that
they may never even see or meet each other. More people, with their special
needs and interests, have brought changes.
The separation does have advantages in our increasingly specialized
world, which demands continued output and progress of its students — not
that those early leading researchers did not produce as much and as high
quality work as any competitor today. Working together in one lab can bring
inconveniences such as noise and lack of privacy. University of North
Carolina embryologist Donald Costello reported that when he had worked
at the MBL when M. H. Jacobs was director, he caused problems with the
noise from his centrifuge. Jacobs felt that eight linear feet of counter space
should be enough research space for anyone. Costello found himself in a
room with twenty-six other researchers, though his own eight linear feet did
not actually connect with anyone else’s. His work required centrifuging, and
the typical centrifuge of the day put out a terrific racket. Since he ran it for
up to twelve hours a day, nonstop, the noise drove him a little crazy. He
would go out to sit by the waterfront and recuperate, but not all of his
labmates could do the same, as some were engrossed in projects that
demanded their constant attention. Costello asked Jacobs to give him a
separate place for at least his centrifuge in order to spare the others; but the
director responded that no one should object to the sounds of science. Only
investigators with significantly more research stature were entitled to pri-
vate work space in those close quarters. In fact, considerable effort went
into planning whose laboratory space would be where in the building.
When Old Main went down, reportedly because its old wooden struc-
ture no longer met fire codes, many people mourned its demise. “Can't we
spray it with something?” supporters asked. With a grant obtained to
construct a new building and inspectors’ reports militating against remod-
eling, the old building fell. Pieces of its familiar shingles reside among family
treasures in many Woods Hole cottages. Old Main was a place for everyone
to know what everyone else was doing. It began in 1888 as one 63-by-28-foot
two-story frame building, erected at a total cost of $1,600, on land costing
$1,300 for a 78-by-120-foot lot. Whitman then added another section in 1890,
and another in 1892. The total reportedly cost about $3,000 and, as Costello
suggested, with that initial investment ‘‘probably more significant scien-
tific work was done than has ever been done in any $3 million building
ever created since.” That building, one might reasonably claim, trained
the first generation of American experimental biologists.
Other separate wooden buildings of the same unassuming style fol-
lowed thereafter, with an alarming regularity that threatened the trustees’
sense of economic well-being. Certainly, the MBL did continue to attract
more and more people each year, but that might be only a temporary
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS 7 N 61
XA oe
Old Main in 1888. It was constructed for a total cost of $1,652 in just under three months’ time. MBL Archives.
success. These trustees, who had made themselves legally and financially
responsible for the Laboratory, worried about Whitman’s enthusiasm for
expansion. Only later did the Laboratory begin to acquire other gifts of land,
including their first piece of waterfront property in 1902. After that, various
gifts and purchases, most notably from Charles R. Crane, extended the MBL
holdings and made expansion more secure.
Besides augmenting the MBL's operating budget, Crane also donated
funds to the MBL to construct a new laboratory building, the Crane Build-
ing, which was erected in 1913-1914 as the first permanent (brick) MBL
structure. In the dedication speech for that new building, Crane also
proudly referred to the spirit of research that inspired him to want to
contribute. “Without that spirit no amount of bricks and mortar and
organization would be of any great service, but with that spirit the laboratory
has been able to accomplish a great deal with very simple means.” That
spirit represented freedom and cooperation and democracy, Crane con-
tinued, and the time had come to give it “a more substantial body.”
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Crane and Lillie then accumulated further funds to add on another
wing, creating an impressive L-shaped brick edifice. The new wing was
called the Brick Laboratory for a while and only much later the Lillie
Building. The Crane and Lillie complex, now often mistakenly simply called
Lillie, was a fairly straightforward brick building: upright, solid, sturdy,
reliable, with all the necessary conveniences. When they added a section to
the library just before 1940, they had to scrounge around all over New
England to get the required materials as the impending war had made
things tight. They managed to complete the project just before World War
II began. The Lillie and Crane buildings are more functional and restrained
than fashionable or ostentatious. They are solid and have served their
purposes well and promise to continue doing so, which is what really
matters.
Like Lillie himself, the Lillie Building now serves as the rather austere
and quiet control center for the MBL. The mail room is located in the
basement, as are the chemical supply room, the equipment room, and
other, unheralded functional rooms and their staffs that make the MBL run.
Laboratory equipment arrives at the receiving room and thus begins its
MBL life in Lillie. The administrative offices used to reside in Lillie until 1981,
down the hall amid the clutter of laboratories and other offices. Recent
remodeling of the Candle House has provided a more appropriate, fancier,
and more modern setting for the administration, now removed from the
bustle of everyday science.
Lillie also houses the large auditorium, where the MBL community
congregates for the famous Friday evening lectures. In the early days, when
Whitman was impressing his vision of the MBL on the place, the evening
lectures served a somewhat different purpose than they do now. Then they
were directed at problems. Rather than reporting research results, they
were designed to discuss ideas of research approaches more generally.
Because a high percentage of the community shared overlapping research
interests, the lectures could appeal to nearly the entire audience. The
modern listener shares the silent presence of many of the MBL greats,
whose names are inscribed on the refurbished mahogany chairs in the
auditorium. One can gaze at Crane's portrait on the wall, marveling that he
really does not look like such an imposing person, even though he did
silently and single-handedly save the MBL during its worst economic years.
Outside the Lillie Auditorium, around the corner, sits a bronze statue
of Confucius. Mr. Crane had served as minister to China in 1920 and
brought back Confucius for the MBL. Originally placed in the Crane wing of
Lillie, Confucius has wandered, at times to the MBL beach and even to
Nobska. For a while he sat watch near the watchman’s desk, and now he
has returned to his original location. Tradition holds that a researcher who
places a penny in Confucius's hands will have rewarding research results,
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS De 63
The itinerant statue of Confucius in the
lobby of Crane. MBL Archives.
whereas those who fail to observe the custom will only publish in the
Journal of Negative Results. Children in the know regularly check to see if
Crane Building and there are any coins in place, and researchers caught putting pennies in
Candle House in 1923. explain that they are only ‘‘for the children.”
Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Funding and Control
The original trustees tended to have a conservative vision of what was
possible or expedient. The group included Hyatt, of course, and several
other professors of zoology or botany in Boston (William Farlow, Charles
Minot, and William Sedgwick), but also representatives of the Boston Society
of Natural History's ancestral links to the MBL (Florence Cushing, Susan
Minns, Samuel Wells). At first, this mixture of scientific and nonscientific
individuals enthusiastically supported the MBL projects. They raised money
by giving lecture series and sponsoring concerts and other popular events
of the time, and they circulated announcements of the Laboratory session.
Whitman helped with much of the fund-raising as well and gave his own
time, potential salary, and additional monies to help the MBL.
Every year, Whitman presented his expanding plans to the trustees.
Sometimes he just went ahead and made commitments and spent money
without official permission. Some of the trustees began to rebel. They
fretted about the increasingly professional and research-oriented direction
of the MBL and about what some saw as Whitman’s desire for increasing
control, as well as his tendency not to worry very seriously about running at
a deficit. At the same time, the number of trustees gradually grew larger.
Some were added because of their scientific reputations; others, because
they were important people and held the prospects of providing financial
support, or because they had particularly endorsed the basic idea behind
the MBL summer school. The balance began to shift away from the natural
history school plans of the original group and increasingly toward the more
expansive and less locally oriented idea of developing a leading research
laboratory.
Major changes came about in 1897, following a minor revolution. After
the 1896 session some of the trustees concluded that Whitman had finally
overstepped all reasonable bounds in spending funds without official per-
mission. They refused to provide further funds and even threatened to close
the Laboratory altogether. Eventually, the crisis was resolved at least long
enough for the summer session to continue more or less as planned. Fewer
students did attend, however, because the trustees’ disagreements had
delayed the announcements, and people simply did not know whether the
MBL would even exist in 1897. School teachers had to make plans and often
had only limited financial support to attend such a school; they could not
afford to wait until the very last minute. This disagreeable state of affairs
simply could not persist. So the scientists, with Whitman at the helm, staged
a quiet revolution.
At the corporation meeting in Woods Hole in 1897, the group voted for
changes. The MBL Corporation has always played a role in directing the
laboratory and technically owns the facility, but that role received consid-
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS Dh 65
eV OE Map serine arn anbene:
MBL from across Eel Pond, early 1930s. The large brick building to the
right is comprised of Crane and Lillie; immediately to the left is the
supply building, with Candle House behind. Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
erable strengthening with the decisions of 1897. Previously, the corporation
had included the official incorporators, consisting of a few scientists and
those representing the Boston Society of Natural History and the Woman's
Education Association, of course, plus voting participation by “All who aid
in [the laboratory's] support by subscribing to investigator's tables.” This
included a number of subscribing schools and societies. By including the
subscribers in the corporation rather than focusing on those who actually
occupied the tables, that governing group was weighted toward adminis-
trative and institutional representation.
With the troubles of 1897, Whitman and his supporters, such as the
influential Columbia University and American Museum of Natural History
paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, decided that the scientists should
exercise greater control. They particularly distrusted the strong Boston
representation on the board of trustees. Though Whitman consistently
envisioned the MBL as a national facility, as he stressed over and over again,
some trustees thought he really meant to take control himself.
This conviction about the principle of control by the scientists for the
scientists, while widely praised in the years since, probably had less impor-
66 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The Chem Room, 1952. Photograph by
Alicia Hills, MBL Archives.
Candle House in the early 1920s before
Lillie was added. It has served the MBL as
a supply area, dormitory, administration
headquarters, and lecture/meeting space.
MBL Archives.
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS 1 N 67
The supply department when it was in Candle House. MBL Archives.
tance in the 1897 reform than Whitman’s eagerness to rid himself of those
hopeless Bostonian ‘“‘old maids.’’ He was not at all opposed to women as
scientists. Indeed, his own wife, Emily Nunn Whitman, had studied as a
biologist in Europe and the United States and had taught at Wellesley
College. But those Boston women trustees were not scientists, and he felt
that they failed to understand what would make biology work. In short, they
did not share Whitman’s vision for a national biological station that would
embrace advanced research as much as it did teaching.
In 1896 and 1897, Whitman and his cohorts plotted change. They set up
a reorganization committee. They officially appointed L. L. Nunn of Tellu-
ride, Colorado (Whitman’s brother-in-law), as a trustee. Mr. Nunn then
made a generous offer to provide financial security for the MBL's deficit for
that session. But, he insisted that
I make this offer upon the condition that your present director, Dr. C.
O. Whitman, directs the affairs of said Institution in accordance with his
best judgment during the said season, and that Mr. L. Wilcott Allen, or
68
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
some other person acceptable to me, be employed as Assistant-
Treasurer at Woods Hole, with full authority to collect and receive all
revenues and income from said operations, and to supervise and direct
the expenses incurred in said operations, with the understanding that I
am not to be responsible for any expenses, except those incurred with
and by the knowledge and consent of said Assistant-Treasurer or of
myself.
Nunn had already placed $500 in the hands of Mr. Allen to guarantee the
opening of the lab. Mr. Nunn’s hard-hitting, straightforward western style
appropriate to silver mining in Colorado did not sit well with all of the
proper Boston trustees. They wanted to retain control themselves. On April
12, 1897, they voted to open the MBL for the summer but to reject Nunn's
offer. It seemed, after all, that they could find enough money for the
purpose without giving up control to Whitman or to any such outsider as
Nunn.
The trustees as a group wanted to retain control of their laboratory, for
which they had initially accepted legal and financial responsibility. In con-
trast, Nunn endorsed Whitman's desire for more leeway as director and for
not always having to have everything approved by the trustees.
On August 6, the trustees met once again in Woods Hole. After con-
siderable worry about financial details, they voted to add new members to
the corporation. One hundred and fifty new members joined the list. These
people included mostly investigators and students at the MBL and sig-
nificantly swelled the ranks of scientists in the governing body. Then
4:20 p.m. came closer. The Boston trustees had to leave to catch the last train
of the day if they were to avoid an expensive overnight stay. This left the
balance of scientists, who lived in Woods Hole for the summer. Of the
nonscientific Boston group, only the secretary, Miss Anna Phillips Williams,
stayed. She found herself in a sudden and shocking minority. The real
changes began in what must have been a positive and emotionally charged
meeting.
First, the new majority voted to pay for salaries in priority to other
bills —a shift of the position held by the trustees as a whole. Then they voted
to move the annual meeting from Boston to Woods Hole during the
summer—over Anna Phillips Williams's objection. They called a special
meeting of the new corporation to change the bylaws, to be held in ten
days — against Anna Williams's lonely objection. The group then voted to
appoint a committee to revise the bylaws—over Miss Williams's continued
objection. She was not appointed to the revision committee.
The crisis had passed. Most of the Boston trustees quit. And at the
special meeting the new corporation changed the bylaws so that the group
of trustees had to become more responsive to the scientific community.
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS N 69
Whitman and his supporters had won, so that the MBL became an organ-
ism on its own, in their view not so dependent on the action of that nucleus
of restrictive conservatism represented by the nonscientific Boston trustees.
With the help of Mr. Nunn’s money, the MBL could continue to grow and
flourish in the manner to which Whitman wanted it to become accustomed.
Building and expansion continued apace, and all was well — briefly.
But running a “national” laboratory proved horrifically expensive. What
the MBL, like any aspiring institution, really needed — and still needs to this
day—was a solid major endowment. For a while it appeared that Helen
Culver, who controlled the Hull fortune in Chicago, which had also sup-
ported Jane Addams’s Hull House project, had provided just such an
endowment. She had donated one million dollars to the University of
Chicago, with the intention that it also be used to provide classes for
Chicago's less well-to-do West Side and to support a national marine
laboratory, among other biological activities. Her correspondence makes
her intentions clear. She hoped to support the MBL as well as the University
of Chicago because advisors had convinced her of the value of both. As
plans unfolded for the projects at Chicago, however, it became evident that
her money would not stretch as far as she and her advisors had hoped. Her
donation came in the form of real estate, and prices had dropped pathet-
ically in a short time. In addition, building prices had risen so much that
providing a modern laboratory for the University of Chicago finally took all
the million dollars, as well as an additional gift from Miss Culver. The MBL
gained nothing but moral support from the Hull fortune.
By 1900 the continued difficulties in raising money, the demands to
expand the laboratory, and the desire to include more advanced (and more
expensive) investigations combined to make Whitman even more anxious to
obtain financial security. L. L. Nunn and a group of businessmen repre-
senting the University of Chicago made an offer that it seemed unlikely the
MBL could afford to refuse. The group offered a considerable sum of
money in exchange for some simple expectations of financial accountability
to them. The offer seemed very attractive. Stubbornly and perversely it
seemed to Whitman, the MBL board nonetheless refused. Whitman felt that
some of the trustees had impugned his integrity with their implication that
he and Chicago were trying to take over control of the Laboratory. It seems
clear that this charge was unfair to Whitman, who had after all served as
director all those years with no salary and often at some considerable
personal expense. Whitman wanted to place the MBL on solid financial
ground. But the Nunn proposal was unacceptable to the MBL’s leading and
trusted scientists.
Whitman, in turn, opposed an attractive proposal by the Carnegie
Institution in 1902 to fund the research of the laboratory. The Carnegie
Institution by this time was beginning to fund various sorts of biological
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
projects. Supporting the MBL seemed within their purview. But Whitman
and others did not want to give up the independence of the laboratory and
felt that Carnegie money would mean Carnegie control. The MBL trustees
did not accept the Carnegie offer, though they did receive three years’ worth
of support in meeting expenses from the Carnegie people.
Whitman retired as MBL director in 1908, in part because it was too
much trouble to haul the pigeons that he had begun to study back and forth
from Chicago to the Cape each summer, in part because there was no
longer any pressing reason to go to Woods Hole, and in part because he had
tired of all the battles. His personally trained assistant, F. R. Lillie, took over.
Whitman had directed Lillie’s dissertation, which was begun at Clark Uni-
versity and completed at the University of Chicago. Then he had exerted
considerable effort to hire Lillie at Chicago. Though not successful at first,
he eventually managed to attract Lillie to Chicago from Vassar. Lillie became
assistant director at the MBL and assistant chair at Chicago, in many ways
simply taking over control when Whitman no longer wished to have it.
Lillie had money, and Lillie attracted money to the MBL. In fact, the
MBL owes much to Lillie and to the new booming business of indoor
plumbing. Lillie’s brother-in-law was Charles R. Crane, a wealthy business-
man associated with plumbing and porcelain fixtures. From 1904 to
1923, Crane helped to make up the MBL’s deficit, amounting to roughly
$20,000 per year in the 1920s.
In fact, the MBL began really only in the 1920s to attract any major
endowment and financial assistance, well after Whitman's death in 1910.
During that period, it gained sufficient support both to enlarge the
facilities and offerings and to secure what was then a substantial endow-
ment. The National Research Council (with many MBL researchers as
members) supported work at the MBL and called for financial invest-
ment by others. The Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
personally, and the Carnegie Institution all made liberal contributions, with
various conditions for support to be provided by the MBL itself. That
indispensable benefactor Charles R. Crane met these conditions brilliantly
and thus put the MBL on a “high plateau of security.”
The successes of the 1920s took the MBL from one original wooden
building to a physical plant worth $1.5 million, with an endowment of over
$1 million. Even that magnificent sum proved insufficient to do much more
than desperately tread water during the Depression, when annual income
fell and attendance dropped drastically from 1931 to 1935, but it did keep
the MBL afloat. Then came the great period of government funding (but not
government control) with the strengthening of the National Research Coun-
cil, then the advent of the National Science Foundation and National Insti-
tutes of Health to replace the private Crane, Carnegie, and Rockefeller
support.
3 | BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS 7% 71
Ce
A painting of benefactor Charles R. Crane, which
hangs in Lillie Auditorium. MBL Archives.
During the building years of the 1920s, Crane wrote to Rockefeller to
express his pleasure at being involved and his satisfaction with the results,
emphasizing the important spirit of the place: “These scientists were strug-
gling and accomplishing marvelous things with most meager equipment,
making many sacrifices — It seems to me that the precious thing to preserve
was the spirit of the organization, a spirit everywhere recognized although
hard to seize or to imitate.” His generosity and the great successes with
fund-raising helped to stimulate the General Education Board to add its
contribution, giving substantial funds to help the library purchase back
series of journals and to provide an endowment. They also gave another
$250,000 to support the dormitory and apartment house projects, which
provided the first MBL housing facilities with winter heating and with
housekeeping facilities for families. The 1920s proved an active time of
strengthening finances and resources at the MBL as in much of the rest of
the United States. Further financial relief came only well after World War II,
as building grants have allowed the MBL to expand physically and to gain
security.
72 rN
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
NOTES
Donald Costello, in a transcript of a taped interview at
the University of North Carolina, 1967, mentions
the importance of such factors as temperature for
isotope use.
Robert Kahler’s interview, Historical Collection, gives an
eyewitness account of the various fires, which are
referred to by a number of other interviewees as
well. Isabel Morgan Mountain, in her valuable un-
published history of the Morgan barn property and
in a 1987 interview, places the fire in historical
context.
Winterton C. Curtis recalls his being drawn to the MBL in
“Good Old Summer Times and the M.B.L.” and
“Rhymes of the Woods Hole Shores,” Falmouth En-
terprise (August 12, 19, 26 and September 2, 9, 1955),
reprint in MBL Archives.
Laboratory allocations and the desire to change the sys-
tem are discussed in MBL annual reports and
other archival notes. Whitman often discussed his
views on education in MBL annual reports and in a
number of documents and letters both in the MBL
archives and at the University of Chicago Archives,
as well as in lectures in the Biological Lectures of
the MBL.
Philip Pauly’s excellent Controlling Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987) provides a provocative and
important account of Jacques Loeb’s work and of
his role at the MBL. Also see Pauly on the MBL's
place in history, “Summer Resort and _ Sci-
entific Discipline: Woods Hole and the Structure of
American Biology, 1882-1925,” in Ronald Rainger,
et al., editors, The American Development of Biology
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1988), pp. 121-150.
Other Loeb stories, by W. J. V. Osterhout and by others,
are on file in the MBL Archives.
Donald Costello discusses his early times at the MBL in
his 1967 interview, deposited in the MBL Archives.
The initial building bill resides in the Archives, along with
other documents about costs.
On the 1897 and other crises, see Lillie’s history (Notes
Chapter 1), MBL trustees’ minutes and annual re-
ports, and papers in the Biological Bulletin Supple-
ment. See also “A Statement Concerning the Marine
Biological Laboratory at Wood's Holl, Mass.,” Sci-
ence (1897) 6: 529-534 from disgruntled trustees
and “A Reply to the Statement of the Former Trust-
ees of the Marine Biological Laboratory,” October 8,
1897, as a separate publication because they did not
feel that they should air MBL business in public. See
also Conklin, “The Reorganization of 1897,” Collect-
ing Net (August 17, 1935): 209-211; and Jane Maien-
schein, “Early Struggles at the Marine Biological
Laboratory over Mission and Money,’ Biological
Bulletin (1985) 168: 192-196.
On later support from Charles Crane and others, see MBL
annual reports and Collecting Net throughout the
1910s and 1920s. Also a letter from Crane to J. D.
Rockefeller, Jr., December 22, 1923, records his
affection and respect for the spirit of the MBL.
The Library and Publications
Across the street from the library in the Lillie Building. Photograph by Hugo Poisson. MBL Archives.
The Marine Biological L:
ZO» Nol. 2, No. 5
Grass Fellows
Do It All
See Page 8
4 | THE LIBRARY AND PUBLICATIONS Lie 75
MonpayY MORNING ToUR through the MBL campus reveals one area of espe-
cially intense hustle and bustle. Carts of books, with their request slips
indicating desired page numbers to be copied, line the halls outside the copy
room. Piles of volumes to be reshelved cover the countertops. MBL scien-
tists and students have busily put the library to use over another weekend,
as always. Even on a stormy weekend night, with the wind blowing wildly
and setting up an unsettling moan throughout the building, people work
quietly in various tucked-away corners of the library stacks. Today the quiet
clicks of word processors at all hours augment the sounds of turning pages.
The Library
In many ways the real center of the MBL lies in the library, run since 1962
by head librarian Jane Fessenden. No locked doors or guards or stern looks
interrupt the researcher who comes to work in the library. Instead, library
readers meet friendly faces and cheerful smiles. Some people think the
library staff is not serious enough because they seem to have too much fun.
They are always there, ready to help with even the smallest questions. They
also make it clear that they believe a library is there to be used, and not
primarily to be preserved for some unsuspecting and very possibly unap-
preciative posterity. Anyone with a legitimate purpose, who gets prior
permission and who follows the rules, may use the MBL Library at any
season of the year and at any time of day.
At first, the head librarian was a scientist who volunteered to take care
of the books. Then the lab hired an assistant, and then a full-time librarian
who would listen to the scientists and set up the operation the way they
wanted it, someone who would want to go to them for advice about their
library.
The scientists respect this valuable resource, as they always have. Some
take it for granted: of course they can run in, find what they want on the
shelf, have it copied, and get back to work quickly and easily. Some of these
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The main reading room, as it looked in the fifties. Recently
refurbished, it is now called the Bay Reading Room.
MBL Archives.
researchers might even claim that the MBL Library is a useful convenience
but hardly the real core of the research center. Yet they too publish their
results, in journals and books that become part of the long-term scientific
world housed in the library.
Each year scores of scientific researchers recognize the value of that
resource. They come to the MBL as library readers to write books, revise
textbooks, or complete long reviews. One recent year found more than 150
readers from many states and countries working on a wide range of histor-
ical and biological projects. People go to great effort to spend a sabbatical
year in the MBL Library, where more than 400 years’ worth of biological
literature is kept. As Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has said, ‘“The
library at the MBL is an institution that has its own humanity and seems to
me more an organism than a place.”
As such, it has been the recipient of practical jokes. In 1926, at the height
of the first major American bout with creationism in the wake of the Scopes
trial, the editors inserted the following item into the MBL’s newspaper, the
Collecting Net:
We were shocked beyond measure last Sunday morning when an ex-
haustive search failed to reveal that classic book on evolution —the Holy
Bible —in what is supposed to be one of the finest libraries of its kind in
the world. The situation was untenable. It could not be allowed to stand.
Fortunately the Trustees of the laboratory saw fit to severely censor
[sic] the Librarian at a special meeting on Tuesday afternoon called for
that purpose. The Editorial Staff wish to commend the Trustees for their
prompt and efficient action in relieving the situation.
4 | THE LIBRARY AND PUBLICATIONS \ 77
The library stacks when
they were in Crane 217
before Lillie was built in
1924. MBL Archives.
Creationism attracted attention again a few years ago with a lecture series
on science and religion and a recent speaker who asserted that no honest
scientist can possibly be religious. And numerous books about science and
religion continue to appear on the library shelves.
The first year, the MBL Library began as a handful of books in the back
corner of the downstairs general laboratory room. By the second year, a
healthy collection of 343 volumes occupied the library corner. Over the next
years, Cornelia Clapp served as librarian for the slowly expanding collection
that moved from corner to corner in search of sufficient space. During the
crisis of 1897, the trustees ordered Whitman to stop spending money.
Notwithstanding the injunction, he asked Clapp to continue ordering jour-
nals. The trustees then informed her that she could pay for them all herself.
With that in mind, Clapp nonetheless did order the volumes, which were, in
fact, paid for. Yet the uncertainty illustrates the tenuous basis of the MBL in
its earliest years and the scientists’ commitment to maintaining that library
as a vital organ essential to the life of the MBL.
In 1914 the MBL hired an official assistant to the librarian for the first
time, when the library moved into more substantial, fire-protected sur-
ara) 14 wed >
:—- 4
4 dan
Aj
78 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Cornelia Clapp, early librarian, shown here circa 1933 with the
board of trustees, of which she was a longstanding member.
roundings in the new Crane Building. They used a wheelbarrow to haul all
the books across the street. For the first time someone was actually paid to
run the library. In 1919 Priscilla Montgomery took the assistantship role.
She became librarian in 1925 and continued in that position for many years.
The widowed wife of University of Pennsylvania cytologist T. H. Montgomery,
she was part of the MBL community and understood what the scientists
wanted.
During that time, the library and its holdings continued to expand, even
during World War II, and moved into larger quarters in the new Lillie
Building when it opened. A section of that building was specially designed
for stack floors. There the library remains, now complete with up-to-date
computerized interlibrary loan and other searching services. Further ex-
pansions and additions have continued to help the facilities keep pace with
demand, more or less.
Open windows bring in the fog, which threatens the books at times, but
the staff keeps the books and bound periodicals in order, properly on the
shelves, and in good condition so that the volumes are often in far better
shape than those in a fancy, environmentally controlled setting where they
are never used. Leather-bound books like to be handled, and respectful use
over the century has caused little damage beyond normal wear. The greatest
4 | THE LIBRARY AND PUBLICATIONS ip N 79
A quiet place to work: one of
the sixty-eight desks located in
the MBL Library stacks.
MBL Archives.
miracle is that the system works. Loss due to theft is lower than in almost
any other institutional library in the country. The absent-minded professor
may wander down the hall to jot down a reference and intend to bring the
volume right back. The book is therefore temporarily lost and unavailable to
other readers, but such books almost always find their way back to the
library — eventually.
Sometimes books return in an unorthodox way, as they did one time
during World War II. University of Michigan cytologist and botanist William
Randolf Taylor occupied an upstairs room of one wing of Old Main, the
room at one connecting corner in the U-shaped building. The false ceiling
had openings in it, which raised the curiosity of the small number of
80 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
students still in attendance during the war. The students wanted to know
what was inside the false ceiling. Taylor responded that there were probably
only dead birds, which aroused the curiosity all the more. So the students
pulled up benches and crawled in for a look. They found books. Bushels of
books. Some had long since been replaced when they were discovered as
missing, but here they were, bird-stained and rain-beaten. Nobody recorded
what happened to the unexpected treasure.
What is more amazing, however, is that the journals remain in their
proper places. The staff checks carefully to ensure that volumes are not
misshelved. The researcher can generally find nearly all of the material
sought, though the journals sit on the shelves in alphabetical order by title,
which sometimes sends the reader to each of five different stack levels in
search of any particular subject. Because of the tradition of gathering books
and continuing journal subscriptions even during tough economic times,
the MBL Library has full runs of a large number of rare journals. Roughly
80 percent of the journal titles go back to the first volume. In 1924 and 1925,
the General Education Board’s gift of $50,000 provided sufficient funds to
purchase back sets of incomplete runs, which filled out the collection. In
addition, the board provided an endowment for library use.
A recent $2.5 million matching grant from the A. W. Mellon Foundation
provides a further endowment for the library and puts its operation on a
The card catalogue when it
was in the main reading
room. MBL Archives.
4 | THE LIBRARY AND PUBLICATIONS Li 81
Recent periodicals, kept available in the main (Bay) reading room
until there are enough to be bound, a process that takes only two
weeks. They are then put in the stacks. MBL Archives.
more secure financial basis than it had been on. These endowments are
appreciated, for as demand has increased, so have costs. When the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution was founded in 1930, the two institutions
agreed that having two separate, overlapping libraries would be foolish. The
MBL would run the MBL-WHOI Library, as it has been called since that
time, because the MBL already had one, and WHOI would buy books and
journals and contribute to operating costs. In those beginning years, there
was not much of a science of oceanography, so the addition did not require
a host of new journals and books. But time has changed that, so that during
the last decade expansion has also dictated a more formal arrangement
between the two institutions.
In addition, the MBL is now the official library for the National Marine
Fisheries Service, originally the Fish Commission. In the early years, the
Commission men wandered over to look through the MBL's book corner.
They then set up their own facility. Only recently did the U.S. government
put the library out for bid, at which point the MBL was officially given the
contract. In addition, the library belongs to the Southeastern Massachusetts
82
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Consortium of Hospital Libraries. This gives same-day access to a wide
range of medical journals that the MBL would not otherwise have.
In 1983, the library undertook a use survey of the journals, with
financial assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation. For ten months,
readers recorded every time they used a journal, and the staff compiled the
results—for every bound volume and current periodical in the library, not
just some selected samples. The survey showed that the full complement of
holdings are used actively, even seemingly obscure, very specialized, and old
volumes. Furthermore, even those volumes used relatively rarely prove
valuable in special circumstances. Scientists find the completeness of the
collection, with its current holdings of 160,000 journal volumes, a resource
matched by very few other places.
One problem that demanded a solution by the mid-1970s was that of
space. All those different runs of journals, each slowly increasing in size,
take ever more space. Careful evaluation and management provide predic-
tions for expansion. With the help of generous grants, the MBL recently
undertook renovation and remodeling of the Lillie Building, including the
library. Eleven laboratories were removed to make room for the library
expansion, and a modern climate-controlled rare books room and archives
was built. Everything had to be moved —by hand. And everything found an
adequate new home except the old reprint collection. Not enough space,
they said. The once extremely valued and fully catalogued collection of
reprints lost its appeal as the dust gathered and as copy machines made
private collections easier to acquire. History-conscious researchers miss
this wonderful unique resource of more than 250,000 reprints, now largely
languishing away in a storage hallway, but most of the materials are available
in the original journals. And eventually, the librarians insist, the collection
will find a new space.
Pub(ications
Since 1908, when Lillie effectively took over as director of the laboratory, the
MBL has been following Baird’s example at the Smithsonian and has
exchanged copies of its journal, the Biological Bulletin, for other journals.
In the 1940s, the library acquired roughly half of its 1,200 titles that way. Now
the exchange accounts for about 600 of the 3,000 periodical titles currently
received.
The Biological Bulletin began after Whitman decided to begin a new
American publication. This happened before the MBL began, when Whit-
man was director of the Allis Lake Laboratory near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A businessman from a business family, Edward Phelps Allis had wanted to
do biological work. Advice from England and America led him to set up his
own laboratory and to hire a director/teacher. When Whitman took that
4 | THE LIBRARY AND PUBLICATIONS Di 83
part, he suggested to Allis that an American journal would prove extremely
valuable, and that it was a disgrace that none existed. Allis promised
support, and Whitman began editing the new Journal of Morphology.
Designed to carry long papers with what Whitman regarded as the requisite
degree of detail and quality, the journal proved very expensive to run.
Conklin’s dissertation in 1897 cost $2,000, and others must have come close.
Whitman never settled for less than the best possible, however, so the
journal continued publishing excellent and finely illustrated articles until it
had to close down briefly because of the deficit. Fortunately, the Wistar
Institute resumed publication soon after.
In addition to the Journal of Morphology, Whitman soon recognized
the advantage of having a companion publication for shorter articles that
could be published quickly. This took the form of the Zoological Bulletin.
After two volumes in 1897 and 1898, however, Whitman and his cofounder,
Harvard entymologist William Morton Wheeler, decided to transfer editor-
ship to the MBL and to change the title to the Biological Bulletin. Its
three-dollar price for three hundred pages produced a per-page cost that
remained about the same into the 1940s, after which it joined the escalating
world market. It has always been intended as a general journal, never
restricted to MBL research or researchers (only 9 percent of the articles in
the most recent year were by MBL scientists), and includes work on a variety
of biological topics. More recently, it has published papers from special
symposia and the set of abstracts of papers presented at the General
Scientific Meetings held each August at the MBL.
With these two publications in his power and as leader of the MBL,
Whitman became a very influential figure in American biology. In addition
to these periodicals, the MBL also issued Biological Lectures in order to
publish the Friday evening lectures under his directorships. With time, of
course, numerous other journals have appeared, including a considerable
number begun by MBL researchers.
One such periodical was the Collecting Net, begun by Ware Cattell.
Cattell was an unusual individual who specialized in electrophysiology and
inspired various enterprises, such as this popular newspaper. The paper
was put together each week by Dot Rogers and a friend on their way over
to the printer in New Bedford. They worked on the boat ride over, delivered
the copy, waited for the printed papers, and returned with them in a short
time. The more recent version of the Collecting Net is put out by the Public
Information Department, under the direction of George Liles, and serves
to inform the wider MBL community of activities there. The first run of
those wonderful mixtures of science and gossip resides in the Rare Books
Room and Archives of the library.
84
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Rare Books Room and Archives
In fact, the Rare Books Room is one special and little-known feature of the
library. Accoutered with Louis Agassiz’s intriguing leather-covered swiveling
table, this comfortable area houses many marvelous collections of photo-
graphs and archival materials as well as the extremely valuable rare books
and journals, many of them gifts from appreciative MBL alumni. One recent
addition came from T. H. Montgomery's sons and includes volumes detail-
ing Captain Cook’s voyages. Few students find their way to this room, but
scholars wanting to check out the history of a subject or to find illustrations
of the MBL or of work done here can make arrangements with the archival
staff to use the materials.
In 1986 WGBH, one of Boston's public broadcasting stations, sent a
team of photographers and writers to do a special show on the MBL. They
also chose the MBL to photograph for a different set of shows a number of
rare prints and book illustrations dating back to 1560. When asked why the
MBL, especially when Boston has its own libraries with some of the same
rare volumes, the crew replied that the MBL staff was so friendly and
helpful. Some of the Boston facilities wanted to close off their materials
rather than to make them available to the public even through film. By
contrast, the MBL Library’s attitude of respectful sharing for purposes of
scientific research is historically typical of the MBL.
One day not long ago, three topnotch scientists sat at Agassiz’s desk in
the reading room of the Rare Books room. Photographs of former great
researchers hung on the walls. One of the scientists was redoing his cell
biology textbook and expanding the historical parts of the introductory
section by rereading the classic texts that reside in the Rare Books Room.
Another knew that work very much like what he was doing in his lab had
been done at the MBL in the 1890s by E. G. Conklin, and he was checking
the earlier papers in the bound reprint collections. The third was a visiting
historian looking for a photograph to illustrate an upcoming lecture in
Paris. At the same desk sat a first-rate science writer, pursuing his own
study of global ecology, quietly reading books by Agassiz, Alexander von
Humboldt, and other nineteenth-century writers who worried about the
history and dynamic process of the earth as a whole. The researchers spoke
briefly, curiously looked over each others’ shoulders for a moment and
exchanged ideas, admired the rich written and photographic resources
around them, and then settled in for another typically intense day of research
at the MBL.
4 | THE LIBRARY AND PUBLICATIONS
NOTES
Jane Fessenden has helped clarify many episodes and
provided many leads for discussing the history of
the library. The MBL annual reports have a library
section which provides information for each year;
they also document the statistics of journal use and
loss rates.
Stephen Jay Gould is quoted in a library flyer, n.d.
The Collecting Net story about the Bible appeared August
26, 1926, p. 5.
William Randolf Taylor's interview, Historical Collection,
discusses the finding of books in the ceiling. On
Whitman and journal publication, see Ernest J.
Dornfeld, ‘The Allis Lake Laboratory,” Marquette
Medical Review (1956) 21: 115-144. See also Pamela
Clapp, “The History of the Biological Bulletin,” Bio-
logical Bulletin (1988) 174: 1-3.
Dot Rogers told us in a 1987 interview about riding the
boat over to get the Collecting Net printed each
week.
Details and data come from the MBL Library’s official
records, MBL Archives.
Se
——————— ee
“=
j a ad
ie 4), Mi [alias tae” re ee ° ; ait, il ow) gia Pritpay yes ti Toa
adnan wwe. TT! i ell. al Leip at i reel al! gre Fi; ] ‘a iad ot »
ieee tals eS Ci is (tg SE ary Ire ib We ue ro MAGA el” Piaeve Rl he od
amt) Ctl id Were oul) OOS nat? erie? Ar ie & NUT [naeeSe FOU Bes i) oe
7 i CPR atretitir & > om, lo 6 hie wena oie
Sag) yoriphs Meal eee nrveil “agal: ) at 1) west Ss L 7
me Dehiin oe @or'|u) sf) ve WW | pA] Sat ay ipvmaee /* wanes
; aa beg jas (he “Diba! THD oti
eee a) Ne eed Par) Ly i, vs ly At
mai Fi |
atid ' b| — b) @% iWwies 4 sete iin é revo] ahs
‘ 7, ri j by Lid) =p ommees
. a
' ba u__—
q o
“/ ar
a at @! otal
). fii la TE
7 | oles
7 ¢ : i hay o de
| “4 tat
’ ? > 1 a
: card :
60th jam ‘
yo Ae
at éuh> eae a
: SS
- rer /y(aee ays an
<< Ae |.
ly Cie n
7
i 7
The People
Collecting party at Cuttyhunk Island, 1895. Captain Veeder (on the
right, with a child on his shoulders) had served the MBL for many
years and had grown up at Cuttyhunk. Photograph by Baldwin
Coolidge, MBL Archives.
¥ o@
es. 4 _ Le mal
Pye, SANs, samige
Collecting isn't all work aboard the Dolphin (1952).
Photograph by Alicia Hills, MBL Archives.
5 | THE PEOPLE
Ox LITTLE BOY, about five, happily asked his father at a recent MBL Day after
they had toured labs and looked around, ‘Dad, can I come here to school
when I grow up?” That is the point of the MBL: biology at the seashore is
attractive to a wide range of people.
Students
Political and economic changes may dictate which people are able to attend
MBL sessions and which accents will predominate at the lunch tables in any
given year, but the MBL tradition persists. Students come and mingle and
learn, and then return as teachers to the familiar surroundings to do
research with their own students in tow, or they send their students to take
courses on their own. The MBL perpetuates itself that way, as new genera-
tions learn about the laboratory from its people.
Donald Costello, for example, reported that he wanted to attend the
protozoology course at the MBL after his sophomore year in college. He
applied and received a rejection. Embryologist Lester Barth advised him to
go anyway and offered to give him a ride to Woods Hole. Barth thought that
Lewis Victor Heilbrunn, with whom Barth was working, would probably set
Costello up to work too if only Costello could afford the $50 required
minimum fee. Because Costello had worked for the previous two summers
as an Office boy in a die manufacturing firm to earn money for his education,
at forty cents per hour for forty-five hours per week, he had accumulated
enough to embark on this zoological adventure. Once in Woods Hole, he
discovered that he could sit in on all the lectures at no cost and could absorb
the atmosphere of, as well as the ideas in, the place. This atmosphere kept
him coming back for most of his summers, sometimes bringing students of
his own and even instructing in the embryology course for about ten years.
Other students arrive in more conventional ways, applying and becom-
ing accepted to their first courses. Often today they are far more advanced
90 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
By the 1950s, specimens were
collected primarily by the
supply department, but some
classes continued to make field
trips to study natural habitats
for themselves. MBL Archives.
Mary R. Huettner, wife of the
scientist-photographer, collecting at
Sippiwissett Marsh. Photograph by
Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
5 | THE PEOPLE HN 91
Ue WR rn = ’ ee ae iP Sc << ye
Embryology class, 1897, including Gertrude Stein, front left. Photograph courtesy of WHHC Archives.
in their careers—and far more specialized and sophisticated in their de-
mands — than they used to be. Rarely do high school teachers seeking their
first experience with living organisms populate the courses, as they once
did. Nor do many people arrive so casually as Frank Lillie did when
Whitman invited him to come on down to Woods Hole for the summer to
begin his graduate career. No longer are there as many eager novices to be
enthralled by their first invertebrate collecting trips to Tarpaulin Cove or
Sippewissett Salt Marsh.
Most of today’s neurobiology students, for example, are much more
advanced and dedicated to their sophisticated coursework. They simply do
not have time to experience what it is like to wade one’s way through the
meandering streams of a salt marsh and to become mired down in mud so
that other students have to help pull you and your rubber waders out with
a loud sucking smack. A few do head out on a Sunday morning to catch
bluefish. Yet only rarely do the busy students have much free time to explore
the intertidal areas nearby and to gain respect for the fragile ecological
balance, though they may find time to play the time-honored pranks of
attaching a crab’s claw to someone's ear or a lobster to a long skirt (or to
a pair of shorts today). Many still attend courses on their way to fame in
other fields, as Gertrude Stein did while she was briefly a medical student
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
at Johns Hopkins in the 1890s. Overall, a more advanced group of dedicated
researchers come today.
The late night gathering around the bunsen burners to cook clams,
lobsters, crabs, and occasionally even the ubiquitous snails is more likely to
begin with a trip to the fish market or the supply department than to the
beach, as it used to be. Strict regulation of marine fauna as well as laboratory
specialization has dictated that. But that regulation has been stimulated by
ecological and embryological research carried out at the MBL and other
marine laboratories. Times change. Details change, but students do still
come to the MBL for their courses with the same eagerness that they always
have. If there is sometimes less lighthearted fun and more dedication in
their work here, that reflects the changes of science and of society as well.
Administrators
To the students involved today in their own research and coursework, it is
not always obvious who the leaders are. The MBL has a scientific director
who organizes courses and laboratories, but that is no longer sufficient.
Now a full team of administrators has filled in, doing jobs that either did not
exist in earlier times or that the director himself carried out. Conklin once
remarked that his role as chairman of the biology department at Princeton
for decades was not particularly difficult; he just borrowed a secretary one
afternoon a week and polished off all the business. Whitman never even had
a secretary at the MBL, much to the regret of those who had to read his
rather difficult handwriting and his undated letters. In those days the
trustees had to approve all financial decisions, even to spend as little as $1.98
for postage or $3.04 for alcohol (and much administrative effort seems to
have gone into acquiring alcohol until World War II, not so readily available
in pure form then as it now is). Today, we have a group of business
managers of various sorts to run the laboratory. Some are required to
guarantee conformity to legal requirements regulating animal care, scuba
activity, liability coverages, and such. Others keep up with the expanding
physical plant, increasing course demands, sophisticated equipment needs,
or complicated financial arrangements. This complexity makes it harder to
tell just who is in charge, though the scientists, in the form of a corporation,
still officially hold control.
For a long period until he retired in 1986, Homer Smith served as
business manager of the MBL. As the only major year-round employee, he
must have appeared to the public as “Mr. MBL.” In fact, one year when
photographers came to take the necessary set of pictures to portray the
activity of the laboratory, they came in midwinter. They found few scientists
at work in their labs, surrounded by the fancy equipment the photogra-
phers sought. Only Homer Smith was at work. He was persuaded to play all
5 | THE PEOPLE 7X 93
the roles of the MBL in addition to his own. The result appears as a series
of Mr. Smith shots: in the laboratory doing research, at the electron
microscope making observations, reading diligently in the library, and so
forth. The prototypical dedicated scientist at work, in other words. Did
anyone notice that it was the same indispensable Homer Smith each time?
The MBL spirit normally resides in the population of researchers, students,
and administrators working together rather than in any one man.
Edwin Grant ConkGin and Charles Otis Whitman
In earlier years, when there were fewer people, the leaders stood out more
clearly. Whitman—solemn, dedicated, with his shock of white hair and
upright stature —inspired trust. He was clearly a leader, those earliest
students recognized. Edwin Grant Conklin recalled his first encounter with
the already well known man. Conklin was a student at Johns Hopkins under
William Keith Brooks, and Brooks continued to prefer the Fish Commission
to the MBL. As a result, Conklin found himself in Woods Hole at the Fish
Commission table doing research in 1891. Brooks had sent him up to the
seashore to begin his embryological research and had advised him, when
Conklin asked, to study the siphonophores. Upon his arrival in Woods Hole,
Conklin asked where he could find some specimens. Nowhere, came the
reply. Woods Hole had no siphonophores. Thus thrown onto his own
resources, and without a telephone to ask instantaneously for further
guidance from the home advisor, Conklin turned to the plentiful and
efficiently compact local slipper snail Crepidula.
As he began to study the development of Crepidula from its earliest egg
cell stage, Conklin observed the morphological details of cell division and
nuclear as well as cytoplasmic activity. Conklin found the earliest stages of
development fascinating. He turned closer and closer attention to them,
thus embarking on what became known as cell lineage work, in which
researchers meticulously traced the detailed changes in each cell as it
underwent division. They thereby charted the lineage of each cell as it
became increasingly differentiated towards its eventual role in the adult
organism.
One day, Conklin reported, Columbia University cytologist Edmund
Beecher Wilson walked across the street to talk with him. Wilson had also
studied with Brooks at Johns Hopkins but had completed his Ph.D. roughly
a decade earlier. He had already achieved a reputation with his careful
cytological and embryological work. Conklin was thrilled that Wilson was
visiting and he was even more excited when he learned why. Wilson had
been working on his own cell lineage studies, using the marine worm Nereis
instead of Conklin’s Crepidula. Perhaps they could make a close compar-
ison of the two organisms and their changing cleavage patterns. Such a
94 A
E. G. Conklin in 1920s. Photograph by
Julian Scott, MBL Archives.
Edmund Beecher Wilson, cytologist and
MBL trustee. Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
5 | THE PEOPLE Lik 95
comparison might reveal useful keys to evolutionary relationships among
the simple marine organisms, which might in turn help to illuminate those
pressing traditional morphological questions about the origins of the ver-
tebrates and of humans. Conklin and Wilson did compare results and found
striking and informative parallels. Many of the cell divisions proceeded in
nearly identical ways, with deviations occurring as needed to produce the
structural differences in the two adult organisms.
Wilson also reported that Whitman wished to talk with Conklin about
his work. Whitman had been one of the first to suggest that looking at the
early cell stages might be useful to answer important evolutionary ques-
tions, and he was interested in what he had heard of Conklin’s work.
Conklin went when invited, of course, and explained what he was doing.
Whitman asked what he intended to do with the work, and Conklin re-
sponded that he did not know. In fact, he rather despaired of finding
someone to publish his dissertation, especially since Brooks had said that
publication of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s dissertation the year before had used
Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1923, the first
Nobel laureate with MBL connections.
Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner,
MBL Archives.
96
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
up all the Hopkins money available for such purposes. Whitman offered to
print it in the Journal of Morphology, which he edited, thereby solving
Conklin’s problem.
But Whitman insisted on color plates with great detail to show every
aspect of cellular development, which entailed considerable careful prep-
aration and additional expense. It took Conklin six more years before his
work finally came out in print in 1897. All the colored plates and the sheer
length raised the cost of printing to the remarkable sum of $2,000. At one
point, when Conklin feared that this meant the end of the project, he
expressed his concern to Whitman. Whitman saw no problem, character-
istically responding “After all, what is money for?”
Whitman’s support, and the community of sympathetic workers that
he found at the MBL demonstrated the vital way that the MBL influenced
science. Other researchers soon joined in the cell lineage work, and Conklin
moved across the street to become a loyal MBL investigator and later trustee
until his death in 1952. Whitman taught students and colleagues to look
closely, to see details, and to draw carefully. Conklin’s own teacher, Brooks,
ridiculed Conklin’s masterful job, suggesting that he did not see the point of
such mere ‘cell counting.” Yet Conklin did not just count cells, and Brooks
came to accept Conklin’s own insistence that he was a “friend of the
egg” —the whole egg, both cytoplasm and nucleus together. Conklin’s view
had its influence on later embryology classes, which had become increas-
ingly specialized and reductionistic by the 1930s. Students recall Conklin’s
decades of visiting lectures and his dynamic emphasis on the egg and on the
whole cell and cell interactions.
The Tradition of Research
Costello later adopted Conklin’s traditional emphasis when he undertook
work on Nereis, the same worm that Wilson has studied. Wilson, who
suffered from crippling arthritis, died in 1939, but his wife continued to
spend her summers in Woods Hole. When the young Costello met her and
explained that he was studying the embryonic development of Nereis, she
responded happily, ‘Oh, my husband loved that egg.” But, she reported, the
problem was that with Nereis one has to collect specimens and then start
observing at night. That meant that even the year they were married, he was
spending his nights collecting and watching in the lab. “That,” she recalled,
“was very distressing.” Years later, when Costello met her again at a party,
she recognized him as the young Nereis fellow and asked what he was
doing. When told that Costello was still examining the nature of cleavages in
the Nereis eggs, Mrs. Wilson responded that “E. B. would have liked that.”
A classic paper of Wilson's on germinal localization in the molluscan tooth
5 | THE PEOPLE NN 97
shell Dentalium appeared in the first volume of the Journal of Experimental
Zoology; Costello's paper on Nereis is in the one hundredth volume. Clearly,
Costello felt very proud to belong to such a tradition of cell lineage studies
begun by Wilson and Conklin so long before at the MBL.
In fact, he insisted to me when I was a fresh graduate student in the
history of biology that I should study Nereis myself. But he did not want me
ordering eggs or worms from the supply room. Rather, it was essential to
take Costello's own net and his light and obtain special permission to go to
the MBL dock at night. There in early summer, shining the artificial light
into the water mimics the full moon and stimulates the beautiful and
complicated mating maneuvers. The male and female worms begin to
dance toward the light. They trace out intricate spiral patterns in the water,
becoming more and more frenetic with time. Eventually the moment comes
when the females release their eggs and the males release their sperm into
the water, which suddenly becomes very cloudy. The embryologist can
either grab the worms just before that point or collect some of this water
and run for the lab to start watching cell division. The realization that simple
observations are extremely difficult to make, and that it is very tedious to try
to reproduce the meticulous cell lineage work that was done with simple
equipment a century ago is instructive. The sense of following the same
tradition of research as Wilson, Conklin, Costello, and others is also inspir-
ing. Some recent returnees to cell lineage work have similarly felt the
pleasure of participating in such traditions.
Geneticist Tracy Sonneborn epitomized the feeling and the excitement
at the MBL when he wrote to his aunt and uncle. He wanted to thank them
for their generous twenty-first birthday present and to tell them what he had
done with the money. As a student at Johns Hopkins under Herbert
Spencer Jennings, Sonneborn had enrolled in a summer course at the
MBL. He wrote from Woods Hole in 1926:
If you could only know the childish delight and wonder and amaze-
ment which I have been experiencing the last few nights, you would be
certain [that I will never grow up]. I just wrote to mother about it, but I’m
going to write it to you because I want to be sure you hear.
I've been staying up over my microscope the last few nights watch-
ing a new living being formed! Can you believe that? Well, it's absolutely
so. I've collected certain marine animals whose mating reactions are
governed by the moon; at full moon and for the first quarter thereafter
they spawn. It is a simple matter to collect them at night with a flashlight;
they are strongly attracted to the light, just like moths and swim right up
to you so that they can be scooped out and brought to the lab. When I
am ready, I allow them to mate. Right away, I take a drop of water
containing hundreds of eggs and thousands of sperm and put it under
the microscope. Then I can see the whole drama in all its details.
98
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
The sperm swim up to the egg, penetrate it and fuse with it. This
act of fertilization completely transforms the egg so that it’s [sic] whole
substance undergoes a reorganization. It soon begins to divide: the
single egg-cell transforms itself; right before your eyes, gradually but
surely, into two cells. More rapidly, each of these divides in half and there
are four cells. Now things happen apace. In a little while there are
hundreds of cells developed from the single cell; and wonder of won-
ders, the organs begin to take form, whip-like locomotor appendages
appear. Then you think you're seeing illusions from too much staring
and gaping: it can’t be true. The things are actually beginning to swim
around! But you become convinced that such is actually the case. Can
you realize the thrill of seeing the whole process of the formation of a
new creature? It simply makes you gasp. Do you wonder, then, that I still
feel the amazement and wonder of a child when I see such things?
Aren't you glad that your gift is helping me to buy the instruments
that make it possible for me to see such things, and to retain the
immortal astonishment of a child at how things work, and to keep me
wondering why? Perhaps, but this is almost too much to hope for—I
may even help to find out the why and how of some of these wonderful
things, with the aid of those instruments.
The only flaw in carrying out these studies today is that the current
emphasis on the giant squid axon has introduced some squid into the Eel
Pond. These animals like to eat the unsuspecting Nereis in the midst of the
worms’ sexual activities. Ethicists somewhere probably worry about
whether the observer is morally guilty for provoking the attack.
Leaders
In those early decades of collecting on the dock, there were a few leaders
who clearly stood out. Conklin, Wilson, Morgan, Loeb, Montgomery, Har-
vard’s George Howard Parker and Yale’s Ross Granville Harrison joined
Whitman and Lillie as top men. To one admirer, it seemed that the senior
scientists in the beginning were “real luminaries in science’ and made a
lasting impression. Later there seemed to be many more scientists who
stood out in different ways rather than as leaders overall, but that change
was largely due to changes in science and the structure of science rather
than to anything about the MBL itself. With time it became much more
difficult for individuals to master all the concepts and problems of the day
the way those leaders seemed to in the early part of the century. Research-
ers saw with some regret the moves from general biology, concerned with
concepts pervading the field, to what one observer called the more special-
ized ATP Age and later the DNA Age. In addition, the pressures to ‘publish
or perish” and the greater rewards for publishing ahead of the competition
5 | THE PEOPLE
Lie 99
have made many scientists think twice before openly discussing their ideas
and innovations, thus cutting off free discourse. Science changes, and so do
the individual scientists’ roles. Today there are some administrative leaders,
some brilliant fund-raisers, and some world-class scientists. Very few people
have the time or energy to excel in all areas.
In those earliest years, Whitman, Lillie, and the others could represent
MBL leadership both scientifically and administratively. These were all
exceptionally strong men, with a conviction as to what a biology program
should be like and about how to effect such a program at the MBL. Those
were simpler times, when they could feel confident about what they were
doing and could urge inclusiveness rather than always being forced to make
exclusive decisions. These men towered far above the others in leading the
MBL and American biology. They took canoeing and hiking trips together,
attended meetings together with long train rides to talk things through, and
they edited the Journal of Experimental Zoology together. These men were
close friends and made up the sort of unique group that rarely comes
together. They were also recognized as world leaders in biology generally.
Their presence at the MBL helped show the international scientific world
that this was a leading place for both research and teaching excellence.
MBL Personalities
There were others who stood out through force of personality as well as
scientific excellence. Columbia’s Thomas Hunt Morgan was highly re-
garded, for example, not only for his work on regeneration, heredity, sex
determination, and later genetics, but also as a popular member of the MBL
crowd. He was known, at least to some of the Woods Hole community, for
his clean white shirts. The story, greatly exaggerated according to his
daughter Isabel but told by several local sources, was that his mother
insisted that her son’s shirts should be a priority for laundering. He must
have clean white shirts, rather than the more typical detachable collars, to
wear each day to the lab. This vehement demand impressed the launderers
in town.
Even such prominent people could be the subject of friendly jokes.
Paul Reznikoff recalled a party at Columbia attended by a number of MBL
people. Morgan, who was later to win a Nobel Prize, appeared at the door
and asked what people were drinking. Cocktails, was the reply. Morgan
asked for one, though it seemed to the partyers that he was not used to such
drinks. As he began to feel the effects, he asked Reznikoff, “Young man, why
don't you change your name?” ‘Well, Dr. Morgan, I really don’t see why I
should,” Reznikoff answered. Morgan rejoined with alcoholic wisdom, “Oh,
I see, I see; that’s your name and you want to keep it.” “Well,” Reznikoff
responded, ‘that’s probably a good reason. Now you tell me, Dr. Morgan,
100
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Robert Chambers, cell
biologist. MBL Archives.
why don’t you change your name?” After all, Morgan was named after a
“bloody pirate.” The students might have pointed out Morgan’s relationship
to a Confederate general as well. It is always reassuring to “have something”
on the great leaders.
Columbia's cell biologist Robert Chambers provided even more fond
amusement to the MBL community. At the end of the season one year, he
and his wife were rushing to make the train on time, as the family often ran
late. The laboratory community had pitched in to help get all the Chambers's
belongings to the station, because very few people had cars in the mid-1920s,
and those who did often used them to help others. When they reached the
station, the Chambers couple suddenly realized that they had left their son
Bobby home in the bathtub. Mrs. Chambers kept the engineer busy talking,
while the young helpers hurried back to wrap the baby in newspapers and
bring him to the train.
Robert Chambers was evidently the prototypical absent-minded profes-
sor. A favorite story concerned a day back in New York, but it could have
happened in Woods Hole. Chambers had taken all the family’s umbrellas to
be repaired and had forgotten to retrieve them. When he went off to
5 | THE PEOPLE N 101
Columbia in the morning, his wife insisted that he must stop and pick up all
six on his way home. Chambers rode the street car to work, then absent-
mindedly picked up the umbrella next to him as he prepared to disembark.
The lady next to him said, ‘“Hey, mister, that’s my umbrella.” With sufficient
apology and a charming smile, he persuaded her that he had simply made
a mistake. That evening, he entered the street car with his six repaired
umbrellas all wrapped up to take home. There was the same lady. She said,
“Oh, say, you had a good day today, didn’t you?”
Cooperative Administration in a Community
The MBL has always attracted a variety of people, able scientists with various
personality quirks that make the community more interesting. From the
beginning Whitman stressed that the MBL was a community, consisting of
specialty cells organized into a functional, cooperative whole organism. As
second director, Lillie chose to perpetuate that view. Whitman imposed his
vision of the MBL by running the place in a dictatorial manner and making
as many of the decisions as possible himself. Lillie held far more meetings
but brilliantly used committees to work things out. Lillie reportedly had little
patience with interminable arguments, where everyone saw the positions
early on and realized the points of disagreement. Instead of listening further
and working to effect some compromise, he appointed a committee,
naming the most vocal people on the extremes of a question and giving
them the task of bringing forth a proposal.
The system generally worked and produced the sense of cooperative
administration through committee work. However, perhaps it worked too
well in the early decades, because it made people want to stay and be part
of the MBL. The same people loved Woods Hole, bought summer places
there, and returned summer after summer. With so few housing openings
it became too difficult for many, especially married, new researchers to join
the group. This created a shortage of new leaders by the 1930s, and it took
new housing and new resources to attract new blood. Perhaps the same
sort of closure could happen again, unless more housing can be provided
to keep young people coming back and bringing their own students, who
will in turn keep coming back. ... The MBL is trying to meet this critical
need.
Nonetheless, the sense of a community of research has persisted and,
indeed, represents the spirit of the MBL. New people have always managed
to squeeze in among the “regulars.” The decision in 1940 to rotate course
instructors more frequently than the nine years then typical, reducing the
post to no more than five years, helped to bring in enthusiastic and
energetic recruits. The wonderfully appropriate sculpture of a group of
three scientists engaged in eager conversation, created by Elaine Pear
102
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Cohen and entitled ‘‘Woods Hole: The Scientists,’”’ depicts the atmosphere.
And the story from 1929 about Maurice Rayon, the botanist who worked on
silkworms, illustrates the importance of community. Someone heard that
an unpleasant person was coming to occupy the one empty research table,
so the botanists invented Dr. Rayon and kept his correspondence and
research going for a while until the crisis had passed. The table was
therefore “occupied” and safe from the undesirable visitor. No one knew
just who had done what or who was in the know.
Today the institution has become too successful and too large to rely on
such a cooperative, community approach any longer. Those who call for a
return to the old times probably do not understand the complexities of
funding and publicity central to any modern research institution. Those
who long for those old times have many sympathizers, but perhaps little
foundation in reality. The current system of committees and helpful ad-
ministrators at all levels has made many things run more smoothly.
Jobs and Fellowships
One thing that has not changed appreciably is the diversity of people
attracted to the MBL, some bringing with them little more than a desire to
be here. One young student, Arnold Clark (later a geneticist at the University
of Delaware and a long-time MBL regular), was so eager to learn biology that
he arrived with no job, only ten dollars, and no place to stay. He went to the
head janitor, T. E. Tawell, to ask for a job. Tawell replied that things were
very tight just then and asked whether Clark could wait for a while, maybe
two days. In two days, Clark returned and was given a job sweeping the
floors of Lillie at five in the mornings. He would arrive at that time, have a
glass of grapefruit juice with Mr. Tawell, then get straight to work, finishing
in time for his morning class and laboratory work. One morning he had to
return to the Lillie Building in midmorning. To his dismay, another fellow
was sweeping the very floors that he had swept only a few hours earlier. He
dejectedly asked Mr. Tawell what he had done wrong. “Nothing,” was the
answer as Tawell explained, ‘Well, Arnold, you're not the only one around
here who needs a job.”
Others found jobs in the collecting department. When Horace
Stunkard arrived from the midwest, where he had been told that he must
go to a marine station for a season in order to receive his degree, he had no
job either. He applied to George Gray in the supply department and
obtained a position helping with collecting, despite his landlubber’s igno-
rance of marine organisms. He learned fast; he had to.
Fortunately, various granting agencies have arisen in the course of the
twentieth century, so that investigators now arrive with National Science
Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), or even Guggenheim
5 | THE PEOPLE Lie 103
And still they sweep. Janitor sweeping out
Lillie auditorium, 1952. MBL Archives.
Polly (foreground) and Ruth Crowell,
longtime MBL employees. Photograph
by Alfred F. Huettner. MBL Archives.
104 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Fellowships under their belts. Students may apply for a number of special
scholarships to attend courses or may receive fellowships to carry out
research. MBL advocates have recognized the importance of such funds for
scientific work, as when Columbia physiologist Harry Grundfest appealed to
the community to write to congressmen to urge passage of the NSF bill.
And generous donors have set up important privately funded fellowship
programs.
Just one of several such programs that reflect the MBL spirit so well is
the Frederick B. Bang Fellowship. Bang, a physician, was Professor of
Pathobiology at Johns Hopkins, studying infectious diseases. On his way
back to Baltimore from doing research at Mt. Desert Island in 1950, he
stopped in at Woods Hole to visit a colleague, who insisted that he and his
family stay for a few days. They did and were hooked from then on. When
Bang visited the Marine Resources Building, he was astonished that they
simply threw away the dying animals, which were of no interest to the
researchers who needed healthy living specimens. With his interest in
pathology and immunology, he was amazed at the waste. He saw a potential
gold mine of research material in these discarded animals. The next year, the
family returned to Woods Hole, bought a house, and continued to return
thereafter. Bang and his wife, Betsy, loved their work at the MBL. Thus, when
Bang died in 1981, the family sought to make it possible for other research-
ers to work at the MBL on the immunology, pathology, and infectious
diseases of marine invertebrates. Their story is typical of the sorts of
cross-fertilization of disciplines that occur here, and the ways in which the
effect carries on.
Another such fellowship was the Lucretia Crocker Grant, named after
an influential Boston educational reformer, and designed to help teachers
learn natural history. This grant program provided an opportunity for many
women at the MBL, as many of them were school teachers. With fewer high
school teachers coming to the MBL, the Crocker fellowship recipients have
changed a bit over time.
Minorities at the MBL
Only recently have larger numbers of women begun to enter the domains
of investigation and instruction in their own rights rather than as students
or as adjuncts to husbands and advisors. At first not all of the women were
well received. Some were the brunt of unfriendly practical jokes. For
example, a group of men saw one of the women, a rather hefty person, on
the floating collecting dock with her heavy and voluminous skirts on,
bending over to haul up a sample. They casually stepped together onto the
dock, which thus sank several inches and soaked the poor woman, whom
they did not really like. She probably did not like them much either. Others,
5 | THE PEOPLE nN 105
Sister Florence Marie Scott,
1964. She was a corporation
member and trustee from 1902
to 1965. Loaned by Jane
Fessenden.
such as Cornelia Clapp, have been more fortunate and more integrated into
the community since the very first years.
Examples of women researchers from the middle of this century
include the popular and respected Sister Florence and Sister Elizabeth.
Both spunky and dedicated researchers, they have inspired many fond
reflections. Sister Florence, who returned to the MBL for over thirty years,
was so popular that she once said that she almost dreaded walking through
town. She knew so many people and always stopped to chat so that it took
a very long time to get anywhere. When George Scott insisted on calling her
106
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
E. E. Just in Old Main, 1923.
Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
“Sister Scott,” since that was her last name, she retaliated by calling him
“Great Scott.” She had a fine sense of humor and told wonderful and not
always proper stories. She and Sister Elizabeth helped to break down any
prejudices that nuns could not do science.
Sister Elizabeth was also admired. Early one morning she went to the
MBL floating dock behind the supply building to check on her organisms.
When she stepped on a plank, it somehow rolled and she fell into the water.
Nobody was around, so she calmly grabbed onto a nearby piling and hung
on until someone came to rescue her. The collecting crew solicitously
insisted that she be taken home in a truck, though she did not want to get
it all wet. When she arrived at the house where she was staying, Mrs. Smith
kindly helped her into a hot bath and took care of her. Sister Elizabeth
explained that she appreciated all the attention, but said “You know what I
really would like to have had would have been a drink of whiskey!”
Black students and researchers have also found a place at the MBL,
though not perhaps in the numbers or quite as early as they might have.
Kenneth Manning's study of Howard University embryologist Ernest Everett
Just and early twentieth-century times at the MBL indicates how uncom-
fortable Woods Hole could be for blacks in the teens and twenties. It was,
of course, a reflection of racism in the society as a whole, carried over to the
MBL community as well. It is clear that many scientists held the highest
respect for Just’s biological work on fertilization and the cell surface. As
Paul Reznikoff recalled, Just was “one of the most remarkable men” he had
met, a meticulous researcher who was always ready to give up his own
5 | THE PEOPLE 7 107
——— a eae ae
valuable time to help anyone with experimental work. While Reznikoff's
group was getting about 60 to 70 percent successful cleavage, Just would get
98 to 99 percent. They asked him how he did it. In his typical way, he showed
them. He kept his starfish and sea urchins in a covered bucket, even during
the very short time it took to move them into the lab. He thus avoided the
accelerating and confounding effects of the sun.
Foreigners have always been officially welcome, though the relative
proportions of visitors from different countries have changed significantly
with time. The wars and depression brought refugees to America, among
them many excellent scientists, but the MBL did not have sufficient re-
sources to take them in in substantial numbers. Refugees often arrived with
nothing to support their research or even to live on, but helpful scientists
did sometimes adopt some of them and gave them space in their labs.
Japanese students have played a prominent role at the MBL at various
times, beginning in the earliest years when Whitman’s student Shosaburo
Watase attended. Whitman regarded Watase as probably the leading cytol-
ogist in America and promoted him at the University of Chicago and the
MBL. Spending his summers in Woods Hole, Watase evidently felt himself
well treated and comfortable, despite his imperfect English. In Chicago, he
met with less hospitable treatment as the administration criticized his
teaching and failed to award him promotions. This leading cytologist even-
tually left the United States and the MBL to return to Japan.
In the early years Whitman also hired Japanese artists for the summer
staff, to help with drawing and final coloring of plates. Eventually they found
American artists and photographers as well. Whitman's connection with
Japan dated to the years he had spent teaching biology at the Imperial
University of Tokyo. He had had only four graduate students and fairly
limited facilities to work with, but all four became published, successful
professional biologists. Whitman gained tremendous respect for the Japa-
nese people but not for the University of Tokyo bureaucracy. He left his job
in Japan partly because they told him that his students could not publish
their own work under their own names. The professor's name must be
given as author. Whitman rebelled against what he saw as a gross stupidity
and helped to have the papers published in other, more tolerant journals
elsewhere. In Japan, he nonetheless acquired a love for the people that set
the atmosphere of acceptance at the MBL.
A framed notice on the wall of the library's card catalog room also tells
of the sympathy between Japanese scientists and the MBL. The handwritten
sign reads:
This is a marine biological station with her history of over sixty years.
If you are from the Eastern Coast, some of you might know of Woods
Hole or Mt. Desert or Tortugas.
108 rN
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
If you are from the West Coast, you may know Pacific Grove or Puget
Sound Biological Station.
This is a place like one of those.
Take care of this place and protect the possibility for the continu-
ation of our peaceful research.
You can destroy weapons and the war instruments.
But save the civil equipments for Japanese students.
When you are through with your job here notify to the University
and let us come back to our scientific home.
— The Last One to Go
This had been addressed to the submarine squadron occupying Mikasi
Laboratory. When Costello saw the poster, which had found its way to the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he thought the brushed handwrit-
ing looked familiar and had a friend look up an old Japanese friend of his
from the MBL, Katsuma Dan, to learn if he had made it through the war. He
had. And Costello was right, the poster was Dan's.
Katsuma Dan had come to the United States to work on a Ph.D. with
cell biologist L. V. Heilbrunn, even though Dan knew little English. Dan and
his wife, Jean Clark Dan, were very popular, so that the MBL community
sympathized as the Dan family in Japan suffered various political problems.
This ts @ marine biota gicel
Station with Cer Ki story of
Over sixty years,
on are from The Sesterh Gest
Some of yen might kien Woods We ov
Init Desert ev Torfagns.
if you are fr™ the Was Coast
yu may Know Faerfie rove or
iM at Soand Diolspren Nalion,
This place i Sa place Gk, ane of these,
Toke qe as ple and prolee
the possi b/ gor He continuation
pot jee f¢ research.
24 can destre
& weap ons and
the War Ne he fem
Bul save He civel cenipnents
fer ny ead tiderats
(hen Kon are Threug&
with sar job tere
hatify ops University ana
Lt Us CoMm< back to aur
scientific hone
The fast one To g0
5 | THE PEOPLE Li 109
Sears Crowell and Emperor Hirohito
examine some hydroids and
nudibranchs, 1975. MBL Archives.
Japan had been a strictly closed country, and Dan told Costello that his father
and uncles were brought up to believe that they would be beheaded if they
went into a foreign country. Japan was opened when his father was about
sixteen, however, so he was sent to study engineering in the United States,
where he and his brothers attended Harvard and MIT. They then returned
to introduce American engineering and mining methods to Japan. When
Katsuma Dan arrived in turn years later, he and Costello shared a lab at the
University of Pennsylvania. They drove together to California one year, in a
car that boiled over at every hill, and they then went on to the MBL together.
At the University of Tokyo Dan later taught cell biologist Shinya Inoue, now
a leading year-round MBL researcher.
After the Dan era, the emperor came to the MBL. In 1975 Emperor
Hirohito proposed to visit the United States. Where did he wish to go? To the
Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, undoubtedly leaving a host of
diplomats scratching their heads and scurrying for their Massachusetts
maps. A marine biologist himself, he wanted to see the famous laboratory.
But the MBL is not accustomed to fancy dress and formal company. They
fixed up the men’s room, which had languished away for years and had
acquired a layer of grime and intellectual graffiti. They polished the floors
and covered them with red carpets. They prepared tea for the honored
visitor and presented an impressive array of fancy local cookies. The em-
peror came, took part in formal receptions of WHOI and the MBL, and
graciously signed his name in a guest book and in one of his own publica-
110 A\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Emperor Hirohito autographing a copy of his book, Some
Hydrozoans of the Bonin Islands, in 1975. Left to right: Paul Fye,
James Ebert, and secret servicemen. MBL Archives.
tions (now in the Rare Books Room). When the time came for the scheduled
tea break, the emperor instead rose and said ‘‘Let’s get on with the science.”
The group then looked through the microscopes at the hydroid specimens
that had been prepared by Indiana University biologist Sears Crowell and set
up in the library. Security remained tight around Woods Hole and especially
in the MBL library that Saturday, and people brought out and fit themselves
into suits they probably had not used at the informal MBL for many years.
W. J. V. Osterhout reports a rather different sort of special visit years
earlier when President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago
came to visit around 1900. Chicago was a major research university and an
important supporter of the MBL. Harper was quite a dignitary by MBL
standards of the time. Captain Veeder, who took charge of boating expedi-
tions, arranged a clambake at Naushon Island for the distinguished visitor.
One of the guests was introduced as a general in the Grand Army of the
Republic. He pulled out his flask in that late nineteenth-century time when
few proper people imbibed (at least in public) and proceeded to become
5 | THE PEOPLE Lh 111
quite genial. He even became sufficiently playful to throw a slice of water-
melon, which promptly landed on Harper’s stiff formal white shirt. The next
day Jacques Loeb was to take Harper to the train. Since they arrived early,
Harper decided to get a haircut. He could not understand why Loeb so
strongly resisted his having his hair cut. Finally Loeb broke down and
escorted Harper to the barber, who was that very general, in no shape to cut
anyone’s hair.
In another incident a photographer concluded that Loeb was trying to
poison him and vowed never to return to such a crazy place as the MBL.
This man was helping Loeb with some difficult photographic work. He
insisted that he was ill and could only work if he had some whiskey to help
him. Loeb recalled that he had seen a bottle in Whitman’s lab with a
well-known visiting scientist's card of thanks attached. Because Whitman
did not drink whiskey himself, Loeb assumed that he would be willing to
oblige the photographer. Whitman was happy to do so. It turned out,
however, that the visiting scientist had never really left any whiskey. Instead
Lillie and Parker had filled some old bottles with seawater and left them on
Conklin’s desk with a leftover card of the scientist's. Conklin had recognized
the joke and had responded that there must have been some error and that
the bottles were surely intended for Whitman. Thus they had been carted
off to Whitman's lab, where Loeb found them. Salt water it was, and Loeb
had to find other help to complete his photographs.
E. G. Conklin and son in a
moment of relaxation together.
MBL Archives.
112 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
E. B. Wilson with sons of the photographer. Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
MBL Staff and Children
In addition to the scientists, the administrators, and the librarians, the MBL
has a host of other people who keep things running year-round. These
people are truly indispensable, even though they are often not accorded the
attention they deserve. From the watchmen to the janitors, to the collecting,
dining hall, electrical, buildings and grounds, chemical, and mail room
staffs, and all in-between, this considerable and influential group includes
individuals who are fascinating in their own right. One finds a buildings
supervisor who was born and has always lived in the same house in Woods
Hole and whose family has worked for the MBL since the beginning. Or a
watchman who has traveled around the world and has read more widely
than most academics. Or the administrative assistant whose grandmother
owned houses next to the Eel Pond and who herself worked cleaning rooms
at the lab years ago. Or the janitor who, as a native Latin American, has a
wealth of information and more than a few ideas that he would like to teach
the U.S. government officials about Central American life, history, and
politics.
One other group of MBL people to whom visitors should listen if they
want to get at that much-touted MBL spirit is the children. MBL children are
5 | THE PEOPLE nN 113
Lilian and Isobel Morgan with chicken. Photo-
graph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
T. H. Morgan with daughters Lilian and Isobel,
1918. Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner,
MBL Archives.
114 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
unique. Recently two young boys, probably about ten years old, were talking
at the MBL beach. One reported that his family was going to Australia in the
fall for his dad’s sabbatical, and that it was going to cost them each over
$1,000 for airfare. But that was okay, he said, because they were going to take
it off their grant. The other boy asked why they were going. “Well,” came the
ten-year-old’s reply, ‘‘the animals are different colors there and they develop
differently than the ones here.” The other boy reported that his family was
just going to North Carolina for their leave the next year. ‘That's not so bad,”
the first one replied, ‘‘we went there once for my mom's sabbatical and it
was neat too.” Children do not talk like that in the less stimulating “real”
world.
Neither do children out there choose to spend their summers in
school, let alone to study something serious like science. But many MBL
families find themselves drawn back to Woods Hole even in years when they
meant to stay home or go elsewhere. The children do not want to miss their
friends or a session of the Science School, held in the old schoolhouse
building. There they take classes of all sorts, with a liberal dose of seashore
field trips included. Ten-year-old Science School students know more about
marine organisms than many professional biologists in other parts of the
country. Then as the children get older, they often work at the MBL, maybe
in the supply department, as Whitman’s and Conklin’s sons and so many
since have done, or in the Mess, or cleaning dorm rooms, or more recently,
in the library or photocopy room. Perhaps it is the enthusiastic response of
the children that captures and perpetuates the MBL spirit best.
Unknown child on the beach. Photo by Alfred
F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
5 | THE PEOPLE Li 115
; . ; 4 > , % *
FiS kids: Rebecca Jackson, Tracy Goldsmith, Eric Hallstien, John Gagnan. Photograph by George Liles. MBL Archives.
The new “FiS Kids’ program to promote Futures in Science for high
school students and their teachers promises to involve more of the local
youth in science at an early age. During the first year, the four selected
students pursued sophisticated projects. Each got negative as well as some
positive results. Each expressed with enthusiasm the value of the experience.
These students learned early what science is about: it is not always so neat
and tidy as it seems from most preprogrammed elementary laboratory
exercises, but it is a lot more fun and exciting. With the cooperation and
support of the MBL Associates, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the
Monsanto Corporation, and the Falmouth school district, this program
exhibits a remarkably successful cooperation of public, private, and institu-
tional interests. ‘Get the younger generation involved in science, and keep
science young” is the motto here.
116 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
NOTES
Donald Costello, discussed his first arrival at the MBL in
his interview recorded in the MBL Archives.
Conklin, on his first years at the MBL, in “Early Days at
Woods Hole,” American Scientist (1968) 56:
112-120, as well as in other writings and even a
phonograph record made during an interview at
Princeton toward the end of his life in the 1950s.
Conklin loved talking about what science was like in the
early part of his career. In a more formal account,
Conklin discussed William Keith Brooks in his
Memoir for the National Academy of Sciences, Bio-
graphical Memoirs (1910) 7: 25-88. He always con-
sidered himself a “friend of the egg—the whole
egg,” aS many students have recalled. See also J.
Bonner, with notes by Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “ ‘What
is Money For?’: An interview with Edwin Grant
Conklin, 1952,” Proceedings of the American Philo-
sophical Society (1984) 128: 79-84. Conklin’s, as
well as Wilson’s, Morgan’s, Whitman’s, and other
bound collections of reprints, including their clas-
sic early papers, are housed in the MBL Rare Books
Room.
There were, in fact, other “top men” besides those
named here, but these men returned year after
year, served as trustees for long periods of time,
worked as journal editors, and generally continued
to play the most active roles in all facets of MBL life
for a long period of time. More information about
each of the men is available in the archival collec-
tions at each home university or at such central
collections as the American Philosophical Society.
Robert Kahler’s Historical Collection interview, recalls
Morgan’s white shirts, though Isabel Morgan
Mountain questions whether the story was over-
stated.
Tracy Sonneborn, letter of August 2, 1926, to his Aunt
Bella and Uncle Jake, printed in Collecting Net (July
1987) 5: 14.
Paul Reznikoffs Historical Collection interview discusses
the cocktail party and Chambers’s stories. Many
people fondly recall Chambers's superb idiosyncra-
sies, often chuckling while relating stories so many
years later.
University of Chicago records as well as the Lillie Collec-
tion at the MBL demonstrate Lillie’s management
style. Sears Crowell provided an account of Mau-
rice Rayon, the phantom botanist, in a story told by
Hannah Croasdale, MBL Archives.
Arnold Clark told the janitorial incident in an interview
while in the MBL Archives one day, while Horace
Stunkard recorded his arrival at the MBL in his
interview in the Historical Collection.
Betsy Bang, personal communication in 1987 and 1988,
provided information about the Bang family’s ar-
rival in Wood’s Hole and about the Frederick B.
Bang Fellowship Fund.
Sister Florence and Sister Elizabeth are remembered in
George Scott's interview, Historical Collection, as
well as by Donald Costello and a number of others.
The fullest discussion of Ernest Everett Just’s stay at the
MBL appears in Kenneth R. Manning's extremely
well-written biography, Black Apollo of Science
(New York: Oxford, 1983). Whitman's experiences
in Japan are discussed in biographies of Whitman
as well as in his unpublished account “Zoology in
the University of Tokyo,” all available in the MBL
Archives.
In his interview deposited in the MBL Archives, Donald
Costello recalled his times with Katsuma Dan, and
a number of documents recall Dan's role at the
MBL.
During Emperor Hirohito’s visit, James Ebert was direc-
tor of the MBL. Records in the MBL Archives and
Ebert's own recollections show that, even with lim-
ited resources, he managed to pull off the event
gracefully and without problem—no easy task for
an informal place without real precedent for state
visits.
W. J. V. Osterhout discusses University of Chicago pres-
ident Harper's earlier visit and the whiskey bottle,
in his Loeb stories sent to the MBL Archives in
1948. Also see Conklin, “M.B.L. Stories,” (Notes,
Chapter 2: “The Story of the Whiskey Bottles,”
pp. 128-129.
Doing Science
Tarpaulin Cove, lighthouse and bell, 1896. Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
au
Captain Veeder aboard the MBL collecting vessel Cayadetta, 1923.
Norman W. Edmond Collection, MBL Archives.
6 | DOING SCIENCE
ABORATORIES TODAY house all sorts of exotic-looking paraphernalia. In some
cases, the equipment even spills out into the halls, with large, heavy-duty,
impressive-looking apparatus designed to sterilize or rotate or otherwise
manipulate the required materials for the intricate operations that make up
science. Fancy high-powered computers have appeared, for example. Or
Shinya Inoué’s unique six-foot light microscope, which is both large and
complex, but which makes it possible to observe details of living organisms
instead of the frozen and prepared dead specimens required for the more
typical electron microscopy. Elsewhere, bright yellow signs on some doors
declare the radioactive goings-on inside. Much of twentieth-century biology
has become complicated and expensive, often requiring teamwork. Of
course, this does not keep the researchers from personalizing their space
with posters, favorite photographs, or even afternoon coffee or tea breaks.
Afternoon tea poured by Mrs. Albert
Svent-Gyorgyi. MBL Archives.
120 A\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Collaboration
Scientists often find that they need a particular tool or a particular proce-
dure which is not readily available. They cannot always just locate the item
in a handy mail order catalog and phone in an order. So the scientist
becomes part designer and engineer. And each MBL researcher learns
from the others. One cell biologist reports that his work in embryology
depended on finding a functional probe of a particular sort to perform
delicate operations. Only in talking to a neurobiologist on the MBL beach did
he realize how to solve his technical equipment problem. Other examples
abound: there is the neurophysiologist working on the horseshoe crab
Limulus exchanging ideas with the expert studying the workings of the fish
retina; they collaborate on analyzing what the brain tells the eye to do. The
salt-marsh ecologist learns from the physical chemist about uptake of
various chemical nutrients. Or the cell biologist studying cell motility in-
spires others to look more closely at the effects of osmotic pressure. The
light microscopist with his unique equipment makes it possible for the
expert on growth of the sperm’s extending acrosomal tip in fertilization and
An early laboratory.
MBL Archives.
6 | DOING SCIENCE
* 121
A 1980s laboratory.
Photograph by M. Rioux,
MBL Archives.
development actually to look and see the tip moving and extending. These
research collaborations are possible here because of the unusual mixture of
people who might not normally even meet each other, let alone talk and
exchange technical ideas.
Indeed, this sort of cooperation makes the MBL what it is, a sort of
extended “laboratory without walls,” to borrow Albert Szent-Gyorgyi's term.
While scientists elsewhere in the world are sometimes cautioned not to
discuss their work in order to avoid being scooped or to avoid priority
disputes, the MBL has always thrived on open exchange among a growing
group of scientists and students. Back in their academic winter homes, a
neurobiologist or embryologist may be able to talk with only one or two
other people who care about the same general questions. As Yale cell
biologist J. P. Trinkaus put it recently, one tremendously exciting thing
about summers at the MBL is that so many of the top people in neuro-
physiology; cell, molecular, and development biology; and a few other fields
are gathered together. The researcher is bound to find someone who
understands and will share ideas while walking down the hall, to the beach,
or to the library. As neurophysiologist Robert Barlow points out, “If some-
122 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
thing is not working, 99 times out of 100 someone here at the MBL will have
something to help.” The absence of teaching responsibilities and of many of
the more mundane administrative chores allows researchers intense con-
centration on those problems of shared interest during the summers. MBL
workers seem to collaborate far more often with other MBL scientists than
with their longer-term colleagues back at their winter quarters. And they
generate an astonishing array of well-attended special symposia and collo-
quium series all summer long.
Late in his life, Lillie worried that the intense summer research away
from the home lab encouraged quick descriptive work and did not allow the
careful development of more sustained research programs, particularly
demanding experimental programs. It is a problem to pick up and move for
the summer, but the “intellectual rejuvenation” and the opportunities for
exchange of ideas and techniques, as well as the ready availability of fresh
marine material, far outweigh the disadvantages.
Early Days of Marine Biology
The sophistication of the problems and of the equipment today is a far cry
from the earliest days in marine biology, when the Frenchmen Henri
Milne-Edwards and his friends Victor Audouin and Jean Louis de Quatre-
fages took to the seashore with only their nets, lots of baggy jacket pockets,
and an assortment of collecting bottles. German physiologist Johannes
Miller then took his group of students to North Sea holiday spots and added
a small boat and larger collecting nets in order to make what he called
pelagic sweepings. With such simple equipment, a few men sought to learn
about life in the sea, life that they had only recently begun to recognize for
the richness and diversity it exhibited.
One of the students who made the pilgrimage to the North Sea with
Muller was ardent evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, who sought to find the
earliest life forms in the ocean. In turn, he too took his students to the
seashore. In his desire to establish a permanent marine station, one of those
students, German Darwinian Anton Dohrn, founded the Naples Zoological
Station in Italy in 1872. Dohrn did not envision any simple system of nets and
collecting bottles. His grand laboratory instead contained a magnificent
public aquarium downstairs and wonderfully modern research laborato-
ries upstairs. Visitors could gather there from all around the world, as long
as they had a serious research purpose and as long as they or a sponsor
subscribed to a table for their use.
Our friend Whitman was the first American at the Naples Station,
though as a guest of Dohrn’s, since no Americans had subscribed to a
research table yet. Then came Emily Nunn, later Whitman's wife. Wilson
arrived a few years later, followed by a steady stream of other Americans,
6 | DOING SCIENCE
a. A me f vein 2 ; Re L Pic ; S ra BD : : :
Seated: William Morton Wheeler, W. A. Setchell, Charles O
hats off: instructors, 1892.
Whitman, Hermon C. Bumpus, Sho Watase. Standing: Pierre A. Fish, Jacques Loeb, Edwin O.
tis
Hats on,
Jordan, Charles L. Bristol, Edwin G. Conklin. MBL Archives.
2
3
4
b chaticaie
124
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
many of them MBL researchers as well. Whitman, Wilson, and others
advised their students to venture to Naples, even after they had their own
MBL to satisfy their research needs. For Naples afforded two real advan-
tages, which complemented what the MBL offered: a different set of
organisms to work with and an international group of scientists using the
absolute foremost of contemporary research techniques. Dohrn made sure
that the Naples station had sufficient funds to guarantee the best equipment
and materials needed. As a result, in the early years, biologists said, ‘For
techniques, go to Naples.” Very soon, the MBL became a mecca on its own
for the latest in techniques and ideas.
For techniques, Whitman determined after his trip to Naples that the
Americans needed a manual for marine biology. As usual when he per-
ceived a need, he met it. In this case, he wrote the handbook in question,
concentrating on microscopic techniques for preparation, preservation,
fixing, and staining of specimens. With its emphasis on detailed cytological
study of fixed materials, his Methods of Research in Microscopical Anatomy
and Embryology of 1885 offered the latest word at the time. E. E. Just’s
methods book or Donald Costello and Catherine Henley’s handbook or W.
D. Russell-Hunter’s introductory texts for study of marine invertebrates
filled a similar need for students of embryology and invertebrate biology
years later. In fact, a significant number of the standard biological textbooks
have been written by scientists affiliated in some way over the years with
the MBL.
Science at the MBL looks much different today than it did in those
earliest years, and yet there is a continuity to the changes that provides
perspective on each shift of emphasis. The return of the same people in
different but related roles year after year, and the continuing concern with
some of the same problems and organisms has ensured the persistence of
MBL traditions. Against that background of stability (at times embryology
has dominated; at other times, physiology), the problems, equipment, and
other details have become more specialized, more sophisticated, and
more expensive. Techniques and equipment, problems, and organisms
make up scientific research.
Techniques and Equipment
In the early years, a microscope with the latest lenses and dissecting stand,
a collection of glass dishes and slides and plates, the appropriate stains, a
microtome to slice up specimens (which could be shared with others), and
a few other odds and ends made up the basic equipment kit. By concen-
trating the sorts of research around several central areas of concern, the
laboratory could provide what people needed even with their increasingly
complicated demands. Keeping the researchers and students well supplied
6 | DOING SCIENCE 7X 125
has always been a priority, and a continual challenge. Much of the official
correspondence has concerned keeping up with the growing demands for
supplies and equipment.
Something as apparently simple as running seawater in the laboratory
is necessary to keep specimens alive, for example. Yet keeping the plumbing
system working with 500 gallons of seawater running through the pipes
every minute (with its potential contaminants and corrosive salt) has always
proven difficult. As one of the men responsible for keeping the system
working recently put it, ‘A valve just won't work with a starfish the size of
your hand sitting inside.”
Another problem is getting and keeping male and female organisms
separated when they all come in together in the same bucket. The re-
searcher wants to control development and to start fertilization when he or
she is ready, and not when the animals want to begin. This control makes
it possible to observe any chosen stage of development, even the earliest,
including the fertilization process itself. For one hundred years, many MBL
researchers have concentrated on these early processes, to determine both
the patterns and the incredible processes by which two tiny germ cells
manage to become one complex, coordinated adult organism.
Further equipment helps to turn the individual scientist's observations
into a public record in the form of drawings or photographs. Initially,
familiar pens (often crow quills) and India ink made the requisite drawing
possible. Others used the simple but effective camera lucida to make their
drawings, until photography replaced much of that work in this century.
One student reported that he had had to identify and draw by hand clearly
one hundred specimens of protozoa for Gary Calkins’ protozoology course.
The first fifty or so were easy, he said, but the last ten were awful to find,
identify, or to represent accurately.
Making observations takes some equipment, whether a basic com-
pound microscope (for only a few individuals have ever used simple mi-
croscopes for serious scientific work, even when those would have been
just as good) and stains and drawing paper, or maybe an electron micro-
scope and advanced videotaping equipment. Since the 1970s, Carl Zeiss,
Inc., has helped to provide the very best microscopic equipment for MBL
students and researchers. They loan equipment in exchange for the chance
to try out new ideas with the demanding and sophisticated but respectful
audience. This program has helped to continue the MBL tradition of
making available the very best equipment, which from the very first years
has featured Zeiss equipment.
Besides microscopes, there are the chemicals, procured from the
chemical room. And special glassware, for a while produced by first-rate
glassblower from the University of Pennsylvania, James Graham. In recent
decades, researchers have added radioactive isotopes and the necessary
126 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
accoutrements. There are also autoclaves to sterilize equipment, which the
research of the early decades here did not generally require; and centri-
fuges, bigger and faster and more efficient than those Costello used in his
first years here. Complicated specialized equipment appears as well. People
sometimes have to improvise to meet their particular needs. NIH and NSF
grants finance a high percentage of the increasingly complicated require-
ments of today’s workers.
Of course, sometimes the innovations can prove profound while re-
maining simple. Syracuse University’s Robert Barlow notes that his own
neurophysiological work on the brain of Limulus suffered from the serious
problem that he needed to remove the brain yet keep it alive for at least
several days. For obvious reasons, it usually dies under such circumstances.
Somehow he had to prevent coagulation of the blood without producing
toxic side effects. He could not think of any solution until he happened to
meet a colleague in the MBL mailroom and described his frustrations. Well,
his friend suggested, why not cool a saline solution, cool the brain, and
replace the blood with the saline solution to inhibit clotting. Then do the
required measurements and studies while the brain stays alive and cool.
The suggestion worked, and the very first time brought measurements over
a four-day stretch.
MBL techniques and equipment represent an amalgam of the tradi-
tional and modern, sophisticated and makeshift. Walking down the halls of
the lab buildings and peeking through the doors, a visitor can see tables,
chairs, seawater tanks, glassware, and other basic equipment from an
earlier century alongside such things as ultracentrifuges and Inoué's
fantastic-looking ultimate (for now) light microscope. The more than
100,000 square feet of space for instruction and research are filled with a
full range of equipment and with people to use it in the most creative and
innovative ways.
Problems
Just as techniques and procedures have constantly changed, the sorts of
dominant problems addressed over the years have also evolved. In the
earliest years, most researchers worked on a set of closely related prob-
lems. They asked “big” questions such as how organisms develop and what
their development tells us about their evolutionary relationships. On the
first question, which occupied much of their attention, the MBL group held
an almost exclusively epigenetic position. This meant they believed that an
organism begins as a virtually unformed, though organized, collection of
matter and gradually becomes differentiated into the right kind of organism
during the developmental process.
6 | DOING SCIENCE NN 127
Some MBL embryologists, such as Whitman, were intrigued by the sort
of quasi-predeterminism that German biologist August Weismann sug-
gested in his chromosome theory of heredity, with its collection of deter-
minants, ids, and idants. They found equally intriguing Weismann’s and
Wilhelm Roux’s mosaic theory of development, according to which the
various pieces of the developing organism act as separate bits of of a mosaic,
each predestined by heredity to become a particular body part. Yet they still
sought an in-between, essentially epigenetic viewpoint; extreme predeter-
minism remained a horror to most MBL scientists. Morgan, for example,
saw as anathema Weismann’s idea that inherited germinal material (or
germplasm) might actually determine, in some mechanistic and prepro-
grammed way, how an organism develops. Such an idea is not true science,
he suggested, but just pushes the question of how development occurs back
to a ‘shadowy, ancestral past.” Others at the MBL declared that Weismann’s
speculations seemed as futile as ‘sorting snowflakes with a hot spoon” and
could not possibly explain how development occurs. Still others condemned
such predeterministic ideas as a “scientific misdemeanor.”
To the MBL researchers, it seemed obvious that the internal organi-
zation of the egg itself and its response to environmental stimuli direct
development. Inherited nature plays a role in development, of course, but
so does nurture —as biologists a bit later would have put it. Problems of
development and heredity reigned in the first years at the MBL. DNA
changed the picture that nineteenth-century researchers had had of the
undifferentiated egg, of course, and made it seem more predetermined. Yet
many MBL biologists today would still stress, along with Wilson, Conklin,
Morgan, Loeb, and others, that development is every bit as important as
predetermined heredity in guiding the differentiation process that turns the
germ into an adult.
For the first half-century of MBL researchers the question, ‘‘does each
organism develop epigenetically or by preformation?” could have been
rephrased as: does the egg in some way already possess the organization
that the adult then assumes? In particular, how much is cell division of the
fertilized egg determinate, or fixed, and how much is indeterminate, or
subject to change as conditions vary? Cell biologists today pursue similar
questions. The laboratory of Raymond Stevens, for example, explores the
biochemistry of microtubules, asking what role they play in cell division and
cell processes. Shinya Inoue explores in detail the process of mitosis and cell
morphogenesis, looking at each morphological bit of the cell. Richard
Whittaker’s group examines the way in which the genes control cell differ-
entiation. Others at the MBL have extended cell lineage study to other
organisms, such as the nematodes, to discover exactly what each cell does
at each stage of the developmental process. Each of these laboratory
128 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
research programs addresses the basic problems and uses techniques
developed by MBL scientists over the course of a century.
Rachel Fink provides an excellent example of blending the old and the
new with her work on development of toadfish eggs: she became intrigued
by the eggs after reading about the work of Cornelia Clapp a century ago.
These eggs adhere to a solid surface, which makes them useful for various
sorts of experimental work that tests the relative effects of internal and
external changes in directing development. Clapp had looked at the impor-
tance of gravity for determining the embryonic axis, for example. Fink
decided to study these eggs with current techniques to explore twentieth-
century problems. Her work demonstrates the MBL tradition in going
beyond the earlier work, to combine tradition and innovation in a progres-
sive, productive way.
Traditional views certainly held that environmental factors can exert a
major influence in development, just as internal inherited material does.
Researchers such as Jacques Loeb, who emphasized the physiological and
physicochemical processes of development, began the continued call for a
stronger epigenetic and environmentalist position. To Loeb, it seemed that
the female did not even require any male input. The egg did not really need
any sperm to get it going along its proper developmental pathway; a simple
change of salt concentration in the seawater could do the trick by initiating
artificial parthenogenesis. Chemical environmental factors gained top bill-
ing with him and his entourage of graduate students and assistants well into
this century.
Morgan agreed with this physicochemical orientation, as he embarked
on studies of regeneration and sex determination right up until 1910. Then
his first work in genetics abruptly confronted him with problems of heredity
rather than of physiology and development. Others have carried on the
physiological programs, including Lionel Jaffe, who uses a vibrating probe
to analyze the role of ionic currents in development and regeneration, for
example.
Within the context of discussion about the relative importance of
epigenesis and preformation, and about morphology and physiology, came
other debates about the relative roles of cytoplasm and nucleus in heredity
and development. A number of European researchers had begun by 1900
to accumulate data from observations made with improved equipment (oil
immersion lenses and effective microtomes, in particular) and techniques
(stains, fixing agents, preservatives). These studies suggested that there
might be something important in the nucleus. Indeed, that stainable mate-
rial in the nucleus— appropriately labeled as the chromatin — might retain
its autonomy in the course of cell divisions and might have something to do
with heredity. Because the only thing inherited directly and as a whole from
one generation to the next is the egg, and because this generation of
6 | DOING SCIENCE TN 129
scientists rejected vitalism (see description below), it seemed that the egg
must hold all the material necessary for development. Or at least everything
necessary to respond appropriately to external influences that direct devel-
opment. Because development must be some combination of epigenetic
response and inherited action (or else evolution could not work), something
about the egg must be inherited and organized in some way. Either the egg
cytoplasm or the nucleus was important — or both.
That is what the MBL researchers argued in the 1890s and for the next
century: that both heredity and environment play essential roles in directing
development. Conklin and Watase reminded those who claimed priority for
the nucleus that the mitotic apparatus, necessary for the cell to divide,
actually resides in the cytoplasm and directs the cells’ cleavage patterns. The
nucleus cannot survive, divide, or do anything interesting by itself. Even
modern biologists might do well to recall that Wilson's great ctyological
work and his classic The Cell in Development and Inheritance (1896, 1900,
1925) stressed a balanced view of the nucleus and cytoplasm that was
characteristic of the MBL. Geneticists began to draw attention exclusively to
the nucleus, so that some forgot about the cytoplasm (though Morgan never
did). Others, especially the embryologists, became so distracted by the chase
of elusive chemical “organizers” (or substances thought to direct develop-
ment by organizing the material in the proper way) that they ignored the
nucleus and heredity. Yet other prominent MBL scientists such as Conklin
continually stressed that they remained friends of the cell—the whole cell,
and the whole egg, and the whole developing organism. Recent work in
developmental biology, some of the best done at the MBL cr by MBL alumni,
has returned attention to that lesson: do not forget the cytoplasm in the rush
to identify inherited bits of material in the nucleus.
Also it is important to pursue both zoology and botany, the MBL has
insisted with varying results. From the beginning, the idea to include both
carried the day. After all, the trustees wanted to establish a marine biological
laboratory. Yet those very first years were really dominated by basic devel-
opment of animals and by invertebrate studies. Despite the trustees’ inten-
tions and Whitman's agreement, it took a while before botany really became
established, and it has never gained the status that zoology enjoyed. Indeed,
the botanist who had declared that the Johns Hopkins University program
in biology contained ‘plenty of lobster, but hardly enough vegetables to
make a decent salad” might well have leveled the same criticism at the MBL.
A botany course existed for many years, until the loss of its energetic
director brought its demise. The head of the supply department, George
Gray, made collections of the organisms attached to the buoys near Woods
Hole (especially plants) over several years. As there is no lack of interest
among students, such a course may well be revived in the future to help gain
the balance that the founders said they wanted. A short course on the cell
130
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
and molecular biology of plants run by coordinators from the University of
Georgia has filled that role and has attracted great attention for the last few
years. In addition, the various ecology programs, such as the marine ecology
course, may replace more traditional botanical courses. Recent work on
algae and cell biology of plants also continues the interest in botanical
research.
While botany and zoology have been somewhat unequal partners at the
MBL, the attention to morphology and physiology has been much more
balanced. In the earliest years, morphological work predominated. This
meant a concentration on the structure of organisms rather than on how
they work in life. Structure could_be studied by fixing and staining the
organism to determine exactly how it was made and of what parts. Study of
function requires devising some way to see inside the living organism, or
inventing clever manipulative or experimental ways to gain information
about those internal workings.
When Whitman attracted Jacques Loeb to the MBL, they thereby
introduced physiological work at all levels of instruction and investigation
into the mainstream of MBL work. Whether he was more determined to
include physiology or to enlist Loeb is unclear, but Whitman encouraged
both with great enthusiasm. He particularly endorsed Loeb's experimental
work on artificial parthenogenesis and on regeneration. Though he did not
agree with all of Loeb’s conclusions or with the popular newspaper pub-
licity about ‘controlling life,” he was undoubtedly delighted that Loeb’s
successes attracted others to similar research and to the MBL. To the MBL’s
benefit, Loeb inaugurated the chemical study of developing organisms as
well as physiological work, and he attracted a host of medical researchers
and medically related issues to the lab. Today neurophysiological study,
pursued by many people from medical schools as well as from biological
programs, is one of the specialties of the MBL.
Early on, and probably again today, most MBL researchers are mech-
anists and materialists: they believe that life structures and processes
consist of material and mechanical (including chemical) action. They also
generally believe that biologists can explain living structure and function in
terms of material, mechanical explanations. This does not, however, imply
that they are also all reductionists; they do not all insist that life can be
explained in terms of the component parts of the organism. In fact, it may
be the interactions of the parts, or some sort of wholism, that explains
biological functions. During the years from 1910 through the 1930s, one
alternative view of living process was vitalism, which gained attention
especially through the writings of former experimental embryologist Hans
Driesch. Though most biologists at the MBL were not fully persuaded of the
vitalistic insistence that something more than mere material and mechanics
6 | DOING SCIENCE TN 131
exists, issues of mechanism versus vitalism were quite hotly debated during
that time.
Today less attention is given directly to such metaphysical and episte-
mological concerns. Most problems tend to be more specifically expressed
than they were earlier: in particular, which pathway makes this cell-cell
interaction possible? What does this chemical do in this phase of the
neurophysiological action? Or maybe: what is the quantitative ecological
balance over a small defined area? The problems are better defined.
Impatient with the opportunities that nature provides, biologists have
turned increasingly to manipulative experimental work. These sorts of
questions have recognizable answers in a way that the broader and more
far-reaching problems of the 1890s often did not. They yield more easily to
what we generally count as progress. But such questions do not evoke
animated discussion by the entire community in quite the same way either.
Times change. Now the Friday evening lectures still attract people from the
community at large, but some people in the audience admit that they only
rarely understand what is going on and what the major question is.
Organisms
Sometimes this focus on getting answers to increasingly specific questions
has meant that scientists have lost track of the organisms they are studying.
Some of the more intently focused of the “squid visitors’ may not be able
to identify what their chosen research subject eats or when they mate, for
example. Perhaps it does not matter that they do not know. Certainly it
keeps the brain less cluttered, with more room for biochemical details or
neurophysiological modeling. As one researcher put it, “So what! The squid
has the giant axon. That is really all that matters” — because it works so well
as a model to address the current pressing problems of neurophysiology.
Similarly, Jacques Loeb was rather disinclined to gather animals him-
self and far preferred to have someone else get his specimens for him. It did
not really matter to him exactly where the animals lived or what their
feeding habits at the bottom of some pond might be, as long as they
provided useful models to answer the questions at hand. He was not
attracted to the idea of wading about in the mud or slipping about on the wet
algae of the intertidal zones. Other researchers were more inclined toward
the traditional concerns about behavior and life-style, as is characteristic of
natural historians such as Just, and they ridiculed Loeb’s attitude. A true
scientist must know his beast, Just insisted. Today, a range of different types
of researchers coexist, exploring different sorts of questions with different
sorts of approaches and generating the MBL’s vitality with cross-fertilization
of ideas.
132
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
When a student first arrived in the 1890s, people asked not what
problem the research would address, but rather what organism. One had
to choose carefully because some choices, like Lillie’s selection of the
freshwater clam Unio, sent the researcher off to less pleasant or less
accessible sites to collect specimens. Today’s easier transportation makes it
possible to roam up to Barnstable Harbor to explore life in the mud flats, or
to Sippewissett for the salt marsh. Collectors may tap the colder waters or
move on to the warmer currents of the Gulf Stream. And thanks to the
efforts of private ventures and then the Army Corps of Engineers, since 1914
the researcher has been able to explore life along the Cape Cod Canal, with
its fast-moving currents and access to clear, deep water. Lots of starfish find
their ways into collecting buckets from the canal.
Choosing which organisms to study can be one of the crucial decisions
in biology. Some creatures simply do not like to perform in a laboratory
setting. Others only behave in the relevant way in certain months of the year.
In particular, embryological studies have to begin in early summer for many
marine organisms. For those organisms that are fertile for only a short time,
the researcher has to work frantically, collecting all possible material. After
the short mating season he or she can then begin a more leisurely process
of preparing and observing the materials collected. Occasionally, this means
that the hectic season has passed and the would-be observer has discovered
a fatal flaw in the preparations that makes the materials useless. A season
might thus be lost for serious research and for publishing any papers, on
that problem at least. Until very recently, squid have only been available
during the summers, because they come close to the shore then and are far
easier to collect and bring back than when they migrate further out to sea
in the winter.
The selection of organisms for study has changed over the century, of
course. At first, logically enough, people went to the seashore to study
exclusively marine organisms. Then Whitman began to haul his pigeons
back and forth from Chicago to Woods Hole to carry out behavioral studies
on birds as he had earlier studied leeches and freshwater mudpuppies.
Morgan turned to the abundant and highly variable fruitfly Drosophila for
study of sex determination and heredity. The subsequent explosion of
interest in genetics encouraged the use of fast-breeding, controllable spe-
cies, for which most marine organisms did not qualify as well as Drosophila.
Columbia geneticist Donald Lancefield recalled that he first arrived in
Woods Hole to become assistant to Charles W. Metz, (who moved from
graduate school under Morgan at Columbia to Cold Spring Harbor and on
to the University of Pennsylvania). Metz was then working on Drosophila but
not on the most popular D. melanogaster. He gave still another species, D.
obscura, to Lancefield as his pet subject thereafter. Morgan and others also
brought teams of fly researchers with them each summer, so the MBL had
6 | DOING SCIENCE TN 133
its fruitful fruitfly era, to be followed later by a period dominated by
squid.
The early 1960s brought intense neurophysiological work on the highly
visible and relatively simple giant squid axon. As supply department head
John Valois explains, this is because ‘two very thick nerve fibers, or axons,
run down the sides of the squid’s mantle. These fibers coordinate a system
of muscles that enables the animal to shoot water through a siphon under
its beak, propelling it through the water like a torpedo. But it’s the axons
themselves, not the squid’s behavior, that bring biologists here. Fifty years
ago J. Z. Young discovered the axons. He was the first to penetrate one with
a tiny electrode to measure the electrical transmission of nerve impulses.
Much of what we've learned since then about our own nervous system
comes from work on this animal.”
Valois explains that the demand for squid has escalated from maybe
fifty per month in the 1950s to two hundred (up to four hundred) small ones
per day. Currently, about one third of the MBL demand for marine animals
is for squid, today’s martyr to science as sea urchins, frogs, and guinea pigs
have been in the past. The collectors devised special traps and other tricks
to gather enough squid in the beginning. Recently the national popularity of
seafood has helped. People eat so many of the fish that normally eat squid
that the squid have increased in population and are easier to collect now.
Because squid do not remain alive in traps for more than twenty-four hours,
the increased supply and better collecting methods have saved the day. But
even the vigilant supply staff still occasionally has trouble meeting the
increased demand during peak season. A sort of marine farm to provide
cultivated and more controlled specimens, which Whitman and other
directors have envisioned since the 1880s, could help to solve the problem
and may soon come to fruition.
Beasts of study are chosen for different reasons. One man, who liked
peace and quiet, elected to study the cytology of a particular algae that had
to be scraped from the rocks around Woods Hole about midnight. Another
researcher wandered into the MBL community by accident, because the
Massachusetts Department of Entomology sent him to study corn borers.
Long-time MBL researcher Sears Crowell says that he initially wanted to
study the coelenterates Tubularia and their growth patterns. Or maybe
Hydra, which have enormous regenerative powers. But, he feared, “the
smart guys probably knew about all there was to know’ about those two
types of organisms. He chose other coelenterates instead. He later realized
that hosts of questions remained unanswered about the old familiar friends as
well.
The earlier tendency to divide up the world so that each person chose
an organism and then asked a familiar set of questions of it has changed.
Instead, people in this century have increasingly concentrated on the same
134
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
few organisms because they provide such excellent material for the ques-
tions at hand and because the more that is known about these few, the more
that can possibly be known about the larger problems for all organisms.
These few serve as systems to model general phenomena. With a smaller
number of productive organisms, then, researchers began to ask many
different questions. Thus the comparisons made and the spirit of commu-
nity cooperation were different than those that prevailed in the early
decades.
Collecting Organisms
Whatever the organism, obtaining specimens is a crucial part of research at
the seashore, as elsewhere. In the first year of the MBL, collecting took place
with the help of boats and nets on loan from the Fish Commission, because
the MBL did not even own any waterfront property. Furthermore, the MBL
itself had only two rather insignificant green dories passed on from Annis-
quam, which could not go very far in this area of swift currents and
changing tides. Collecting under the relatively calm nearby docks or near
the shore remained the order of the day. Then, in 1890, the MBL added to
its menagerie of small dories the thirty-five-foot Sagitta, available for longer
collecting expeditions. Then they hired a captain to take charge.
Captain John J. Veeder immediately struck everyone as a perfect
choice, and he served admirably as collector and captain until he retired
years later in 1933. During his term of service, he directed all collecting trips
by student groups, organized class picnics, demonstrated time and time
again that he knew how to put on a real clambake, and as the record books
always say, never lost anybody. In fact, he was a sufficiently good seaman
The crew of the collecting boat
Cayadetta, 1925: Jack Goldrick,
deckhand; John J. Veeder, captain;
William D. Curtis, deckhand; Ellis M.
Lewis, chief; Paul A. Conklin, fireman
and oiler. MBL Archives.
6 | DOING SCIENCE Li 135
Xen :
Invertebrate class on board the Vigilant at Woods Hole dock, 1896.
Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
Setting off on a collecting trip, about 1893. MBL Archives.
136 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Tarpaulin Cove, 1896,
after lunch (note the
ladies’ black umbrellas).
Photograph by Baldwin
Coolidge, courtesy of
SPNEA, Boston.
Lighthouse at Tarpaulin
Cove, 1896. Courtesy of
SPNEA, Boston.
6 | DOING SCIENCE
Collecting under docks,
circa 1910. Photograph
by Gideon S. Dodds,
MBL Archives.
that he avoided any serious troubles and on many occasions rescued
stranded or swamped tourists who lacked his experience or good sense.
Students in the courses those early years generally did their own
collecting. They went out once or twice a week to dredge and gather the vast
variety of life forms to take back to the lab. Until recently the introductory
invertebrate course adopted a phylogenetic approach, proceeding through
the phyla while studying as many species as possible in each. As the classes
grew larger, they ordered a great variety of specimens from the supply
department to supplement their own smaller collections. Some students
recorded that they were expected to eat what they collected and studied, but
that dictum probably found greater compliance for lobsters and crabs than
for starfish or flatworms.
With time, researchers as well as some of the courses turned increas-
ingly to the collecting crews for their materials. Veeder served as official
collector and helped to provide transportation or to gather species that
proved more difficult to find or that localized further away, though the
service remained limited at first. For several years it was possible to
purchase materials from a competitor, though. ‘Colonel’ F. B. Wamsley
learned his trade while working for the MBL, then briefly set up a winter
supply business for himself. Early mornings might find the two competitors
out scouring the choice locations. The MBL staff of collectors tried hard to
138
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
When the dredge comes up. “Dr.” Spenser
explains things, circa 1909. Photograph by Gideon
S. Dodds. MBL Archives.
keep ahead of Wamsley and generally succeeded. Then the MBL hired the
Colonel, a South Carolina school superintendent who loved escaping to the
northern seashore for his summers. At the MBL he wore his grubbiest
slacks and just kept chopping off the bottoms as they ripped and frayed. He
was a master at locating and preparing a variety of species, and many people
recall his sitting and repairing nets for the next outing.
Despite the augmented staff, the old MBL was never like the Naples
Zoological Station, where a researcher placed his order and received his
animals shortly after. Gradually, the collecting group and the supply de-
partment did develop, so that they supplied most of the laboratory workers’
6 | DOING SCIENCE 7X 139
special needs. And eventually they began to take on more and more outside
orders as well. In 1896, for the first time, the MBL reportedly shipped about
$125 worth of specimens to Williams College to inaugurate the winter sales,
which escalated thereafter.
Under Lillie’s directorship, the MBL entered into business with the
General Biological Supply House. In 1913 a graduate student at the Univer-
sity of Chicago, where Lillie headed the program, saw a biological market
and began to fill it. Morris Wells first mailed out forms to biology teachers
the next year. He processed his few orders in his parents’ basement,
provided earthworms or frogs or fetal pigs and brains from Chicago
slaughterhouses, for example. Then with a Ph.D. and eventually an assistant
professorship at Chicago, he expanded his business. In 1918 he incorpo-
rated, with the help of Lillie’s father-in-law, Charles R. Crane, who then
bought 51 percent of the stock. Crane presented this stock as a gift worth
$18,000 to the MBL. The stock value kept expanding so that forty years later
“Colonel” Walmsley and his nets. MBL Archives.
L ita is
ae (IF
¥e
140 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Mending nets in front of Old
Main. MBL Archives.
it was worth well over a half-million dollars, with dividends that also
exceeded that amount.
Yet this business relationship was not an unalloyed joy. It meant that the
MBL collectors spent time preparing things like thousands of pickled
starfish and dogfish and less time in gathering specimens for classes and
investigators. Great business, maybe, but problematic science. Then the
emphasis shifted back toward priority for MBL scientists, and finally the
MBL sold its stock to obtain additional funding for building projects.
William Procter with skiff at Great Harbor, 1923. Captain John Veeder in the wheelhouse of the Cayadetta,
Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives. 1923. Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
6 | DOING SCIENCE i * 141
Collecting. MBL Archives.
Generally, supply directors are happy about the reduced demand, as
they want to avoid overusing the resources. Veeder, for example, was always
careful to avoid overcollecting and threatening the balance of his region. He
preferred to collect sea urchins, for example, at the water’s edges. He felt
that supplies were abundant there, whereas if he disturbed the sea bed, the
population might not be sufficient to ensure fertilization of the eggs and
Seining. MBL
Archives.
142 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
MBL group pulling in the seine with a catboat. The picture appears to have been taken
at Quicks Hole, with Pasque and Naushon in the background. MBL Archives.
might fail to replenish itself. John Valois as current supply director has
followed a similar ethical dictum.
In those early years, the “second-hand steam yacht,” the Sagitta, went
out twice a week with students on board. One experienced collector on the
Sagitta reported that the ship was not perfectly designed for the demands.
There was little deck room for standing or walking, and the boat rolled very
badly even in the rather calm protected waters near Woods Hole. The
Vigilant, which arrived in 1896, proved much more popular, even if not a
perfect ship. This two-masted sailing boat was purchased from a Portu-
guese swordfisherman and had an interesting shape, pointed at both ends
in a manner not typical of American ships. As a result, students called it
Amphioxus, because it looked so much like the long, thin Brachiostoma of
that name. On collecting trips, the group of students and instructors
gathered on board and nearly filled the decks. They began with the Sagitta
towing the Vigilant off the shore. ‘Those collecting trips,’ Winterton Curtis
reported, “to dig for worms at Hadley Harbor, collect along the shore at
Tarpaulin Cove, dredge off Nobska, angle for urchins and starfish in the
Sound, wade the flats at North Falmouth, or new blue crabs at Waquoit
were the highlights of that summer.” Everyone hoped that the wind would
be up and the ship could sail confidently all the way home without the slow
and tedious steam help.
6 | DOING SCIENCE WN 143
“Doc” Hilton extracting flatworms from a
conch, circa 1952. MBL Archives.
George Gray with a shark.
Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
144 A\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
James P. McGinnis preparing a dogfish. MBL Archives.
At other times, the students would go out in small rowboats. Curtis
recalls that when he served on the staff of collectors, Gertrude Stein
attended one of the MBL summer sessions. She had been enrolled as a
medical student at Johns Hopkins but had already decided against a medical
career. She did not make a particularly flattering impression to Curtis: “For
us that summer she was just a big, fat girl waddling around the laboratory
and hoisting herself in and out of the row boats on collecting trips.”
The supply department followed the Mess in hiring students to help
with the increasing work load, as the MBL expanded its extramural speci-
men supply business. Most students quickly learned to wait on the tables.
Learning to sail and to collect marine organisms—and all the other little
tricks of the trade —took longer. One young man recalled his arrival at the
MBL in 1914. His faculty advisor in lowa had urged him to go to the MBL for
the summer. When he responded that he had to work during the summers
in order to attend school during the academic year, he was advised to write
and ask for a collecting job. He did, and he received a job. He had to learn
a lot, and once lay awake all night in his Candle House bunk practicing the
proper knots for making a running boat fast after a particularly embar-
rassing day. The captain’s commands earlier in the day to ‘‘take a line” and
7% 145
6 | DOING SCIENCE
mm iy:
ae
SS ag ee GE = :
ph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
On board the Vigilant, 1895. Photogra
Collecting trip at Quisset, 1897. Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
146 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Collecting methods, revolutionized by the introduction of scuba diving. MBL Archives.
“make fast” had rather escaped his landlubber vocabulary. He said he knew
that a line was the shortest distance between two points and that he had
better do something quickly, but it took him a while to make any further
sense out of such phrases. He did catch on eventually and returned to the
MBL year upon year thereafter, much later even arriving with the help of
more substantial funding from the National Science Foundation.
Others joined the department with greater expertise. Sears Crowell had
grown up nearby and often visited his grandparents in Woods Hole. At
sixteen, he hired on as ‘specimen boy,” the one who carried the specimens
around in buckets to the laboratories. Then he advanced to driving the
rubbish trucks to the dump. Then finally he began actually collecting. One
of the jobs involved working with Wamsley to preserve specimens from a
pond next to the Martha’s Vineyard golf course and walking near the greens;
the golfers never did figure out what was going on with those strange men
carrying buckets. Crowell gained experience and appreciation for the col-
lecting process, which evolved with time, becoming more efficient and
requiring fewer collectors as scuba diving replaced more random net
dredging for some organisms.
John Valois, when he took over as supply director, was accused by his
predecessor of spying on him and of following him around. True, but he
had to. Each collector had his own tricks in the game and kept them secret.
6 | DOING SCIENCE
7 147
—_—_—_——__:«SO _ O_O _
John Valois with visitors,
Ronald and Margaret
Hicks, the Lord Mayor of
Falmouth, England, and
his wife, 1986.
MBL Archives.
They did not keep records of their choice sites and went to some trouble to
keep them unknown. But if Valois was to take over, he wanted to know where
to find things. So he resorted to such tactics as recording the mileage of trips
to collect particularly difficult organisms in order to guess just where the
collecting must have taken place. He wanted to learn the system and to bring
order and organization into the complex collection enterprise.
Sometimes the collectors went out in search of an unusual catch. One
year, before he became assistant director at the MBL, Ulric Dahlgren agreed
to deliver a live shark to the New York City Aquarium in Battery Park. The
shark expedition began successfully. The team did catch the desired crea-
ture, then crated it up and began to tow the crate along behind the Vigilant.
They made it back to the MBL and showed off their prize. But as they began
the long trip to New York, a squall came up. Given the Vigilant’s imperfect
sailing capabilities, both boat and crate tossed in the waves, and the crate
broke loose. Look as they would the next day, the crew could not find it. Only
later did they learn, from a friend in New York who had seen a newspaper
report, that a shark in a crate had washed up on Long Island and had died
shortly thereafter.
Students went on more normal collecting trips and on the annual picnic
into this century, with Veeder in control. The good captain protected
148 A\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888—1988
Laboratory glassware. Today's glassware
comes from the Chem Room, but in
earlier days the MBL had full-time
glassblowers, including Jim Graham.
MBL Archives.
6 | DOING SCIENCE Lh 149
his charges, including his ships, and would not set out when the weather
threatened; with him in charge there were no more exotic whaling stories.
His policy was always to leave on time, not waiting for stragglers, especially
if the tides or weather were turning. Once even the supervisor of the
department, George Gray, was left behind on Naushon Island. He caught a
ferry back later, but he was not pleased. Another time a wealthy student did
get the better of Veeder’s schedule. He was partying with friends and missed
the Cayadetta’s departure. His friends flew up in a float plane and dropped
down right in front of the boat. Veeder had to take him on board. Otherwise,
the captain ruled.
With time, more demands on the collecting crew and the increasing
size of the MBL population curtailed most such participatory collecting
jaunts, and eventually put an end to annual class picnics on nearby islands.
Probably the Coast Guard would not quite approve those days of the
nonchalant approach to sailing trips anyway; only rarely did anyone use a
life vest of any sort. Many long-time Woods Hole residents have their own
boats now, often small sailboats or motorboats, in this time when scientists
make a little more money than when Whitman urged that no one should
become an academic biologist if he expected to make a reasonable living at
it. Money does not attract workers to science, of course. As Szent-Gyorgyi
suggested, it has to be a love of science that drives someone to become a
successful scientist. That, he says, and an average, but not necessarily
above-average, intelligence. What matters is that “you think about it, that you
love it, that you live in it, and that’s your life.”
NOTES
Shinya Inoue’s scientific work is discussed in ‘Exploring Whitman's manual was Methods of Research in Micro-
the Universe of the Cell,” MBL Science (Summer
1986) Vol. 2, No. 2: 2-7. Examples of current science
come especially from J. P. Trinkaus and Robert
Barlow, during personal interviews and through
notes, summer 1987.
On early marine work see American Zoologist (1988) Vol.
28, especially Jane Maienschein’s “Why Do Re-
search at the Seashore?”
On American biologists in Naples, see Jane Maienschein,
“First Impressions: American Biologists at Naples,”
Biological Bulletin 168 Suppl.: 187-191; and Philip
Pauly, “American Biologists in Wilhelmian Ger-
many: Another Look at the Innocents Abroad,”
unpublished paper presented at the History of Sci-
ence Society meeting, 1984. See also Whitman,
“The Advantages of Study at the Naples Zoological
Station,” (1883) Science 2: 93-97.
scopical Anatomy and Embryology (Boston: S. E.
Cassino, 1885). For more recent publications see
Ernest Everett Just, Basic Methods for Experiments
on Eggs of Marine Animals (Philadelphia: Blakiston,
1939); Donald P. Costello and Catherine Henley,
Methods for Obtaining and Handling Marine Eggs
and Embryos (Woods Hole: Marine Biological Lab-
oratory, 1971); and W. D. Russell-Hunter, A Biology
of Lower Invertebrates and A Biology of Higher
Invertebrates (New York: Macmillan, 1968 and
1969). E. B. Wilson’s classic work is The Cell in
Development and Inheritance (New York: Mac-
millan, 1896, 2nd ed. 1900, 3rd ed., 1928). Keith
Benson, ‘The Naples Stazione Zoologica and its
Impact on the Emergence of Marine Biology,’ Jour-
nal of the History of Biology (1988) Vol. 21: 331-341,
discusses the importance of techniques.
150 rN
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
On Lillie’s concerns about the MBL, see James Ebert,
“Cell Interactions: The Roots of a Century of
Research,” Biological Bulletin (1985) 168: 83.
On Valois’s comments on squid as well as the problems
of maintaining the seawater pumps, see James
Shreeve, ‘A World Center of Basic Biology Cele-
brates a First Century by the Sea,” Smithsonian
(June 1988): 90-103 and the full manuscript, which
is longer.
On the role of Zeiss: ‘‘Carl Zeiss and the MBL,” Collecting
Net (July 1987) 5: 8-9.
Robert Barlow discussed his scientific work in a per-
sonal interview in 1987.
Epigenesis-preformation and nuclear-cytoplasmic or
internal-external roles in development were hotly
discussed issues, as revealed by the Biological Lec-
tures. See Jane Maienschein, editor, Defining Biol-
ogy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)
for reprints of some of those key essays, including
William Morton Wheeler’s overview of epigenesis
and preformation discussions. The classic discus-
sion of such issues appears in Jane Oppenheimer's
Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), and Philip Pauly’s
Controlling Life (Notes, Chapter 3) has very helpful
sections as well. The centrality of mechanism-
vitalism debates is considered by W. C. Allee, Allee
Correspondence 1905-1938, Ed Banks Collection,
University of Illinois at Urbana. Thanks to Gregg
Mitman for bringing this latter item to my attention.
Pauly also discusses the work and ideas of Whitman
and Loeb in an unpublished lecture, MBL Archives.
On Loeb’s view of collecting and Just’s reaction, see
Manning’s biography of Just, Black Apollo of Sci-
ence (New York: Oxford, 1983).
In personal discussions, John Valois and Sears Crowell
have provided particularly useful insights into
changes in the types of organisms studied and the
types of questions asked over recent decades, as
have several of the interviews, Historical Collection.
Also, Donald Lancefield discusses early choices of
organisms, Historical Collection.
MBL annual reports discuss the General Biological Sup-
ply Company, as does Lillie’s history (Notes, Chap-
ter 1).
On Dahlgren and the shark, Conklin, “M.B.L. Stories,”
pp. 127-128 (Notes, Chapter 2): ‘The Shark Story,”
pp. 127-128. See also Curtis, “Good Old Summer
Times,” pp. 4-5 (Notes, Chapter 3).
A number of people recall Wamsley, also mentioned in
Lillie’s history (Notes, Chapter 1), and Curtis's
“Good Old Summer Times,” pp. 3-4 (Notes, Chap-
ter 3).
On Whitman and journal publication, see Ernest J. Dorn-
feld, ‘‘The Allis Lake Laboratory,” Marquette Med-
ical Review (1956) 21: 115-144.
James Graham and his glassblowing appear in Collecting
Net stories.
Out of the Lab
Square dancing at the MBL Club. MBL Archives.
Woods Hole
Winter.
2
as
2
<
Ea)
2
7 | OUT OF THE LAB
7 * 153
rr
©,
Canoeing at Hadley Harbor.
Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
NE DAY TWO MEN decided to canoe around Martha’s Vineyard —all the way
around. A look at the map will illustrate what a distance that is, but equally
important is the fact that one side of the island is covered with tall cliffs and
offers absolutely no place to land. The fellows succeeded, just as a neuro-
physiologist recently succeeded in swimming the roughly ten miles to New
Bedford one day. The MBL community plays as intensely as it works. The
energy and camaraderie carry over from labs to seaside activities.
Boating Trips and Beach Parties
For a while in the early decades of the century, the young men and women
spent a great deal of time canoeing around the harbor or around the
Elizabeth Islands. Canoeing was the big fad at the time. They would paddle
154 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Canoeing: a sport so popular
that in 1926 The Woods Hole
Index devoted a chapter to it.
MBL Archives.
over to an island, then walk to the far end to have a picnic, Isabel Conklin
reports. That was all tame and ordinary enough, though sometimes thrilling
if the weather got a bit rough. One time, at a party for men only, three
canoes headed back in the heavy fog to return to the MBL. After a few close
calls and some considerable time heading out blindly into the bay, the group
found the shore and resigned themselves to continuing the long way, closely
hugging the shore.
Alfred H. Sturtevant and
Alfred F. Huettner standing by
their canoe, 1923.
Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
7 | OUT OF THE LAB Li 155
Beach party.
MBL Archives.
The MBL “boys” would also make a game of swimming across the little
space of water, the “gutter,” between the tip of Penzance Point and Devil’s
Foot Island. Just a short space, it seems. But when the tide is changing, the
current rips through that narrow space and makes swimming a challenge.
Boating through the hole proves even more challenging, and a young man
of the 1920s would occasionally try to get his “girl” to try running the hole
with him to see if she trusted him well enough.
Beach parties and boating trips have, of course, remained common
among the group of young people in Woods Hole. An announcement posted
in the post office invited the community to Mrs. Crane’s annual birthday
picnic on Juniper Point throughout the early decades of the century. One
guest recalled the memorable event, complete with a choir from the
Russian Cathedral in New York and sometimes a balalaika performance or
a dance by a popular summer dance school. The MBL group also gathered
for Mrs. Lillie’s picnic trip to Tarpaulin Cove. As the MBL group grew too
large to fit all together on one annual outing, the classes began to have their
own separate picnics; then other informal groups formed as well. As the
original researchers became established and bought their own houses in
town, and as they returned year after year for their family’s summer
vacation, the children grew up. Many established close ties with each other
and with the town, so that some have decided to remain in Woods Hole, or
to retire here, or to visit as often as they can with their own children or
grandchildren. Even those who have not become scientists themselves have
often returned for the atmosphere here.
=
La
Early MBL beach attire. Though
fashions have changed, the
essence of MBL gatherings at the
beach remains the same.
MBL Archives.
7 | OUT OF THE LAB Li 157
Marniages
Quite a few families have actually begun in Woods Hole. Wilson reportedly
introduced Morgan to Bryn Mawr undergraduate student Lilian Vaughan
Sampson, whom Morgan later married. Conklin met his wife while she was
a student in one of the MBL courses, while others met at the Mess or while
waiting tables, for example. Conklin noted that he had begun to generate a
list of MBL marriages until he realized that it was longer than a ‘Catalogue
of the Ships of Homer.” If “marriages are made in Heaven,” he remarked,
then “there is certainly a large branch office in Woods Hole.” Furthermore,
he enthused, such marriages were eugenic and likely to last since the
participants shared interests and companionship very generally.
One Woods Hole proposal had unusual complications. During the first
war, the Fisheries area was closed off by a marine guard. Anyone who
worked there could only be reached by written message. Accordingly, an
MBL scientist asked for a messenger to deliver a note to a woman at the
Fisheries. The note, it seems, contained an invitation to go canoeing that
afternoon, at which time the scientist proposed.
The war did not interfere with the important business of life, though
sometimes science did. It was not always easy being an MBL spouse or child.
Summer resort housing did not offer as many conveniences as at home, the
nonscientist spouse (usually the wife) often felt left out of the interminably
scientific conversations, and it was hard having a husband who was away
working in his lab at all hours. New brides found the circumstances
particularly unsettling, though they either adapted and fell in with the
different style or else left.
The Beach
As families have learned to relax and enjoy, MBL folk have taken an ever-
more-active interest in the beach. A sunny afternoon finds the MBL beach
full of teenagers and older sunbathers of all sort, though these are busy
scientists so that many choose early mornings and late evenings for their
swimming. One non-MBL Woods Hole resident complains that she does not
like the MBL beach. People there talk in funny accents about things that are
not comprehensible, she laments. And she is right; this beach on Buzzards
Bay, which was donated in 1936 by Edward Meigs and enlarged with an
addition by Oliver Strong in 1940, is unusual as a beach. No penny arcades;
no cotton candy; no hotdogs here. This is the MBL beach.
As Lewis Thomas has so ably written, it is a special place. Scientists do
not set aside their research work and forget about it for a few hours of fun
on the water's edge. They take their work, in their heads, in their books, or
scribbled on a bit of paper, with them. Many a dilemma has been resolved
158 rN
MBL beach. Photograph
by Alicia Hills.
MBL Archives.
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
or an attack set up through a conversation at the beach. Wonderful solu-
tions to troubling problems find their expression in the MBL sand: whether
a technical trick for getting something done or planning some exciting
cross-disciplinary symposium that would not occur elsewhere, where peo-
ple would not even have opportunities to talk to each other.
Some people go in the water, and when the tide is high and the wind
calm many addicts can be found moving back and forth, back and forth,
swimming those laps to which they have become so accustomed in their
civilized university pools back home. Then there is the time when Szent-
Gyorgyi swam from his place on Penzance Point over to Juniper Point,
some considerable distance. A friend had promised him breakfast any time
he wanted to swim over. Unfortunately, his friends were out of town, and
the woman renting the place was not at all amused. She would certainly not
provide any breakfast and would barely let the dripping Szent-Gyorgyi use
the telephone to call a taxi.
At the MBL beach, when the Portuguese man-of-war or some other
tyrant makes a visit, some people head out of the water; others rush for
their collecting nets and scoop up samples to show the children or to
investigate themselves. The other beaches are altogether another matter.
There people are more likely to talk about normal things. They may bring
their picnics or their wind-surfing equipment and settle in for a relaxing
7 | OUT OF THE LAB TN 159
afternoon reading a spy novel. Some fishermen cast off from the rocks
below the lighthouse. The difference in atmosphere represents more than
just the different sides of the spit of land on which Woods Hole sits.
Drama
Beyond the beach, the MBL crowd has become involved at various times
with other outlets for recreational energies. One year in mid-century a
group of young scientists and friends agreed to help raise money for the
Woods Hole library and the MBL Club at the same time. They agreed to
perform a vaudeville type skit entitled ‘Tea for Several.’ They had a
magician, and they sang songs for the other acts. But the play was the thing.
They had used local people as models for their characters, and some
complained. A few also complained that the show was vulgar—thereby
demonstrating that they had probably never seen a vaudeville act and that
the standards of the Laboratory and the town dowagers were not always in
perfect sympathy.
Another performance much earlier had had a different ending. History
suggests that Englishman Bartholemew Gosnold had first arrived on Cape
Cod and the Elizabeth Islands in 1602. Nobody noticed in 1902 that it was
J. K. P. Purdum as Gosnold in 1907
before the fall. Sumner family
papers, MBL Archives.
160 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
E. B. Wilson making
music with his daughter
Nancy. Photographs by
Alfred F. Huettner,
MBL Archives.
time to commemorate that event of three hundred years before. When they
finally did take note a few years later, they decided not to miss the
opportunity altogether. Woods Hole would enact a landing by Gosnold, with
Fisheries fish culturist J. Purdum playing the part of the hero. As George
Howard Parker told the story, a group rowed the serious Purdum to shore
in an old boat, properly decorated for the special occasion. ‘A plank was put
out on which he was to walk to the beach to greet a second body of villagers
dressed as Indians. Just as Mr. Purdum stepped onto the plank, a volley was
fired unexpectedly from the stern of the craft.’ As a result, instead of
landing in appropriate style on the beach, Purdum fell unceremoniously into
the sea. Nonetheless, the hero “waded out of Great Harbor and he com-
pleted his part of the performance without cracking a smile.”
Music
Music, including classical music, has always played another central
role in Woods Hole and in MBL society. In those early years, Wilson was a
first-rate cellist. Indeed, he had made a hit when he visited the Naples
Zoological Station as much because he knew and loved music as because of
his outstanding cytological research. His daughter became a professional
cellist, but the Wilsons were really just the first of a long series of MBL
performers. Frank's younger brother, Ralph Lillie, was a marvelous pianist
and often played for friends. And Al Romer and Ricky Harrison (Ross
Harrison’s oldest son) often shared songs that they had learned, respec-
7 | OUT OF THE LAB WN 161
Jelle Atema, musician and scientist, 1986. FT"
MBL Archives. ¢ |
. (FY
Fifties student making quiet music in the laboratory
while others sit at lab tables. MBL Archives.
162
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
tively, while tramping through England or while visiting German relatives.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi allowed that he was not particularly gifted as a musi-
cian himself but that he had grown up in a musical family. His mother
reportedly decided against a career as an opera singer, on the advice of
Gustav Mahler, who told her that she did not have the necessary physique
for a singer.
Today, the piano in Swope rarely sits idle in the evenings, and people
sit outside on the lawn listening to the music wafting out the windows. A
recent celebration of the work of Woods Hole artist Alix Robinson included
a series of concerts, for which as many people may have sat outside on the
grass as inside in the formal seats. The regular Sunday evening concerts
always attract a full crowd as well. So many MBL people have said that
the musical offerings in the little town of Woods Hole remain one of the
major drawing points. The official centennial schedule included a perfor-
mance by premier flutist Jean Pierre Rampal of composer Ezra Laderman’s
“The MBL Suite,” composed for the occasion. Music gives a cosmopolitan
and educated air to the setting, although the MBL music sometimes clashes
with that blasting from the large radios of the vacationers waiting for the
ferry.
Hurdy-gurdy music can clash too. One story goes that Conklin, who
had no musical ear at all but who knew quite well that Wilson did, hired a
hurdy-gurdy man to play outside the labs. The man was playing down the
street, complete with monkey and tin cup. Conklin then hired him to stand
under Wilson’s window and keep playing his grating music. ‘Don’t stop,
even if the man inside says to,” Conklin insisted; “he just doesn’t want to
pay. I have already paid, so keep playing.”
The MBL Club
On a slightly different note, the MBL Club and Woods Hole itself also include
a healthy dose of sea chanties, and folk singing of various sorts reflecting the
changing times. The MBL Club also offers dancing for the community,
sometimes with general events and sometimes with boisterous and popular
teen dances. In the early years, dancing more often came in the form of a
visit from Josephine the Bear, since before 1918 the people at the MBL did
not dance much. Only when World War I brought the first temporary naval
base to Woods Hole did dancing become a regular feature. Sailors liked to
dance, but more importantly, with the sailors came a victrola, and that
victrola attracted dancers. World War II had an effect as well, since gas
rationing kept people at home looking for something to do. The uniformed
servicemen attracted attention to light-hearted dancing, even as the MBL
rented out buildings to the war effort and as the planes flew overhead. Then
as society became more liberal, and as the MBL Club provided a familiar
7 | OUT OF THE LAB VN 163
MBL Club mixer.
MBL Archives.
and comfortable place to relax, people began to use it more often. In recent
decades, the old firehouse down the street has hosted occasional ballet
classes or folk dancing sessions as well.
The MBL Club opened in July 1914 in the building of the old yacht club.
As with so much of the MBL, the building was a gift from the indispensable
Josephine and fans. C. D.
Whitman stands at the
top of the stairs on the
right. MBL Archives.
164
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Charles R. Crane, who felt that the young men and women needed a place
to meet, as the laboratory crowd and the wealthy summer crowd did not mix
much then. There was relatively little social life for the students and young
investigators who were not married and did not have houses. The MBL Club
promised to remedy that.
Actually, the MBL Club should have opened in 1913 with the gift of the
building, but researchers needed the space for laboratories until the next
year when the Crane Building was completed. Very soon thereafter, the
directors introduced denatured alcohol for their ‘‘teas.’’ Magazines made
an appearance a few years later. At first the Club offered a place for a few
workers to gather for a smoke in the evening, but as people’s living quarters
grew more scattered they turned to the quiet, relaxing setting of the Club to
gather and talk. They might discuss a recent book or movie for a while, but
conversation inevitably drifted back to the latest scientific idea or technique.
While the director, Merkel H. Jacobs, in 1930 officially applauded the MBL as
a place of individualism but cooperation and a ‘‘center for healthy critical
interchange and stimulating contacts of individuals,” others seem to have
partaken of the lighter attractions there.
The MBL has continued to provide a place for people to gather
informally. At first everyone at the MBL could gather on the front porch to
talk or sing and smoke. Later they could still all fit into the boat for a picnic
or together in the Mess. As time progressed, more and more people have
come, of course. They have also come at irregular times, with staggered
schedules so that everyone is not new all at the same time. “Other people
all seem to know each other, but I don’t,” someone complained recently.
Some people are in more of a hurry when they are here, trying to squeeze
in visits to old friends with time in the library or collaboration with a
colleague in the lab. Some noted the speeded-up pace and the crowded
calendars as the centennial year approached. People live farther away so that
not everyone is in easy walking distance of the main buildings anymore,
which produces greater anonymity than before. Yet the MBL Club has
nonetheless continued to provide a setting for social interaction during all
that change and hurry, whether on Sunday morning over newspapers or
with dancing and singing.
Sinai
Singing became a favorite evening activity right away, and the founders
intended singing to serve as a central focus of the Children’s Science School.
It did, but no longer does everyone know the same songs. There is no
common repertoire so widely shared as in earlier times, so singing at the
7 | OUT OF THE LAB ie 165
MBL Club involves a good deal of learning the words as well as the notes. No
longer do groups join in enthusiastic chorus to sing to the tune of ‘Tipperary’:
A fish-like thing appeared among the Annelids one day.
It hadn't any parapods or setae to display.
It hadn't any eyes or jaws or central nervous cord
But it had a lot of gill slits and it had a notochord!
It's a long way from Amphioxus
It’s a long way to us.
It's a long way from Amphioxus
To the meanest human cuss
It's good-bye fins and gill slits,
Welcome skin and hair
It's a long way from Amphioxus
But we came from there.
My notochord shall grow into a chain of vertebrae
As fins my metapleural folds shall agitate the sea,
This tiny dorsal nervous tube shall form a mighty brain
AND THE VERTEBRATES SHALL DOMINATE THE ANIMAL DOMAIN.
Students remember such songs from the MBL, but also from other places,
as the MBL community took its lessons elsewhere. One former student
recalls studying biology at Harvard from Museum of Comparative Zoology
director Alfred Romer. He came in, sat on the desk, and sang the whole
song, with its various verses, about the long rise of vertebrates from the
lowly Amphioxus. It worked; many years later she still remembers the lesson.
Another favorite went to the tune of “Sweet Marie”:
It's a question to my mind, sweet Marie,
What in annelids you find, sweet Marie,
Can you number and confirm all the segments of a worm?
Do you know the mesoderm, sweet Marie?
Cuorus: Sweet Marie, look and see,
Look and see, sweet Marie,
Tell me what without the lens you can see.
Do you think you'd better try
With your own unaided eye
To distinguish nuclei, sweet Marie? etc.
166
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Walking, Biking, and Running
In addition to these basic Woods Hole pleasures, walking takes its place as
a favorite. Earlier generations may have hitched up their skirts and doffed
their coats and ties to head for a relaxing break at Nobska Point or farther
north. Or they may have headed up Mowing Hill toward what is now the golf
course. From there, you could see all of Woods Hole without the trees to
interfere. A few took off on long Sunday treks, some wandering twenty or
more miles to explore the Cape, covering ground now occupied largely by
roads and development. Of course, now people are more likely to drive to
a public park or somewhere else “official” to do their hiking, often forget-
ting about their own back yards.
Walking is more dangerous today along the streets where cars drive
faster and there are no shoulders or only healthy fields of poison ivy to dive
into. Yet the bike path provides an easy walk into Falmouth, winding along
the beach and through humid dense greenery. A visit to the wildlife sanc-
tuary at Quissett Harbor is also well worth the walk, especially at sunset as
Mary Huettner at Nobska Light, 1920.
Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner,
MBL Archives.
7 | OUT OF THE LAB 7% 167
the elevated rocks there provide one of the truly spectacular and uninter-
rupted views toward the west. Walking home along the narrow unlit road at
night takes some courage and agility but can be executed successfully.
Bicycling and running have largely replaced walking for many, of
course. Isabel Morgan Mountain conjures the image of six Morgans stream-
ing down the hill on their six bicycles in the early part of the century. And
over the years many people have encountered the question, what to do with
those bicycles during the year when they return to their other home. At
various times bicycles have probably spent the winter stashed in most
Woods Hole garages and storage sheds.
Although there do not seem to be quite so many sweat-soaked runners
as there were a few years ago, the streets and bike path do boast a healthy
number. Many are training for the famous Falmouth Road Race, which
occurs every August. In its first years the race occurred at noon on a
Sunday. But the increasing thousands of competitors and doctors’ warnings
about the effects of running in the beastly heat and humidity, which
occasionally do occur, moved the time to earlier in the day. The race,
which begins in Woods Hole, winds past the Nobska lighthouse and along
the beach, and ends in Falmouth, is quite an event.
Fourth of July, Diving, and Sports
The Fourth of July parade is also an event, sort of. Hardly a fancy parade in
the traditional sense, this annual stroll down Main Street is more a mean-
dering than the patriotic exhibition typical of most small towns. Everyone
can join in, and many do. People dress up in all sorts of outlandish outfits.
Then the parade just peters out: no fancy reviewing stand; no dignitaries to
watch and bow or raise their hats appropriately. Just some good old fun
reminiscent of a different era, and maybe some watermelon or other
refreshments afterward. Sometimes boats also get decked out like they
used to.
The Fourth of July used to include diving contests, and Isabel Conklin
recalls one particularly exciting year. All year the dock had a lot of fishing
and diving going on, with diving practice from the bridge as well. But that
Fourth of July one of the women, a very good swimmer, shocked the crowd.
She had on a proper bathing dress, of course, complete with the requisite
sleeves and ruffles. Then as she prepared to dive, she suddenly pulled off
her suit. Underneath she had on body tights, or what were in those days
called “Annette Kellermans.”’
Years later, when a visitor revisited Woods Hole after a long absence,
his hosts took him all around the labs, the Mess, and the other various
buildings, as well as to the beach. Then he was asked what he found most
168 A\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
e 2 ‘ ’ Bee et -s
ea = al ee Me ee
The Cayadetta “dressed” for the Fourth of July and about to set out on a picnic, 1932.
Donald Zinn Collection, MBL Archives.
different about the MBL. After a minute, he responded, ‘Well, I tell you my
boy, I really think it’s the change in the bathing suits that the girls are
wearing now.”
Other activities take groups out on the fields. Horseshoes was a
popular sport in the 1920s especially. Then baseball and softball gained
attention, made possible by the generous gift of a town ball field from the
Fay family. This undeveloped piece of tucked-away land finds many users in
the summer months. Sometimes it has been soccer that has attracted the
most enthusiasm; otherwise, frisbee or other games.
Tennis is a necessary part of life for some at MBL, perhaps even
required to stay healthy and alive. Not often does one find an empty court
on a calm, comfortable summer day in Woods Hole. And the really windy
days make for interesting play and even more amusing watching. The tennis
courts next to the MBL beach were given to the MBL along with beach
property and are operated by the Tennis Club, whose notebooks in the
Archives attest to the officers’ meticulous accounting. Tennis is big at the
MBL, so that developers will probably have trouble removing the courts to
put in new lab buildings if they want to— unless they provide alternatives
elsewhere. Of course things have changed. With growth and progress, the
tennis courts no longer lie right behind the Mess Hall. So not everyone
7 | OUT OF THE LAB i \ 169
gathers around to watch the interminable after-dinner games or the final
matches of the annual tournament as they used to. Not everyone in town
even knows who the chief leading competitors are this year.
Poker games are popular, too, though perhaps not on grounds of
health. The ongoing games bring people together and, once again, provide
an opportunity to discuss science and to bring together that cross-
fertilization of ideas and innovations that is the MBL. A biochemist and a
neurophysiologist might have some clever ideas about neuromuscular
action over a straight flush, for example.
Gardening
Gardening fills the time of many Woods Hole residents, though most
summer scientists do not choose to invest the time or the energy in a garden
that they miss for so much of the year anyway. Because of the humidity and
E. E. Just throwing horseshoes, flanked
by Calvin Bridges and Donald
Lancefield. Photograph by Alfred F.
Huettner, MBL Archives.
170
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
bountiful growth, however, people with land generally have to cope with the
plant population to some extent. Pulling weeds, trimming trees, trying to
keep back the poison ivy and scratchy wild Cape Cod roses: all this takes
time. Those MBL kids, who pleaded to spend the summer in Woods Hole
in order to see their friends again and to take courses again at the Science
School, may find themselves on enforced garden duty. Many yards reflect
the attention given, however grudgingly, and reward the casual walker out
for an evening stroll in the balmy air. Sometimes a scientist has embarked
on botanical experiments at home. Morgan, for example, bred various
plants (such as verbena) as well as mice and occasional birds during his
Woods Hole summers.
On a more formal and scientific note, the herb garden next to the bell
tower offers a quiet place for sitting and thinking. Designed by landscape
architect Dorothea Harrison (one of Ross Harrison's daughters) and kept in
shape for a while by her and her friends, the garden receives less attention
from visitors these days, but has been well tended by someone. Another
Harrison offspring, Richard Harrison, became an artist of a different sort,
doing architectural work and drawing for the New Yorker, for example. The
scientific interest in order and drawing rubs off on the talented children in
various ways.
Saii
After a busy day of walking, singing, visiting gardens and neighbors, and
swimming, many people would love to take a sail. If only they could get to
know someone important or generous, they could. The Eel Pond is beau-
tiful with its complement of sailboats. Perhaps all that opulence bothers
some of the more politically egalitarian scientists, but the recent invasion of
those sailboats is not likely to stop for that reason. Of course, smaller boats
have been around for a long time. More than one MBL worker has
purchased a boat to get around the choice collecting sites well before
investing in land or even a car. Each winter some of those small boats find
their way to the bottom of the Eel Pond, alongside old-fashioned discarded
microtomes that some people used as anchors and other odds and ends.
Occasionally the ice and storms sink larger and more expensive boats as
well. Spring cleaning has its own meaning at the seashore.
Meals, Movies, and Diversions
After all that activity and a possible sail, anyone would surely be hungry.
Outdoor grills give evidence of the swordfish dinners or the occasional
clambakes out of doors. Lots of good, relaxed scientific discussions take
7 | OUT OF THE LAB 7X 171
Winter at Eel Pond, 1971. MBL Archives.
place over a whiskey sour, a shrimp cocktail, and a slice of fish. The visitor
who wants a break from Swope food or who learns that no meals are served
there on Sundays may head for the Black Duck Restaurant for breakfast or
brunch. There one can sit down to a gigantic meal next to the water and
watch the occasional ducks, or gulls, or on a warm summer's day a
well-behaved mother skunk and baby as they scurry under the dock. Or one
can go to the Fishmonger for an ice cream cone. Or the Food Buoy for a
yogurt, soda, and candy bar. Or to the liquor store. There are other, more
tourist-oriented places as well. Other times call for a group invasion of the
Captain Kidd Bar—with its unique mixture of sailors, tourists, and scien-
tists — for a restoring libation after a particularly tedious or inspiring lecture,
or for no reason at all.
After such a busy day, especially the young folk and teenagers may want
to take in a movie. If the MBL is not showing one or if it is too familiar, one
can head for Falmouth. Groups used to hop the train or take a bus, or even
172 A\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
DRUGS
tS
Pome
Main Street, Falmouth, circa 1932. Photograph by Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives.
to hire a taxi for twenty-five cents—to see a twenty-five cent movie. Others
walked into Falmouth for the big show. Once a group persuaded the
absent-minded Robert Chambers to drive them over. Afterwards the group
disbanded because some wanted to walk back and others decided to get an
ice cream cone first. Chambers got a ride with another group, forgetting his
own car. The next day he notified the police that someone had stolen his
vehicle. Soon they reported back to him that it was found in front of the
movie theater and that he had better move it immediately since it was
illegally parked.
Woods Hole does not offer much variety, but it does offer simple
diversions. For a number of years after Prohibition, people gathered to
watch the Dude train roll in from Boston, for example. It was always
amusing to see who had enjoyed the bar car a little too much this time. In
Woods Hole, one really does not need much more in the way of entertain-
ment. Scientists are supposed to stay in their labs working, emerging only
on occasion for such breaks as mentioned above, are they not? They do at
any rate. The fact that some types of scientific work allow breaks may help
7 | OUT OF THE LAB [he 173
explain why particular people have chosen the work they have. Fortunately,
the library reader can register for a reserved desk (or as a general reader)
and can settle into the stacks to work in a place that allows adequate
opportunity for staring out the window too. Especially the desks on the top
floor: all look out toward water in whichever direction. “Oh, I was just
thinking, outlining the next chapter,” the daydreaming reader can claim. In
contrast, taking even a visual break from most labs back home requires
actually leaving, thereby admitting even to oneself that one is doing some-
thing other than working. At the MBL, though, the pace is intense, with few
real breaks in the ongoing pursuit of science.
Life and research go on, even when other people are visiting the beach
or sleeping. During the summer, someone is at work somewhere in the
MBL at almost any given time of the day or night. That, too, is part of the
spirit of the place. Though the researchers and the supporting staff no
longer have to get by with quite the meager resources once at their
command, they still have to work hard to keep up the elusive spirit of the
place that grows out of the camaraderie and the perpetual discussions of
science that go on in so many different settings during the day. Admittedly,
things are not what they used to be; in many ways they have become even
better as the community has expanded.
The Dude Train, 1895. Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
174 rN
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
NOTES
Isabel Conklin and others in their Historical Collection
interviews discuss the importance and popularity
of canoeing. On proper canoeing technique for
Woods Hole in particular, see E. V. Cowdry, “Ca-
noeing in the Vicinity of Woods Hole,’ The Woods
Hole Index (August 1926) No. 2: 1-5.
W. C. Allee, in notes on the MBL in University of Illinois
Archives, describes Mrs. Crane's birthday parties.
George Scott, Historical Collection interview, recalls the
Purdum and Gosnold adventure.
Many of the Historical Collection interviews refer to
Woods Hole as a place where marriages were
made, including references to Conklin’s comments
on the subject.
On music: Wilson’s love of music was legendary; other
information comes from Historical Collection in-
terviews by Szent-Gyorgyi and Isabel Conklin in
particular.
In a personal interview, Sears Crowell recalled the
hurdy-gurdy story, though he cautions that his
memory may not have the details just right.
On the MBL Club and the role of singing, many people
today attest to the continuing interest, also docu-
mented by numerous items in the Collecting Net
(see informal index, MBL Archives, for specific
references). Several informal songbooks exist in
the MBL Archives.
On changes in the bathing suits, see the Reznikoff inter-
view, Historical Collection.
A number of those interviewed in the Historical Collec-
tion and later attest to the role that movie-going
played, while Paul Reznikoffs interview tells the
Chambers's stories, Historical Collection.
Road to Penzance, circa 1910. Ida H. Hyde Collection, MBL Archives.
Friends and Relatives
Eel Pond: carrying sails out to spritsail. Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
=
pry
‘COU is
mie.
View from the roof of Lillie, looking toward the ferry dock. MBL Archives.
8 | FRIENDS AND RELATIVES dh 177
9, HE MBL spirir is not confined to a few acres of MBL property. Rather,
because the spirit is characterized by a free and cooperative exchange of
ideas and beyond usual boundaries, the long-term development of many
ties to other people and other institutions spreads that spirit widely.
Most obviously, thousands of students have spent time here in hun-
dreds of courses. Thousands of instructors have taught those courses.
Thousands of investigators have pursued research here joined by a host of
workers and visitors and library readers and staff members. The fact that
Japan's Emperor Hirohito chose, of all places, to visit the MBL attests to its
sphere of influence. People from all over come through for tours of the
place they have heard about. Not all the people who have become part of the
MBL's 100 years have stayed long; but they nonetheless visit the place and
take away something, if only a photograph or T-shirt and a vague sense of
what goes on in this place of science, which they then describe to friends
back home.
In the 1920s, Theodore Dreiser visited the MBL at the urging of a friend
from the Rockefeller Foundation. He found just what his friend had prom-
ised: an exceptional place. Expounding in a manner typical of the period, he
enthused about what he saw as the unbiased and pure work before him. As
he put it, “The patience, earnestness, and, I assume, honesty of these men
and women impress me more than anything else I have seen in America.”
The community was embarked, he thought, on a marvelous and beautiful
search, ‘the most honorable and respectable employment of man,” like
going into battle or like hunting or exploring a house with locked doors and
no keys. “My compliments to the workers of the Marine Biological Labo-
ratory of Woods Hole! A profound and reverent obeisance.”’
As the century progressed and the “ring of marine stations around the
globe” that Naples station director Anton Dohrn once envisioned has
gradually appeared, many people have appealed to the MBL for advice and
guidance. Naples set the standard at first, with superior facilities and
equipment. But at Naples, investigators worked in their wonderfully quiet
178 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
rooms upstairs, while the public passed through the open aquarium down-
stairs, paying their admission fees to support the cause of science above.
The Naples station did not teach courses or bring the extended coterie of
assistants and graduate students that very quickly became a vital part of the
MBL. The MBL offered a model (though not always a perfectly successful
model) for integrating instructional and research purposes, and other
stations have followed. Within the century, the coastal states and most
countries of the world that touch on a seacoast, as well as many that do not,
have built their own marine stations. Often they have followed the MBL
model, seeking to foster that spirit of free interchange and cross-fertilization
among students, teachers, and independent researchers. Others have pur-
posefully diverged in whatever ways to develop some other goal.
As these many stations have grown, they have often appealed to the
mature and experienced MBL for advice: how does one get the seawater
system to work without corroding all the metal fixtures or polluting the
environment with toxic metals, for example? How does one procure large
numbers of specimens without overfishing the local waters? How does one
combine the various desirable functions of a marine laboratory at reason-
able costs to the participants, without going too heavily into debt? Some labs
have had wonderful benefactors who have given them more solid and
long-term financial security than the MBL has so far achieved. Many are run
by a single institution such as the excellent Friday Harbor Laboratory at the
University of Washington, or the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the
University of California at San Diego. The MBL has resolved time and again
to remain independent, as a truly national and even international facility, but
at great cost at times. Only a solid endowment will ensure the successful
continuation into the second century of the myriad quality programs and of
the free atmosphere of open discourse. The MBL must learn from others
how to pursue such a goal.
In Woods Hole, the MBL also has a vital host of friends and neighbors.
Many of the wealthy land owners, beginning with the influential and gen-
erous Fay family, have given money, land, and advice at critical junctures.
Charles R. Crane followed, then Carnegie, Rockefeller, and more recently
the Grass, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and Andrew W. Mellon
foundations, along with many other donors to make the laboratory's
continued growth and improvement possible. Individuals from Penzance
Point, the Cape, and elsewhere have generously donated time and money
to the MBL’s well-being. This support is essential, but probably not suffi-
cient without a solid permanent financial base. Even the crucial substantial
grants for many researchers from the NIH and NSF cannot cover all the
ever-increasing expenses for sophisticated world-class science.
Equally important for the MBL’s well-being are the local families who
have contributed indispensable employees. Some have begun as maids or
8 | FRIENDS AND RELATIVES 7 N 179
collecting crew assistants and have risen to head their departments. Their
energetic actions in hurricanes, at the beginning of summers when many
people rush in at once wanting everything immediately set up just right, or
in other times of need demonstrate their work well beyond the call of duty.
Many of these people, some second- or third-generation MBL, believe in the
MBL as an important place of science and want to be part of it. So many
cases abound — of the specimen boy who rose to become instructor or even
trustee, the waiter who became lab director, the dining hall chef whose
father ran the earlier food service, or the local youngster made head of his
department. Many of these people could have made more money else-
where, but they have made their own generous contributions to the MBL.
The MBL Associates is a supportive group that has arisen since 1944
out of similar affections for the place. People associated with the MBL but
not all as researchers or course instructors have wanted to help. Special
projects such as the Futures in Science “FiS kids’ program or the orga-
nizing of photographs or acquiring of rare books for the Archives and Rare
Book Room have attracted the attention of the MBL Associates and other
volunteers.
Aside from its many invaluable friends around the world, the MBL also
has an important set of close relatives. Without Spencer Baird and the Fish
Commission, the MBL Supply Department could not have come into exist-
ence as such. It was Baird’s enthusiastic encouragement of Hyatt, his
arranging for the original land to be given, and his generously supplying the
seawater, collecting boats, and much equipment in the early years that
made the MBL happen. (Baird actually set up the agreement but died before
the MBL opened.) Baird’s supporters, who had subscribed to tables for
their students to do research at the Fish Commission, did not see the point
of encouraging this competition. In particular, Brooks at Johns Hopkins
University and Alexander Agassiz at Harvard remained skeptical or even
hostile towards the new enterprise. Who needs two labs in Woods Hole, they
asked, particularly when one funded by the federal government would be
far better? Who cares about teaching students and high school teachers,
when research really matters? Baird did recognize the value of the MBL
enterprise and without jealousy paved the way for what he realized might
become competition for Fish Commission research. Through the twentieth
century, the relationship has remained relatively distant because of the
Fisheries’ government mandate to pursue practical work more than re-
search and teaching of biology. Yet the institutions have continued to
cooperate in a variety of ways, loaning each other boats or other equipment,
or even scientists at times.
The Coast Guard has remained even more autonomous, because of its
very distinct functions. Yet MBL crews and the Coast Guard crews have
helped each other in important ways over the years. And MBL scientists
180
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
have always enjoyed visits to Nobska Lighthouse, run since 1939 by the Coast
Guard when it replaced the old Lighthouse Service.
The MBL’s relationship with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu-
tion (WHOD) is the closest. In fact, WHOI is really the MBL's younger sibling.
It began when MBL director Lillie and Wickliffe Rose, president of the
General Education Board, decided that an east coast oceanographic re-
search center might be in order. The Pacific United States had its Scripps
Institution of Oceanography. Since it was not clear exactly what sort of
eastern establishment should be developed, the National Academy of Sci-
ences set up a study group. As a result of that group's report and subse-
quent developments, January 1930 brought the official incorporation of
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Why, Woods Hole people often ask today. Woods Hole is so crowded
already and as WHOI has expanded it has had to set up a second, separate
campus site, the Quissett Campus. Lillie reported that Woods Hole “which
had from the first been regarded as the most likely site, was definitely
selected, on account of its geographical advantages and the scientific good
will and co-operation assured there.” Also the existence of a library was a
major attraction. Lillie, as leader of the MBL and inspiration for WHOI,
clearly sought to keep both in Woods Hole.
Lillie reported that the MBL Board of Trustees wanted to donate a
piece of land to WHOI in the first place. It later turned out that they legally
had to be paid for the gift, but that commitment nonetheless set the stage
for the two labs to be neighbors. Yet later, when the Oceanographic wanted
to expand and buy the MBL’s Penzance Garage property, then-director
Philip Armstrong reported, the MBL did not agree. Experts and real estate
specialists from Washington came to assess the properties and concluded
that Woods Hole had “too little land’”’ and ‘‘wouldn’t develop a well-
integrated campus.” The Navy took the property anyway by eminent do-
main, then released the land to WHOI. Such actions, given the very limited
amount of land and especially deep waterfront property, temporarily cre-
ated some hard feelings and stimulated a bit of sibling rivalry. Fortunately
any such feeling has largely dissipated.
Some MBL old-timers felt that the Oceanographic had “sort of ruined
Woods Hole.” It seemed so much more crowded than it had before, with so
many autos and so many people. The smaller MBL has sometimes envied
the large endowment and the solid financial basis of the grown-up little
brother. At other times it has been disdainful. The World War II “booms”
heard frequently off the shore broke windows and set people complaining.
Even if the experimental explosions were part of the war effort, why here in
Woods Hole? they asked. During World War II, WHOI thrived while the MBL
shrank. More recently, directors and staff have worked at building stronger
cooperation to enhance the whole Woods Hole scientific community.
8 | FRIENDS AND RELATIVES 7 181
Crane Laboratory viewed from Eel Pond, 1923. Norman W. Edmund Collection, MBL Archives.
MBL picnic: coming home, early 1890s. Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
Ny Al
182 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
What the nostalgic criticisms and occasional frustrations have failed to
appreciate is the fact that someone would have been there anyway. It is
better to have scientists, with many shared purposes and common interests.
As the various parties involved now realize, the community is stronger when
the diverse groups share activities.
MBL science is relatively small-scale science, done largely by visitors.
They have grants, of course, and assistants and equipment. And MBL does
have absolutely first-rate work in cell biology, physiology, the neuro-
sciences, and other fields, so that it is one of the world leaders in those
areas. Yet overall the MBL remains on a much smaller scale than the
Oceanographic. WHOI was set up with intended connections to the various
armed forces and other government and private groups. It employs a much
higher percentage of permanent year-round researchers and staff. It re-
ceives large government contracts for a wide variety of types of explor-
atory work.
When the Titanic came to town in 1986, in the form of wonderful
photos, folios, artifacts, and lots of stories, the MBL welcomed the WHOI
team back and congratulated the conquering heros. A few may have felt a
little irritated by all the attention (‘that can’t be real science’), perhaps
MBL says Bravo! Photograph by M. Rioux, MBL Archives.
8 | FRIENDS AND RELATIVES 7% 183
briefly wishing for some of the limelight themselves before they settled
enthusiastically back to their own work. Brothers and sisters are like that:
fond of each other, annoyed with each other, and usually, deep down,
supportive and fiercely loyal to each other. Especially in winter, when
crowds thin and paces slow down, cooperation in the scientific enterprise
prevails. People from WHOI and the MBL attend brown bag lunches
together. Some serve as trustees and on advisory groups for both institu-
tions. There seems to be no point to being competitive in this little town at
the end of Cape Cod when the wind is whipping through and the ice collects
on boats and water.
As a result of the generally supportive scientific atmosphere, the U. S.
Geological Survey has set up offices here, as has the Sea Education Asso-
ciation. The National Academy of Sciences has established a conference
center in a beautiful old house on the water nearby.
The Fisheries, WHOI, USGS, SEA, and MBL scientists work together in
various ways, expanding the spirit of scientific activity and making Woods
Hole a special place for science. The Fisheries and Aquarium serve more
direct commercial and public purposes, WHOI carries out government and
private research, while the MBL provides for independent scientific re-
search and instruction at all levels. Here is specialization and cooperation:
just what Whitman insisted should provide the basis for effective science.
Eel Pond, looking toward the golf course, 1895. Photograph by Baldwin Coolidge, courtesy of SPNEA, Boston.
184 A
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
NOTES
MBL annual reports provide information about the
course members over the years, both names and
numbers of participants.
Theodore Dreiser's visit was discussed in the Collecting
Net (July 21, 1928).
Ralph Dexter on marine laboratories, (Notes, Preface)
discusses the list of current facilities.
On other activities and groups in Woods Hole, see the
recent publications: Mary Lou Smith, editor,
Woods Hole Reflections (Historical Collection,
1983) and Mary Lou Smith, editor, The Book of
Falmouth, A Tricentennial Celebration, 1686-1986
(Falmouth Historical Commission, 1986).
Paul Galtsoff, The Story of the Bureau of Commercial
Fisheries Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mas-
sachusetts (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Interior Circular No. 145, 1962). Curtis, “Good Old
Summer Time,” (Notes, Chapter 3) recalls the
sharing of equipment between the USFC and
MBL.
Lillie’s history (Notes, Chapter 1) still provides the best
look at the early years of WHOI, quotation on p. 180.
Editors Mary Sears and Daniel Merriman’s Ocean-
ography: The Past (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980)
also provides information about the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution and insight into the his-
tory of the Woods Hole establishments, including
WHOL, as well as about the history of oceanography
more generally.
Armstrong discussed his reactions in his interview, His-
torical Collection.
Yacht visiting Woods Hole. MBL Archives.
Thanks for the Memories
Sources and Acknowledgements
Discussion in this book is based primarily on materials found in the MBL
Archives, mostly written, documented sources. Often the same event or fact
appears in more than one place. Some stories come, with permission, from
tapes of interviews made by the Woods Hole Historical Collection during the
1970s and 1980s. And a few items emerged from interviews that took place
at the MBL.
I chose not to try to acquire new material by interviewing everyone in
the MBL community, but instead spoke only with a few of those who have
been around for many years in order to verify information or to fill in details.
This project, then, is autobiographical in that it is based on information
chronicled within the MBL records. It is not an attempt to provide a more
detached or analytic biographical treatment. I hope this book will facilitate
other such projects.
In particular, I wish to thank the Woods Hole Historical Collections for
generously sharing their transcripts of taped interviews with MBL scientists
and staff members. Interviews with Philip Armstrong, Isabel Conklin, Sears
Crowell, Robert Kahler, Donald Lancefield, Paul Reznikoff, George T. Scott
and Elsie Scott, Horace Stunkard, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, and William Randolf
Taylor proved very valuable in filling out details and putting much of what we
had learned in the dry, archival form of official records into personal terms.
In addition, Betsy Bang, Bob Barlow, Sears Crowell, James Ebert, Jane
Fessenden, Donald Lahy, Dorothy Rogers, Homer Smith, Susie Steinbach,
J. P. Trinkaus, and John Valois helped fill in details about times and attitudes
during their respective careers here. Undoubtedly, others would willingly
have helped if this had been a different sort of project and if they had been
asked. Again, as a historian, I encourage everyone who has some further or
alternative piece of the story of the MBL to record that information and
deposit it in the Archives for future researchers.
Aside from the specific references given below, quotations or other
information often came from the official records of the MBL. Frank Lillie’s
The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, published in 1944 and re-
printed by the Biological Bulletin in 1988 (v. 174), is extremely valuable for
historical detail. I have not reiterated the many facts and chronologies
included there.
186
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
In addition, the annual reports and the trustees’ minutes contain
invaluable information, though seldom as much of the story behind the
official, sanitized conclusions as one would like. The Lillie Papers, given to
the MBL Archives by the University of Chicago, contain his correspondence
in preparing his history and help to fill out some of the discussion between
the official lines. Other collections of letters and assorted documents give
additional perspective. The Collecting Net provides insight into the less
formal, human side of MBL events.
The official records contain myriads of wonderful data: who came,
what schools and what countries they represented, for what purposes, how
many women, what research they published, what lectures were given, and
so forth. There are even compilations of statistics for the early decades.
Quantitative historians should take note of this largely untapped resource.
Many photographs included here also come from the MBL Archives.
Most have resided there for some time, the product of past professional and
enthusiastic amateur photographers. A few have been given recently, in
anticipation of centennial projects. It is hoped that other people will con-
sider cleaning out the attic and adding to the extremely impressive collection
of many thousands of photos. Each photo collection given recently has been
kept intact by donor or photographer to maintain the integrity of the
collection. For earlier materials, given over many years and sometimes with
no official records kept, every effort has been made to identify photogra-
phers and donors. MBL archivist Ruth Davis has done all the hard work of
sorting through the thousands of photos, selecting the most appropriate,
identifying them, and putting them in order.
The earliest formal photographs were taken by professional Boston
photographer Baldwin Coolidge. The MBL evidently hired him to take
representative but interesting formal group pictures beginning in the very
first years. Many of the glass plate negatives of this first-rate photographer's
work are now held by and provided to us courtesy of the Society for the
Preservation of New England Antiquities. An apprentice of Coolidge's,
Howard S. Brode, who was also a student at the MBL, followed him around
and took similar shots. Brode’s photos make an informative contrast, as
they were never quite as effective. For further discussion of Coolidge, see
Jane A. McLaughlin, “Baldwin Coolidge, Photographer 1845-1928,” Sprit-
sail, Journal of Falmouth History (1987) Vol. 1 No. 1:0 5-25.
Then comes the highly informal collection of Gideon Dodds, given in
the form of a photo scrapbook, which documents life at the MBL in the
1920s. Other similar informal photo albums provide other individual
pictures. In addition, Isabel Conklin recently donated a set of photos
depicting life around Woods Hole, including pictures of her father, who
played such an important role in the early life here.
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES aN 187
—— eee
The Public Information Department, over the years, has accumulated
a set of pictures. Unfortunately, many were taken by unnamed staff mem-
bers in connection with one or another publicity project then underway. A
series for Life magazine, for example, or some for a WGBH program or a
special ceremony or exhibit: photos taken for many different reasons and
by many different people have found their way into the Archives, and some
of those are in this book.
In working on this project, we added a few new discoveries as well.
Undoubtedly there are others to be made. Elaine Pear Cohen provided the
photograph of her bonded bronze 1980 sculpture, ‘Woods Hole: The
Scientists.” The sculpture resides in the collection of Dr. Virginia Peters, on
the corner of Water and School streets in Woods Hole and was photo-
graphed by Sally Brucker. Deborah Day, archivist at Scripps Institution for
Oceanography, sent the photograph of Purdum as Gosnold.
Perhaps the most exciting find, because of its quality and extent, is the
work of Alfred Francis Huettner. An accidental meeting with MBL Associates
Robert and Millie Huettner, now of Woods Hole, revealed that Robert's
father had, in fact, taken many of the beautifully artistic photos of peo-
ple and activities at the MBL during the early decades of this century.
Many people have long wondered who had made such excellent portraits
as those of E. B. Wilson and T. H. Morgan that reside in the Archives and
have hung on MBL walls and have been printed in biographical works on
these men. Now we know. The Huettners have negatives as well as quality
prints that beautifully illustrate the MBL life and people. They have
generously shared those with the MBL, and modern prints and negatives
are now also on deposit in the Archives. An exhibit of Huettner’s work
graced the Meigs Room walls during the centennial summer, and the prints
are now scattered throughout the MBL. For more discussion of Alfred
Francis Huettner, see Collecting Net (August 1987) 5#5: 4.
In working with the historical collection of photographs and preparing
modern negatives and prints for archival purposes and for this volume,
Linda Golder and Linda McCausland have provided invaluable help. Linda
Golder heads the photolab at the MBL and has been very helpful in
providing quality copies of older materials from the MBL collection. Linda
McCausland, a professional photographer in Orleans, Massachusetts, has
worked with the old and fragile materials requiring special care. With her
previous experience at the Eastman School of Photography working with
archival photos, she has provided the expertise to prepare negatives and
prints of far better quality than the original, sometimes faded and yellowed,
prints we have had in the archives. The careful work of both these highly
qualified women has really made the photographic side of this project
possible.
188
100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
Thanks also to everyone else who has helped, perhaps without even
realizing it: to those who have contributed materials; to those who have
come in and been asked abruptly ‘who was this” or “where was that’; to
those who have cheered for the project (especially John Pfeiffer, who egged
Ruth and me on at discouraging times; the watchmen who offered support
early on Sunday mornings or late at night; Jane Fessenden, who would not
let us quit; and Joel Davis, who provided much needed sustenance at critical
times); to those with good editorial advice, especially Phil Pauly, Richard
Creath, and Garland Allen; to Public Information director George Liles, who
provided much information and editorial assistance; and to centennial
coordinator Pam Clapp, who really single-handedly kept things going at
crucial points. I especially appreciate the support and coordination of
Jones and Bartlett's editor, Joe Burns, for steering the book through to
publication. Special thanks go to publisher Don Jones for his support and
overall direction. I would also like to acknowledge Jones and Bartlett's
production director, Maureen Cunningham Neumann, and her able staff,
Rafael Millan and Anne Benaquist, for their skill and expertise in design-
ing and creating this book. Most of all, thanks to everyone who has been
part of the life of the MBL and who has therefore contributed in some way
to this autobiography. This book has really been a community project in
the spirit of the MBL.
SSE
IN THE EARLY 1970s the American Institute of Biological Sciences pub-
lished a collection of essays to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of AIBS. I
served on the editorial committee of that volume, which included twenty-
one chapters written by leading scientists from nearly every area of biology.
We asked our eminent authors not to look back over AIBS’s first twenty-five
years, but to look forward and speculate about the problems biologists
would be tackling in the next twenty-five years. The resulting essays were
provocative, ambitious, and, for the most part, wrong: nearly everything we
hoped to accomplish in twenty-five years was accomplished within a decade.
Although it is always difficult to look forward in science with any
precision, an anniversary— especially a centennial anniversary—is an ap-
propriate time both for looking to the future and for remembering the past.
At the Marine Biological Laboratory, recalling the past has occupied
numerous historians, philosophers, scientists, and writers over the last few
years. Among those who have undertaken historical projects, Jane Maien-
schein and Ruth Davis have produced one of the most accessible and
personal portraits of the MBL. Professor Maienschein’s text and archivist
Davis's pictures recall the men and women of science who founded the
MBL, and the subsequent generations of investigators and students who
came to work in the village that served as the crossroads of American
biology. These, of course, are the stories you'd expect to find in a popular
history of a science institution. Less predictably, 100 Years Exploring Life
remembers the nonscientific side of life at the early MBL: conversations in
the old mess hall, songs sung by students at the MBL Club, canoe races, and
amateur whaling expeditions. The book remembers people like Charles R.
Crane, who rallied to the support of the fledgling laboratory in its early
decades.
As you read about the sense of adventure and discovery that prevailed
in the laboratory's early days, you begin to understand why Woods Hole
residents who were not themselves directly engaged in science nonetheless
welcomed the MBL— donating scarce parcels of land, erecting new build-
ings, lobbying with foundations on behalf of the sometimes financially
pressed laboratory, and, on many occasions, writing checks to cover
year-end budget shortfalls. In the early part of the century, the local
community— everyone from merchants to boardinghouse owners, from
fishermen to captains of American industry— understood that the MBL
190 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
brought to the village a vitality and an intellectual excitement that wasn't
to be found in ordinary fishing villages and oceanside resorts.
So one part of our centennial celebration has involved a long, lingering,
often affectionate look back to see whence we have come. An equally
important part of the centennial has been our effort to look forward, to ask
what role the MBL will play in the next decades of American biology. We are
entering our second century concurrent with the advent of the Age of
Molecular Biology. The galloping progress that overtook the 1971 AIBS
predictions has, if anything, picked up its pace, and today biologists are
developing new tools and new applications at an unprecedented rate.
Already, the powerful new tools of molecular biology have brought vastly
improved techniques for fighting and preventing disease, refinements in
fertility and population control, and the genetic engineering that has made
possible the most profound developments in agriculture since humankind
first domesticated plants and animals many thousand years ago. The revo-
lutionary progress in our understanding of life on the most basic and useful
levels will surely continue through the end of this century.
Fortunately, our task in looking forward is not to set a timetable for
specific discoveries, but to clarify the role the MBL will play in modern
science — an enterprise several orders of magnitude larger and vastly more
complex than it was in C. O. Whitman’s time. We must build the twenty-
first-century MBL without losing sight of the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century MBL. We must keep alive the old MBL—the informal, cooperative,
adventuresome, free-spirited laboratory so affectionately described in the
pages and photographs of this book.
The centennial look forward has involved a broad cross section of the
community and expert consultants, including summer investigators and
year-round scientists, neurobiologists and cell biologists and ecosystems
analysts, our colleagues in the Boston University Marine Program, histori-
ans, friends from business and industry, national science policy leaders,
community leaders from Woods Hole and Falmouth, and our friends in
state government. Because we have had input from so many people who
harbor so much affection and concern for the MBL, we can say with some
confidence where the MBL is headed.
Clearly, our world-famous summer programs of teaching and re-
search will remain our raison d’étre. We will continue to modernize our
facilities and to introduce new biological approaches in our summer
courses and in our summer research programs.
We will continue to provide tutorial laboratory courses at the cutting
edge of science. Given that the faculty and students who populate these
courses are among the leaders in their fields throughout the world, it is
unlikely that the same courses could be given at any one university. The
MBL community is committed to the continuation of these one-of-a-kind
EPILOGUE Li 191
i nc eee EE UE E EEE IE EEE SEES EESSEESESEIESSSEENSSS SEES
courses, where the next generation of biologists is trained in the use of
modern biological techniques and the value of marine organisms. To make
this possible, we will seek over the next decade to raise endowment funds
to cover course expenses that are not covered by current tuition or grants
from foundations and the government.
We intend to enlarge the year-round research program and provide
additional up-to-date laboratory space to accommodate the increased year-
round staff. The expanded year-round programs will provide a stable base
for summer programs of research and education. We anticipate developing
a year-round critical mass in neurobiology, cell biology, and developmental
biology, all with a common theme of molecular evolution. These areas will
complement our already strong and still expanding year-round Ecosystems
Center. The expanded year-round programs will share the modern ap-
proaches of molecular biology and molecular genetics.
The development of genetic engineering has brought a scientific rev-
olution that is dominating the last quarter of our century in much the way
physics dominated the first quarter. Genetic engineering has made possible
new kinds of biological experiments that yield precise information about the
basic mechanisms of life. Our new ability to compile libraries of genetic
information has made it possible to compare organisms and to explore the
evolution of life on a level that is providing new understandings of health
and disease.
The powerful new tools of molecular biology can be used to work on
a wide range of biological problems—from general questions of phylogeny
to very specific questions, such as of the origins of neural receptor sites.
Recognizing the power and range of molecular biology, we intend to
develop, in cooperation with our sister institution, the Woods Hole Ocean-
ographic Institution, a center for molecular evolution that will serve as the
basic platform on which to integrate the disciplines of neurobiology, cell
biology, and developmental biology.
Along with the exciting across-the-board advances in late twentieth-
century biology, another recent development holds great promise for the
MBL: the growing recognition that many biological disciplines can be
studied through the use of marine models, which offer good views into
basic life processes and reduce the need for use of warm-blooded animals
in research. Easy to study, inexpensive, elegantly simple and remarkably
diverse, marine plants and animals are attracting increasing interest from
federal agencies and private foundations. With its long history of educational
and research programs and its continuing reputation as the nation’s pre-
mier marine laboratory, the MBL will remain in the vanguard of biological
research.
We plan to develop facilities and expertise for culturing, rearing, and
studying the genetics of those marine animals that are so valuable as
192 A 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988
biomedical models. At the same time, to complement modern molecular
approaches, we will need an updated and modernized facility for the warm-
blooded animals required for the preparation of monoclonal antibodies.
This merging of basic research, biomedicine, and marine biology
builds upon the traditions celebrated in Jane Maienschein’'s text and the
photographs selected by Ruth Davis. Readers of 100 Years Exploring Life will
note that our plan for the next few decades is not a new venture, but a
reaffirmation of the MBL’s mission and a focusing of its resources.
Of course, while we are expanding programs and modernizing re-
search facilities, we will continue to nourish our traditional programs and
resources. We will maintain our relationship with the Boston University
Marine Program, a remarkably symbiotic arrangement that for nearly two
decades has added to traditional MBL strengths in cell biology and neuro-
biology, provided us with another window on environmental science, and
given us a continuous tie to academia.
Professor Maienschein’s text devotes an entire chapter to the MBL
Library, a facility beloved by several generations of scientists and historians.
We will continue to operate this unparalleled marine and biological science
library, which is jointly supported by the several institutions within the
Woods Hole scientific community. Maintaining an up-to-date library is a
major challenge. Much as biological research has been profoundly affected
by the techniques of molecular biology, library and information science has
been changed in our era by the burgeoning mass of published data and by
computerized information storage and retrieval techniques. Several private
foundations are working with us to update our library facilities and to
network our library with major libraries across the country.
In our centennial year, we have paused in our work to acknowledge the
contributions made by generations of MBL students, faculty, and investiga-
tors. But while we have honored our past, we have kept a focus on the
future — looking forward and backward at the same time. This dual process
of remembering whence we came and deciding where we are bound will
continue beyond the centennial year, as it should in an institution as
venerable and vibrant as the MBL.
HARLYN O. HALVORSON
Woods Hole
July 29, 1988
Year
1920
1922
1931
1933
1936
1937
1944
1944
1946
1946
1946
1952
1953
1955
1958
1958
1959
1960
Laureate
August Krogh
Otto Meyerhof
Otto Warburg
Thomas Morgan
Otto Loewi
Nobel Laureates
Affifiated with the Marine Biological Laboratory
MBL Connection
Researcher
Library reader
Visiting Lecturer
Corporation Member
Corporation Member
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Corporation Member
Herbert Gasser
Isidor Rabi
Hermann Muller
John Northrop
Wendall Stanley
Selman Waksman
Fritz Lipmann
Axel Theorell
George Beadle
Joshua Lederberg
Severo Ochoa
Donald Glaser
Corporation Member
Researcher
Corporation Member
Trustee
Individual Investigator
Researcher
Lecturer
Researcher
Corporation Member
Individual Investigator
Corporation Member
Student
Contribution
Discovery of capillary motor-regulating
mechanism
Relationship between consumption of
oxygen and metabolism of lactic acid in
muscle
Nature and mode of action of the
respiratory enzyme
Role of the chromosome in heredity
Discovery relating to the chemical
transmission of nerve impulses
Biological combustion processes with
special reference to Vitamin C and
fumaric acid catalysis
Researches on differentiated function of
single nerve fibers
Resonance method for registration of
magnetic properties of atomic nuclei
Production of mutations by x-irradiation
Preparation of enzymes and virus
proteins in pure form
Preparation of enzymes and virus
proteins in pure form
Streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective
against tuberculosis
Coenzyme A and its role in intermediary
metabolism
Nature and mode of action of oxidation
enzymes
Genetic recombination and organization
of the genetic material of bacteria
Genetic recombination and organization
of the genetic material of bacteria
Mechanisms in the biological synthesis of
RNA and DNA
Development of the bubble chamber
1962
1963
1963
1963.
1964
1967
1967
1969
1969
1970
1975
1975
1976
1980
1980
1981
1981
James Watson
John Eccles
Alan Hodgkin
Andrew Huxley
Konrad Bloch
Keffer Hartline
George Wald
Salvador Luria
Max Delbriick
Bernard Katz
Howard Temin
David Baltimore
D. Carlton Gajdusek
Baruj Benacerraf
Paul Berg
David Hubel
Torsten Wiesel
Instructor
Individual Investigator
Individual Investigator
Researcher
Individual Investigator
Corporation Member
Corporation Member
Corporation Member
Individual Investigator
Researcher
Student
Library Reader
Student
Instructor
Library Reader
Lecturer
Researcher
Discovery concerning the molecular
structure of DNA
Ionic involvement in excitation and
inhibition in the peripheral and central _
portions of the nerve
Ionic involvement in excitation pad
inhibition in the peripheral and conta a f
portions of the nerve
Ionic involvement in excitation and NS
inhibition in the peripheral and central i ee
portions of the nerve .
Mechanism and regulation of cholesterol
and fatty acid metabolism .
Discoveries about chemical and physical
visual processes in the eye :
ase i
Discoveries about chemical and physical aes
visual processes in the eye “ah ag ‘
Replication mechanism and the Benet tre
structure of viruses ag :
Replication mechanism and the genetic ony
structure of viruses . a3
Transmitters in the nerve terminals and ys
the mechanism for their storage te a; As
Interactions between tumour viruses and
the genetic material of the cell ;
Interactions between tumour viruses and —
the genetic material of the cell eae
Discoveries concerning the origin and
new mechanisms for the dissemination of —
infectious disease
Identification of histocompatibility Mrs
antigens and elucidation of their action __
Development of methods to map
structure and function of DNA
Processing of visual information by the
brain
Medicine
Nore: All laureates were awarded the Nobel Prize in the category of medicine or physiology with five exceptions: Isidor Rabi and
Donald Glaser won prizes in physics, and John Northrop, Wendall Stanley, and Paul Berg won prizes in chemistry.
QUISSETT
“TRAFFIC LIGHT
Mie 0 Ya ¥2 MILE
Jones
and
Bartlett
ISBN Oe Sb?e0-be0~?
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11