XVI 



£, 



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 tlie 

 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, 

 "Address to the MBL Corporation, " August 11, 

 1903, Whitman Collection. 



Lewis Thomas on the MBL as a national laboratory, The 

 Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 

 58-63." 



On early marine work, see the symposium papers by 

 Keith Benson, Ralph Dexter, Jane Maionschein, 

 and Robert Terwilliger, "The History of Marine 



•Materials arc in tho MBL Ai-chivos unless otherwise rioted. 



Laboratories and Marine Research," American Zo- 

 ologist (1988) 28: 1-34. 



On the Naples Zoological Station, see Charles Knfoid, 

 The Biological Stations of Europe (Washington, 

 D. C: Government Printing Office, 1910), pp. 7-34. 

 Also more recent articles by Christiano Gioeben, 

 such as "Anton Dohrn-the Statesman of Dai-win- 

 ism," Biological Bulletin special historical edition 

 (June 1985), 168 Suppl.: 4-25. 



