viii M\ 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 pla3^1 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 veiy good science. 

 In the early 1900s, for example, T. H. Morgan brought his fi'uit 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 neuroti'ansmitter mechanisms, are 

 punctuated by swimming, tennis, or boating. Yet tlic conversations are 

 always resumed, often with ft-esh insights brought about by periods of 



