3 I BUILDINGS AND BUDGETS ^ 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 wliile 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 cind 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 udde 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 £ind 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 



