5 I THE PEOPLE 4k 89 







NE 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 



