96 JL 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 c34oplasm 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 Trcu&tion 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 

 obsemng 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 natvire 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 tlie molluscan tootli 



