104 JL 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988 



Fellowships under their belts. Students may apply for a number of special 

 scholarships to attend courses or may receive fellowships to carry out 

 research. MBL advocates have recognized the importance of such funds for 

 scientific work, as when Columbia physiologist Harry Grundfest appealed to 

 the community to write to congressmen to urge passage of the NSF bill. 

 And generous donors have set up important privately funded fellowship 

 programs. 



Just one of several such programs that reflect the MBL spirit so well is 

 the Frederick B. Bang Fellowship. Bang a physician, was Professor of 

 Pathobiology at Johns Hopkins, stud3dng infectious diseases. On his way 

 back to Baltimore from doing research at Mt. Desert Island in 1950, he 

 stopped in at Woods Hole to visit a colleague, who insisted that he and his 

 family stay for a few days. They did and were hooked from then on. When 

 Bang visited the Marine Resources Building, he was astonished that they 

 simply threw away the dying animals, which were of no interest to the 

 researchers who needed healthy living specimens. With his interest in 

 pathology and immunology, he was amazed at the waste. He saw a potential 

 gold mine of research material in these discarded animals. The next year, the 

 family returned to Woods Hole, bought a house, and continued to return 

 thereafter. Bang and his wife, Betsy, loved their work at the MBL. Thus, when 

 Bang died in 1981, the family sought to make it possible for other research- 

 ers to work at the MBL on the immunology, pathology, and infectious 

 diseases of marine invertebrates. Their story is typical of the sorts of 

 cross-fertilization of disciplines that occur here, and the ways in which the 

 effect carries on. 



Another such fellowship was the Lucretia Crocker Grant, named after 

 an influential Boston educational reformer, and designed to help teachers 

 learn natural history. This grant program provided an opportunity for many 

 women at the MBL, as many of them were school teachers. With fewer high 

 school teachers coming to the MBL, the Crocker fellowship recipients have 

 changed a bit over time. 



Minorities at the MBL 



Only recently have larger numbers of women begun to enter the domains 

 of investigation and instruction in their own rights rather than as students 

 or as adjuncts to husbands and advisors. At first not all of the women were 

 well received. Some were the brunt of unfriendly practical jokes. For 

 example, a group of men saw one of the women, a rather hefty person, on 

 the floating collecting dock with her heavy and voluminous skirts on, 

 bending over to haul up a sample. They casually stepped together onto the 

 dock, which thus sank several inches and soaked the poor woman, whom 

 they did not really like. She probably did not like them much either. Others, 



