6 I DOING SCIENCE A 135 



has always been a priority, and a continual challenge. Much of the official 

 correspondence has concerned keeping up with the growing demands for 

 supplies and equipment. 



Something as apparently simple as running seawater in the laboratory 

 is necessary to keep specimens alive, for example. Yet keeping the plumbing 

 system working with 500 gallons of seawater running through the pipes 

 every minute (vvdth its potential contaminants and corrosive salt) has always 

 proven difficult. As one of the men responsible for keeping the system 

 working recently put it, "A valve just won't work with a starfish the size of 

 your hand sitting inside. " 



Another problem is getting and keeping male and female organisms 

 separated when they all come in together in the same bucket. The re- 

 searcher wants to control development and to start fertilization when he or 

 she is ready, and not when the animals want to begin. This control makes 

 it possible to observe any chosen stage of development, even the earliest, 

 including the fertilization process itself. For one hundred years, many MBL 

 researchers have concentrated on these early processes, to determine both 

 the patterns and the incredible processes by which two tiny germ cells 

 manage to become one complex, coordinated adult organism. 



Further equipment helps to turn the individual scientist's observations 

 into a public record in the form of drawings or photographs. Initially, 

 familiar pens (often crow quills) and India ink made the requisite drawing 

 possible. Others used the simple but effective camera lucida to make their 

 drawings, until photography replaced much of that work in this century. 

 One student reported that he had had to identify and draw by hand clearly 

 one hundred specimens of protozoa for Gary Calkins' protozoology course. 

 The first fifty or so were easy, he said, but the last ten were awful to find, 

 identify, or to represent accurately. 



Making observations takes some equipment, whether a basic com- 

 pound microscope (for only a few individuals have ever used simple mi- 

 croscopes for serious scientific work, even when those would have been 

 just as good) and stains and drawing paper, or maybe an electron micro- 

 scope and advanced videotaping equipment. Since the 1970s, Carl Zeiss, 

 Inc., has helped to provide the very best microscopic equipment for MBL 

 students and researchers. They loan equipment in exchange for the chance 

 to try out new ideas with the demanding and sophisticated but respectful 

 audience. This program has helped to continue the MBL tradition of 

 making available the very best equipment, which from the very first years 

 has featured Zeiss equipment. 



Besides microscopes, there are the chemicals, procured from tiie 

 chemical room. And special glassware, for a while produced by first-rate 

 glassblower from the University of Pennsylvania, James Graham. In recent 

 decades, researchers have added radioactive isotopes and the necessary 



