126 JL 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988 



accoutrements. There are also autoclaves to sterilize equipment, which the 

 research of the early decades here did not generally require; and centri- 

 fuges, bigger and faster and more efficient than those Costello used in his 

 first years here. Complicated specialized equipment appears as well. People 

 sometimes have to improvise to meet their particular needs. NIH and NSF 

 grants finance a high percentage of the increasingly complicated require- 

 ments of today's workers. 



Of course, sometimes the innovations can prove profound while re- 

 maining simple. Syracuse University's Robert Barlow notes that his own 

 neurophysiological work on the brain of Limulus suffered from the serious 

 problem that he needed to remove the brain yet keep it alive for at least 

 several days. For obvious reasons, it usually dies under such circumstances. 

 Somehow he had to prevent coagulation of the blood witliout producing 

 toxic side effects. He could not think of any solution until he happened to 

 meet a colleague in the MBL mailroom and described his frustrations. Well, 

 his friend suggested, why not cool a saline solution, cool the brain, and 

 replace the blood with the saline solution to inhibit clotting. Then do the 

 required measurements and studies while the brain stays alive and cool. 

 The suggestion worked, and the very first time brought measurements over 

 a four-day stretch. 



MBL techniques and equipment represent an amalgam of the tradi- 

 tional and modern, sophisticated and makeshift. Walking down the halls of 

 the lab buildings and peeking through tlie doors, a visitor can see tables, 

 chairs, seawater tanks, glassware, and other basic equipment from an 

 earlier century alongside such things as ultracentrifuges and Inoue's 

 fantastic-looking ultimate (for now) light microscope. The more than 

 100,000 square feet of space for instruction and research are filled with a 

 full range of equipment and with people to use it in the most creative and 

 innovative ways. 



Pro6(ems 



Just as techniques and procedures have constantly changed, the sorts of 

 dominant problems addressed over the years have also evolved. In the 

 earliest years, most researchers worked on a set of closely related prob- 

 lems. They asked "big " questions such as how orgjmisms develop and what 

 their development tells us about their evolutionary relationships. On the 

 first question, which occupied much of their attention, the MBL group held 

 an almost exclusively epigenetic position. This meant tliey believed tliat an 

 organism begins as a virtually unformed, though organized, collcc'tion of 

 matter and gradually becomes differentiated into the right kind of organism 

 during the developmental process. 



