6 I DOING SCIENCE A 131 



exists, issues of mechanism versus vitalism were quite hotly debated during 

 that time. 



Today less attention is given directly to such metaphysical and episte- 

 mological concerns. Most problems tend to be more specifically expressed 

 than they were earlier: in particular, which pathway makes this cell-cell 

 interaction possible? What does this chemical do in this phase of the 

 neurophysiological action? Or maybe: what is the quantitative ecological 

 balance over a small defined area? The problems are better defined. 

 Impatient with the opportunities that nature provides, biologists have 

 turned increasingly to manipulative experimental work. These sorts of 

 questions have recognizable answers in a way that the broader and more 

 far-reaching problems of the 1890s often did not. They yield more easily to 

 what we generally count as progress. But such questions do not evoke 

 animated discussion by the entire community in quite the same way either. 

 Times change. Now the Friday evening lectures still attract people from the 

 community at large, but some people in the audience admit that they only 

 rarely understand what is going on and what the major question is. 



Organisms 



Sometimes this focus on getting answers to increasingly specific questions 

 has meant that scientists have lost track of the organisms they are studying. 

 Some of the more intentiy focused of the "squid visitors" may not be able 

 to identify what their chosen research subject eats or when they mate, for 

 example. Perhaps it does not matter that they do not know. Certainly it 

 keeps the brain less cluttered, with more room for biochemical details or 

 neurophysiological modeling. As one researcher put it, "So what! The squid 

 has the giant axon. That is really all that matters" — because it works so well 

 as a model to address the current pressing problems of neurophysiology. 



Similarly, Jacques Loeb was rather disinclined to gather animals him- 

 self and far preferred to have someone else get his specimens for him. It did 

 not really matter to him exactiy where the animals lived or what their 

 feeding habits at the bottom of some pond might be, as long as they 

 provided useful models to answer the questions at hand. He was not 

 attracted to the idea of wading about in the mud or slipping about on the wet 

 algae of the intertidal zones. Other researchers were more inclined toward 

 the traditional concerns about behavior and life-style, as is characteristic of 

 natural historians such as Just, and they ridiculed Loeb's attitude. A true 

 scientist must know his beast. Just insisted. Today, a range of different types 

 of researchers coexist, exploring different sorts of questions with different 

 sorts of approaches and generating the MBL's vitality with cross-fertilization 

 of ideas. 



