132 J^ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988 



When a student first arrived in the 1890s, people asked not what 

 problem the research would address, but rather what organism. One had 

 to choose carefully because some choices, like Lillie's selection of the 

 freshwater clam Unio, sent the researcher off to less pleasant or less 

 accessible sites to collect specimens. Today's easier transportation makes it 

 possible to roam up to Barnstable Harbor to explore life in the mud flats, or 

 to Sippewissett for the salt marsh. Collectors may tap the colder waters or 

 move on to the warmer currents of the Gulf Stream. And thanks to the 

 efforts of private ventures and then the Army Corps of Engineers, since 1914 

 the researcher has been able to explore life along the Cape Cod Canal, with 

 its fast-moving currents and access to clear, deep water. Lots of starfish find 

 their ways into collecting buckets from the canal. 



Choosing which organisms to study can be one of the crucial decisions 

 in biology. Some creatures simply do not like to perform in a laboratory 

 setting. Others only behave in the relevant way in certain months of the year. 

 In particular, embryological studies have to begin in early summer for many 

 marine organisms. For those organisms that are fertile for only a short time, 

 the researcher has to work frantically, collecting all possible material. After 

 the short mating season he or she can then begin a more leisurely process 

 of preparing and observing the materials collected. Occasionally, this means 

 that the hectic season has passed and the would-be observer has discovered 

 a fatal flaw in the preparations that makes the materials useless. A season 

 might thus be lost for serious research and for publishing any papers, on 

 that problem at least. Until very recently, squid have only been available 

 during the summers, because they come close to the shore then and are fai" 

 easier to collect and bring back than when they migrate further out to sea 

 in the winter. 



The selection of organisms for study has changed over the century, of 

 course. At first, logically enough, people went to the seashore to study 

 exclusively marine organisms. Then Whitman began to haul his pigeons 

 back and forth from Chicago to Woods Hole to carry out behavioral stvidies 

 on birds as he had earlier studied leeches and fi'eshwater mudpuppies. 

 Morgan turned to the abundant and highly variable fruitfly Drosophila for 

 study of sex determination and heredity. The subsequent explosion of 

 interest in genetics encouraged the use of fast-breeding, conUollable spe- 

 cies, for which most marine organisms did not qualify as well as Drosophila. 

 Columbia geneticist Donald Lanceficld recalk^d that he first arrived in 

 Woods Hole to become assistant to Charles W. Metz, (who moved from 

 graduate school under Morgan at Columbia to Cold Spring Harbor and on 

 to the University of Pennsylvania). Metz was then working on Orosophila but 

 not on the most popular D. melanogiister. He gave still anotiier species, D. 

 obscura, to Lancefield as his pet subject thereafter. Morgan and others also 

 brought teams of fly researchers witli them each summer, so the MBL had 



