190 M\ 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 188&-1988 



brought to the village a vitality and an intellectual excitement that wasn't 

 to be found in ordinary fishing villages and oceanside resorts. 



So one part of our centennial celebration has involved a long, lingering, 

 often affectionate look back to see whence we have come. An equally 

 important part of the centennial has been our effort to look forward, to ask 

 what role the MBL will play in the next decades of American biology. We are 

 entering our second century concurrent with the advent of the Age of 

 Molecular Biology. The galloping progress that overtook the 1971 AIBS 

 predictions has, if anything, picked up its pace, and today biologists are 

 developing new tools and new applications at an unprecedented rate. 

 Already, the powerful new tools of molecular biology have brought vastly 

 improved techniques for fighting and preventing disease, refinements in 

 fertility and population control, and the genetic engineering that has made 

 possible the most profound developments in agriculture since humankind 

 first domesticated plants and animals many thousand years ago. The revo- 

 lutionary progress in our understanding of life on the most basic and useful 

 levels will surely continue through the end of this century. 



Fortunately, our task in looking forward is not to set a timetable for 

 specific discoveries, but to clarify the role the MBL will play in modern 

 science — an enterprise several orders of magnitude larger and vastly more 

 complex than it was in C. O. Whitman's time. We must build the twenty- 

 first-century MBL without losing sight of the nineteenth- and twentieth- 

 century MBL. We must keep alive the old MBL — the informal, cooperative, 

 adventuresome, free-spirited laboratory so affectionately described in the 

 pages and photographs of this book. 



The centennial look forward has involved a broad cross section of the 

 community and expert consultants, including summer investigators and 

 year-round scientists, neurobiologists and cell biologists and ecosystems 

 analysts, our colleagues in the Boston University Marine Program, histori- 

 ans, friends fi'om business and industry, national science policy leaders, 

 community leaders from Woods Hole and Falmouth, and our friends in 

 state government. Because we have had input from so many people who 

 harbor so much affection and concern for the MBL, we can say with some 

 confidence where the MBL is headed. 



Clearly, our world-famous summer programs of teaching and re- 

 search will remain our raison d'etre. We will continue to modernize our 

 facilities and to introduce new biological approaches in our summer 

 courses and in our summer research programs. 



We wall continue to provide tutorial laboratory courses at the cutting 

 edge of science. Given tliat the faculty and students who populate tliese 

 courses are among the leaders in their fields throughout the world, it is 

 unlikely that the same courses could be given at any one university. The 

 MBL community is committed to the continuation of these one-of-a-kind 



