Marine Biological Laboratory

History

19th century

The Marine Biological Laboratory grew from the vision of several Bostonians and Spencer Fullerton Baird, the United States' first Fish Commissioner (a government official concerned with the use of fisheries). Baird had set up a United States Fish Commission research station in Woods Hole in 1882, and had ambitions to expand it into a major laboratory. He invited Alpheus Hyatt to move his marine biology laboratory and school which he had founded at the Norwood-Hyatt House in Annisquam, Massachusetts, to Woods Hole. Inspired by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz's short-lived experimental summer school, the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, off the coast of Woods Hole, Hyatt accepted the offer. With $10,000 raised by the Woman's Education Association of Boston and the Boston Society of Natural History, land was purchased, a building was erected, and the MBL was incorporated with Hyatt as the first president of the board of trustees. The Fish Commission supplied crucial support, including marine organisms and running sea water.

University of Chicago professor, Charles Otis Whitman, an embryologist, was retained to also serve as the first director of the MBL. Whitman believed "other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor," and emphasized the need to combine research and education at the new laboratory. The MBL's first summer course provided a six-week introduction to invertebrate zoology; facilities for visiting summer investigators were also offered.

The MBL Library was established in 1889, with scientist and future MBL trustee Cornelia Clapp serving as librarian. In 1899, the MBL began publishing The Biological Bulletin, a scientific journal that is still edited at the MBL.

Gertrude Stein, later well known as a novelist and art collector, took part in MBL's Embryology course in the summer of 1897, while her brother Leo took part in the Invertebrates course.

20th century

Writing in 1972, Lewis Thomas both explained and praised the nature of the MBL as a scientific institution. He wrote about it in his recurring New England Journal of Medicine column called "Notes of a Biology-Watcher", in an installment called "The MBL"; the essay was later collected into the volume titled The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. He said of the MBL of that day, "Today, it stands as the uniquely national center for biology in this country; it is the National Biological Laboratory without being officially designated (or yet funded) as such. Its influence on the growth and development of biologic science has been equivalent to that of many of the country's universities combined, for it has had its pick of the world's scientific talent for each summer's research and teaching. [...] Someone has counted thirty Nobel Laureates who have worked at the MBL at one time or another. It is amazing that such an institution, exerting so much influence on academic science, has been able to remain so absolutely autonomous. It has, to be sure, linkages of various kinds, arrangements with outside universities for certain graduate programs, and it adheres delicately, somewhat ambiguously, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution just up the street. But it has never come under the domination of any outside institution or governmental agency, nor has it ever been told what to do by any outside group. [...] There is no way of predicting what the future will be like for an institution such as the MBL. One way or another, it will evolve. It may shift soon into a new phase, with a year-round program for teaching and research and a year-round staff, but it will have to accomplish this without jeopardizing the immense power of its summer programs, or all institutional hell will break loose. It will have to find new ways for relating to the universities, if its graduate programs are to expand as they should. It will have to develop new symbiotic relations with the Oceanographic Institute, since both places have so much at stake. And it will have to find more money, much more—the kind of money that only federal governments possess—without losing any of its own initiative. It will be an interesting place to watch, in the years ahead."

In 1927, Roger Arliner Young became the first African-American woman to perform research at the institution.

21st century

The MBL became formally affiliated with the University of Chicago on July 1, 2013. In order to further scientific research and education, the affiliation built on historical ties with the university, as MBL was led by University of Chicago faculty members in its first four decades. The Laboratory returned to independent status in 2026.

In September 2018, Nipam Patel became director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, succeeding Huntington F. Willard.

Research

Staff

The MBL has approximately 250 year-round employees, about half of which are scientists and scientific support staff. They are joined each year by more than 500 visiting scientists, summer staff, and research associates from hundreds of institutions around the world, as well as a large number of faculty and students participating in MBL courses (in 2024, 550 students from 273 institutions and 58 countries).

Facilities

The MBL's resident research centers are the Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering, the Ecosystems Center, and the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution]. Visiting scientists are affiliated with the MBL's Whitman Center. Whitman Center Scientists comprise more than 100 principal investigators from academic institutions around the world. Other resources include The Marine Resources Center, an advanced facility for maintaining, culturing, and providing aquatic and marine organisms essential to biological, biomedical, and ecological research; and The National Xenopus Resource, which breeds and maintains Xenopus (frog) genetic stocks; and provides training in Xenopus husbandry, cell biology, imaging, genetics, transgenesis, and genomics.

The MBL shares a library, the MBLWHOI Library, with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The MBLWHOI Library holds print and electronic collections in the biological, biomedical, ecological, and oceanographic sciences, and houses a growing archival collection, including photograph and videos from the MBL's history. The library also conducts digitization and informatics projects.

Research

Research at the MBL focuses on four themes:

fundamental biological research, often using marine organisms as novel model systems, encompassing research in regenerative biology, neuroscience, sensory physiology, and comparative evolution and genomics;

the study of microbiomes and microbial diversity and ecology in a variety of ocean and terrestrial habitats;

imaging and computation;

ecosystems science and climate change, and organismal adaptation to changing environments.

Cell, developmental, and reproductive biology have been a central part of the MBL's programs since the 1890s. Important discoveries in these fields at the MBL reach back to 1899, when Jacques Loeb demonstrated artificial parthenogenesis in sea urchin eggs; to 1905, when Edwin Grant Conklin first identified egg cytoplasmic regions that are programmed to form certain tissues or organs; to 1916, when Frank Rattray Lillie identified circulating hormones that influence sexual differentiation (Lillie, 1944). In the MBL's first two decades, cytologists Edmund Beecher Wilson, Nettie Stevens and others made connections between the chromosomes and Mendelian heredity, while Wilson's colleague at both the MBL and Columbia University, Thomas Hunt Morgan, launched the field of experimental genetics (Pauly, 2000:158). Keith R. Porter, considered by many to be a founder of modern cell biology due to his pioneering work on the fine structure of cells, including the discovery of microtubules, carried out research at the MBL starting in 1937 and directed the laboratory from 1975-77 (Barlow et al., 1993: 95-115).

The MBL is also a proving ground for new technologies in microscopy and imaging. MBL Distinguished Scientist Osamu Shimomura, who joined the MBL in 1983, was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP) in the early 1960s, which led to the development of revolutionary techniques for imaging live cells and their components. Resident Distinguished Scientist Shinya Inoué's innovations in polarized light microscopy and video imaging since the 1950s have been instrumental in clarifying the cellular events of mitosis, including his discovery of the spindle fibers.

Education program

The MBL offers a range of courses, workshops, conferences, and internships throughout the year. Central to its programs are more than 20 Advanced Research Training Courses, graduate-level courses in topics ranging from physiology, embryology, neurobiology, and microbiology to imaging and computation integrated with biological research.

In addition, the MBL hosts courses for undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Chicago and other colleges and universities, as well as workshops and conferences—accommodating more than 2,600 participants in 2016.