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 A Place for Breakthrough Science
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 he oldest private marine laboratory in the western hemisphere, the Marine Biological Laboratory was founded in 1888 as an independent institution for teaching and research. Primarily a summer laboratory in its early years, the MBL today retains its renowned summer program while simultaneously serving as the year round home for a cadre of world-class biologists and ecologists.
From Cell to Biosphere
Using marine organisms as models, scientists at the MBL have made fundamental discoveries about how organisms—including humans— reproduce and develop, how bodies fight disease, how sense organs gather information and how brains process it. "The invertebrate eye was invented into an optical instrument at the MBL, opening the way to modern visual physiology," wrote Lewis Thomas. "The giant axon of the Woods Hole squid became the apparatus for the creation of today's astonishing neurobiology. Developmental and reproductive biology were recognized and defined as sciences here." In recent years, the MBL has expanded and strengthened its research efforts in fields such as: molecular evolution, cell biology, and behavior and neurobiology.
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MBL scientists have also done seminal 20th century studies of how organisms interact with their environments and how environmental changes affect life in the earth's forests and fields, atmosphere, lakes, rivers, and oceans. In fact, the Ecosystems Center at the MBL has pioneered a method of extrapolating data from small sample areas and applying it to broader ecosystems that is now used by researchers around the world.
A Unique Institution
But while the MBL is one of the top tier research institutions in the country, it is also fundamentally different from other leading academic institutions. Almost as long as biology has been an experimental science, the laboratory in Woods Hole has been a gathering place where biologists come to work together, to collaborate across institutional and disciplinary lines, to open new lines of inquiry, and to train the men and women who will take up where they leave off. |
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"Unaffiliated with
any university,
supported by a small
endowment and
researchers' federal
grants, the MBL was
founded in 1888 as a
place where scientists
could get away from
their routine pressures
and do biology, teach
it and talk about it."
—Boston Globe
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Cornelia Clapp was the first investigator to be given a research problem at the MBL during its inaugural summer. Her work on toadfish led to a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Clapp was the MBL/s first librarian, one of the laboratory's first female trustees, and in instructor in the embryology course. In 1906 she was hailed as one of the 150 most important zoologists in America.
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