Marine Biological Laboratory
Encyclopedia
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is an international center for research and education in biology, biomedicine and ecology. Founded in 1888, the MBL is the oldest independent marine laboratory in the Americas, taking advantage of a coastal setting in the Cape Cod village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. To date, 54 MBL-affiliated scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize
, among many other honors received by the laboratory’s researchers.
Each year, hundreds of scientists from around the world come to the MBL to conduct research. Often, they form collaborations at the MBL that continue throughout their professional lifetimes. Serendipitous encounters at the MBL have historically led to leaps in scientific understanding. One example is the meeting of Franklin Stahl
and Matthew Meselson
at the MBL in the summer of 1954, when they conceived their crucial experiment to demonstrate the semi-conservative replication of DNA
(Holmes, 2001: 60-70).
During the summer, young scientists come to the MBL to attend the laboratory’s famous graduate-level courses. Some of these courses, such Physiology, Embryology, and Neural Systems and Behavior (formerly called Invertebrate Zoology), have continued to evolve over more than a century.
The MBL and Brown University
share a research and educational affiliation, The Brown-MBL Partnership, which includes a Ph.D.-awarding Graduate Program in Biological and Environmental Sciences. Other MBL programs train postgraduates, undergraduates, science teachers, historians, and science journalists. Throughout the year, the MBL is the site for research and planning conferences organized by professional scientific groups.
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 120-year history. The library also conducts digitization and informatics projects.
The many opportunities for recreation in Woods Hole are an important part of the social fabric of the MBL. Over the decades, hundreds of scientists have relaxed at MBL’s Stony Beach; enjoyed oceanside bike and walking trails; and met for conversation and rejuvenation at The Captain Kidd bar and restaurant.
In 2008,the institution began a campaign to obtain money to expand its year-round permanent programs.
The MBL is a private, nonprofit corporation. Its director and chief executive officer is Gary G. Borisy, a Ph.D. cell biologist known for his discovery of the protein tubulin
.
, the country’s first Fish Commissioner. 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 summer 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 (Maienschein, 1989).
Charles Otis Whitman
, an embryologist, was retained as the first director of the MBL. Whitman, who believed “other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor,” 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 (Marine Biological Laboratory, 1888).
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 (Maienschein, 1989).
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 has long been a center for the world’s experts in cell division. 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. In the early 1980s, Tim Hunt
, Joan Ruderman and others at the MBL identified the first of a class of proteins that regulate the cycle of cell division (cyclin
). Hunt was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2001 for this work (Hunt, 2004). In 1984, Ron Vale and others discovered kinesin
, a motor protein involved in mitosis and other cellular processes, during summer MBL research. In 1991 Israeli scientist Avram Hershko
began coming to the MBL to study the role that the protein ubiquitin plays in cell division. In 2004, Hershko won a Nobel Prize for his work to establish the basic mechanism of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
The MBL is also a proving ground for new technologies in microscopy
and imaging. The availability of cutting-edge imaging instrumentation in the MBL's discovery-based courses puts faculty and students at the forefront of experimentation. Osamu Shimomura
, an MBL senior scientist from 1982-2001, was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of green fluorescent protein
(GFP), which led to the development of revolutionary techniques for imaging live cells and their components.
A large portion of the leading developmental biologists in the United States, both historically and today, have participated in the MBL’s Embryology Course as directors, lecturers or students. One draw is the Woods Hole location and the availability of marine organisms, particularly the sea urchin
, that are ideal for embryological analysis because they shed nearly transparent eggs which are fertilized and develop externally. In the first decades after the course was founded in 1893, its faculty pioneered research directions that remain central today, including the study of cytoplasmic localization in eggs; embryonic cell lineage (important in modern stem cell
research); and evolutionary developmental biology
(today called ‘evo devo’). Some of the distinguished embryologists who have directed the course are Charles Otis Whitman
(1893-1895); Frank Rattray Lillie (1896-1903); Viktor Hamburger (1942-45); James Ebert (1962-66); Eric H. Davidson
(1972-74; 1988-96); and Rudolf Raff (1980-82) (see Davidson, 1993). Developmental biologist Eric Wieschaus, recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1995, teaches regularly in the MBL Embryology Course. Currently co-directed by Lee Niswander and Nipam H. Patel, the course continues to be a premier training ground for developmental biologists.
and sensory physiology also are significant, fostered today by its Neuroscience Institute with more than 100 participating summer researchers. The MBL has been a magnet for the discipline since L.W. Williams in 1910 discovered, and John Zachary Young
in 1936 rediscovered, the squid giant axon
, a nerve fiber that is 20 times larger in diameter than the largest human axon. Young brought this locally abundant, ideal experimental system to the attention of his MBL colleague K.S. Cole, who in 1938 used it to record the resistance changes underlying the action potential, which provided evidence that ions flowing across the axonal membrane generate this electrical impulse. In 1938, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
came to the MBL to learn about the squid giant axon from Cole. After World War II, Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley
, working in Plymouth, England and using the voltage clamp
technique developed by Cole, laid the basis for the modern understanding of electrical activity in the nervous system by measuring quantitatively the flow of ions across the axonal membrane. Hodgkin and Huxley received the Nobel Prize in 1963 for their description of the ionic basis of nerve conduction (Barlow et al., 1993: 151-172). Following on Hodgkin and Huxley’s work, in the 1960s and 1970s Clay Armstrong
and other MBL researchers described a number of the properties of the ion channels that allow sodium and potassium ions to carry electrical current across the cell membrane and Rodolfo Llinas
described the transmission properties at the squid giant synapse (Llinas 1999). The “scientific career” of the “Woods Hole squid,” Loligo pealeii, is still going strong today, with studies on axonal transport, the squid giant synapse
, and squid genomics.
Other marine organisms draw neuroscientists and neurobiologists to the MBL each summer, where a history of research into sensory physiology and behavior has been established. Haldan Keffer Hartline
, an MBL summer investigator in the 1920s and early 1930s, uncovered several basic mechanisms of photoreceptor function through his studies on the horseshoe crab. Hartline shared the 1967 Nobel Prize with summer MBL colleague George Wald
, who described the molecular basis of photoreception by showing that the light-sensitive visual pigment molecules consist of a slightly modified form of vitamin A coupled to a protein. Another long-term summer investigator, Stephen W. Kuffler, is credited with “founding” the science of neurobiology in the mid-1960s at Harvard Medical School and he also initiated instruction in neurobiology at the MBL (Barlow et al., 1993:175-234; 203-234). Instructors in the MBL Neurobiology Course have included four Nobel laureates: Roderick MacKinnon
(2003 prize), H. Robert Horvitz
(2002), Paul Greengard
(2000) and Bert Sakmann
(1991). Another Nobelist, Albert Szent-Györgyi
, conducted research at the MBL from 1947 to 1986, most significantly on the biochemical nature of muscular contraction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Frederik Bang and Jack Levin at the MBL discovered that the blood of the horseshoe crab clotted when exposed to bacterial endotoxins even in vanishingly small amounts. From this basic research, a reagent, Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL), was developed that can detect minute amounts of bacterial toxins. The LAL test has resulted in dramatic improvement in the quality of drugs and biological products for intravenous injection.
, an emphasis maintained today. The Ecosystems Center has a year-round staff of more than 40 scientists who study a variety of ecosystems and their responses to human activities and environmental changes. The center is located in Woods Hole yet has a global reach, with active research sites in the Arctic tundra; in forest, coastal and marine sites in New England, Sweden and Brazil; and on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Ecosystems Center is home to three of the 26 U.S. Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites: Toolik Lake, Alaska; Plum Island, Massachusetts; and Palmer, Antarctica. Scientists in the Ecosystems Center study the effects of forest clearance and land-use change on atmospheric chemistry, watershed processes and coastal ecology, the global-scale anthropogenic enrichment of the nitrogen cycle
, and ecosystem responses to global warming
. The Ecosystems Center is directed by Hugh Ducklow, a biological oceanographer. The center's former directors, who are still active on the scientific staff, are Jerry Melillo, who studies the biogeochemistry
of terrestrial ecosystems, and John Hobbie, a microbial ecologist. The Ecosystems Center is founded on a vision of collaborative, interdisciplinary science; shared lab facilities and instrumentation; and a long-term, large-scale, systems-wide view of ecosystem processes.
, are studied. Mitchell Sogin, the Bay Paul Center’s founder and director, started the summer Workshop in Molecular Evolution at the MBL in 1988. In 2003-2004, Sogin launched the International Census of Marine Microbes, an ambitious, global effort to describe the biodiversity
of marine micro-organisms. Early results from this census in 2006 revealed some 10 to 100 times more types of marine microbes than expected, and the vast majority are previously unknown, low-abundance microorganisms now called the “rare biosphere.” Other Bay Paul Center projects are focused on microbes that live in extreme environments, from hydrothermal vents to highly acidic ecosystems, which may lead to a better understanding of life that could exist on other planets. Activities at the Bay Paul Center are supported by advanced DNA sequencing and other genomics equipment at the center’s Keck Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics Facility.
(EOL) project, a global initiative to electronically document all 1.8 million named species on Earth. The MBL is home to the EOL's Biodiversity Informatics Group, which is developing the software infrastructure for the EOL. Also, the MBLWHOI Library is a member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
consortium, which is providing content to the EOL by digitizing thousands of books and other publications on natural history and the biological sciences.
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
, among many other honors received by the laboratory’s researchers.
Introduction
The MBL has three main research centers: the Ecosystems Center; the Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution; and the Whitman Center for Research and Discovery.Each year, hundreds of scientists from around the world come to the MBL to conduct research. Often, they form collaborations at the MBL that continue throughout their professional lifetimes. Serendipitous encounters at the MBL have historically led to leaps in scientific understanding. One example is the meeting of Franklin Stahl
Franklin Stahl
Dr. Franklin William Stahl is an American molecular biologist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for the "replicated" strand.He is...
and Matthew Meselson
Matthew Meselson
Matthew Stanley Meselson is an American geneticist and molecular biologist whose research was important in showing how DNA replicates, recombines and is repaired in cells. In his mature years, he has been an active chemical and biological weapons activist and consultant...
at the MBL in the summer of 1954, when they conceived their crucial experiment to demonstrate the semi-conservative replication of DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
(Holmes, 2001: 60-70).
During the summer, young scientists come to the MBL to attend the laboratory’s famous graduate-level courses. Some of these courses, such Physiology, Embryology, and Neural Systems and Behavior (formerly called Invertebrate Zoology), have continued to evolve over more than a century.
The MBL and Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
share a research and educational affiliation, The Brown-MBL Partnership, which includes a Ph.D.-awarding Graduate Program in Biological and Environmental Sciences. Other MBL programs train postgraduates, undergraduates, science teachers, historians, and science journalists. Throughout the year, the MBL is the site for research and planning conferences organized by professional scientific groups.
The MBL shares a library, the MBLWHOI Library, with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, nonprofit research and higher education facility dedicated to the study of all aspects of marine science and engineering and to the education of marine researchers. Established in 1930, it is the largest independent oceanographic research...
. 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 120-year history. The library also conducts digitization and informatics projects.
The many opportunities for recreation in Woods Hole are an important part of the social fabric of the MBL. Over the decades, hundreds of scientists have relaxed at MBL’s Stony Beach; enjoyed oceanside bike and walking trails; and met for conversation and rejuvenation at The Captain Kidd bar and restaurant.
In 2008,the institution began a campaign to obtain money to expand its year-round permanent programs.
The MBL is a private, nonprofit corporation. Its director and chief executive officer is Gary G. Borisy, a Ph.D. cell biologist known for his discovery of the protein tubulin
Tubulin
Tubulin is one of several members of a small family of globular proteins. The most common members of the tubulin family are α-tubulin and β-tubulin, the proteins that make up microtubules. Each has a molecular weight of approximately 55 kiloDaltons. Microtubules are assembled from dimers of α- and...
.
History
The Marine Biological Laboratory grew from the vision of several Bostonians and Spencer Fullerton BairdSpencer Fullerton Baird
Spencer Fullerton Baird was an American ornithologist, ichthyologist and herpetologist. Starting in 1850 he was assistant-secretary and later secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C...
, the country’s first Fish Commissioner. Baird had set up a United States Fish Commission
United States Fish Commission
The United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries was established on February 9, 1871 , as an independent commission with a mandate to investigate the causes for the decrease of commercial fish and aquatic animals in U.S...
research station in Woods Hole in 1882, and had ambitions to expand it into a major laboratory. He invited Alpheus Hyatt
Alpheus Hyatt
Alpheus Hyatt was an American zoologist and palaeontologist.- Biography :Alpheus Hyatt II was born in Washington, D.C. to Alpheus Hyatt and Harriet Randolph Hyatt...
to move his marine biology laboratory and school which he had founded at the Norwood-Hyatt House
Norwood-Hyatt House
Norwood-Hyatt House is a historic house at 704 Washington Street in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Alpheus Hyatt purchased the house in 1878. He started the first marine biological laboratory in the country here in Annisquam, Massachusetts, a village of Gloucester. It later moved to Woods Hole and was...
in Annisquam, Massachusetts
Annisquam, Massachusetts
Annisquam is a small waterfront neighborhood located in the City of Gloucester located on the North Shore of Massachusetts.-History:The name "Annisquam" comes from an Algonquian term meaning "top of the rock, containing , "on top of", and , "rock". The first European settlement in Annisquam was...
to Woods Hole. Inspired by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
’s short-lived summer 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
Boston Society of Natural History
The Boston Society of Natural History in Boston, Massachusetts, was an organization dedicated to the study and promotion of natural history. It published a scholarly journal and established a museum. In its first few decades, the society occupied several successive locations in Boston's Financial...
, 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 (Maienschein, 1989).
Charles Otis Whitman
Charles Otis Whitman
-External links:***-Notes:...
, an embryologist, was retained as the first director of the MBL. Whitman, who believed “other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor,” 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 (Marine Biological Laboratory, 1888).
The MBL Library was established in 1889, with scientist and future MBL trustee Cornelia Clapp
Cornelia Clapp
Cornelia Maria Clapp was an American zoologist and academic specializing in marine biology.Born in Montague, Massachusetts, Clapp was educated at Mount Holyoke Seminary, the forerunner of today’s Mount Holyoke College, and graduated in 1871...
serving as librarian. In 1899, the MBL began publishing The Biological Bulletin
The Biological Bulletin
The Biological Bulletin is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the field of biology. The journal was established in 1897 as the Zoological Bulletin by Charles Otis Whitman and William Morton Wheeler. In 1899 the title was changed to The Biological Bulletin, and production was transferred to...
, a scientific journal that is still edited at the MBL (Maienschein, 1989).
Cell, Developmental, and Reproductive Biology
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 LoebJacques Loeb
Jacques Loeb was a German-born American physiologist and biologist.-Biography:...
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
Edmund Beecher Wilson
Edmund Beecher Wilson was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist. He wrote one of the most famous textbooks in the history of modern biology, The Cell.- Career :...
, Nettie Stevens
Nettie Stevens
Nettie Maria Stevens was an early American geneticist. She and Edmund Beecher Wilson were the first researchers to describe the chromosomal basis of sex....
and others made connections between the chromosomes and Mendelian heredity, while Wilson’s colleague at both the MBL and Columbia University, Thomas Hunt Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and embryologist and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries relating the role the chromosome plays in heredity.Morgan received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in zoology...
, launched the field of experimental genetics (Pauly, 2000:158). Keith R. Porter
Keith R. Porter
Keith Roberts Porter was a Canadian cell biologist. He did pioneering biology research using electron microscopy of cells , such as work on the 9 + 2 microtubule structure in the axoneme of cilia. Porter also contributed to the development of other experimental methods for cell culture and nuclear...
, 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 has long been a center for the world’s experts in cell division. 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
Mitosis
Mitosis is the process by which a eukaryotic cell separates the chromosomes in its cell nucleus into two identical sets, in two separate nuclei. It is generally followed immediately by cytokinesis, which divides the nuclei, cytoplasm, organelles and cell membrane into two cells containing roughly...
, including his discovery of the spindle fibers. In the early 1980s, Tim Hunt
Tim Hunt
Sir Richard Timothy "Tim" Hunt, FRS is an English biochemist.Hunt was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland H...
, Joan Ruderman and others at the MBL identified the first of a class of proteins that regulate the cycle of cell division (cyclin
Cyclin
Cyclins are a family of proteins that control the progression of cells through the cell cycle by activating cyclin-dependent kinase enzymes.- Function :...
). Hunt was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2001 for this work (Hunt, 2004). In 1984, Ron Vale and others discovered kinesin
Kinesin
A kinesin is a protein belonging to a class of motor proteins found in eukaryotic cells. Kinesins move along microtubule filaments, and are powered by the hydrolysis of ATP . The active movement of kinesins supports several cellular functions including mitosis, meiosis and transport of cellular...
, a motor protein involved in mitosis and other cellular processes, during summer MBL research. In 1991 Israeli scientist Avram Hershko
Avram Hershko
Avram Hershko is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.-Biography:Born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, Hershko emigrated to Israel in 1950. Received his M.D. in 1965 and his Ph.D in 1969 from the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel...
began coming to the MBL to study the role that the protein ubiquitin plays in cell division. In 2004, Hershko won a Nobel Prize for his work to establish the basic mechanism of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
The MBL is also a proving ground for new technologies in microscopy
Microscopy
Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view samples and objects that cannot be seen with the unaided eye...
and imaging. The availability of cutting-edge imaging instrumentation in the MBL's discovery-based courses puts faculty and students at the forefront of experimentation. Osamu Shimomura
Osamu Shimomura
is a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and Professor Emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University Medical School...
, an MBL senior scientist from 1982-2001, was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of green fluorescent protein
Green fluorescent protein
The green fluorescent protein is a protein composed of 238 amino acid residues that exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to blue light. Although many other marine organisms have similar green fluorescent proteins, GFP traditionally refers to the protein first isolated from the...
(GFP), which led to the development of revolutionary techniques for imaging live cells and their components.
A large portion of the leading developmental biologists in the United States, both historically and today, have participated in the MBL’s Embryology Course as directors, lecturers or students. One draw is the Woods Hole location and the availability of marine organisms, particularly the sea urchin
Sea urchin
Sea urchins or urchins are small, spiny, globular animals which, with their close kin, such as sand dollars, constitute the class Echinoidea of the echinoderm phylum. They inhabit all oceans. Their shell, or "test", is round and spiny, typically from across. Common colors include black and dull...
, that are ideal for embryological analysis because they shed nearly transparent eggs which are fertilized and develop externally. In the first decades after the course was founded in 1893, its faculty pioneered research directions that remain central today, including the study of cytoplasmic localization in eggs; embryonic cell lineage (important in modern stem cell
Stem cell
This article is about the cell type. For the medical therapy, see Stem Cell TreatmentsStem cells are biological cells found in all multicellular organisms, that can divide and differentiate into diverse specialized cell types and can self-renew to produce more stem cells...
research); and evolutionary developmental biology
Evolutionary developmental biology
Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine the ancestral relationship between them, and to discover how developmental processes evolved...
(today called ‘evo devo’). Some of the distinguished embryologists who have directed the course are Charles Otis Whitman
Charles Otis Whitman
-External links:***-Notes:...
(1893-1895); Frank Rattray Lillie (1896-1903); Viktor Hamburger (1942-45); James Ebert (1962-66); Eric H. Davidson
Eric H. Davidson
Eric H. Davidson is a developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology. Davidson is best known for his pioneering work on the role of gene regulation in evolution, on embryonic specification and for spearheading the effort to sequence the genome of the purple sea urchin,...
(1972-74; 1988-96); and Rudolf Raff (1980-82) (see Davidson, 1993). Developmental biologist Eric Wieschaus, recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1995, teaches regularly in the MBL Embryology Course. Currently co-directed by Lee Niswander and Nipam H. Patel, the course continues to be a premier training ground for developmental biologists.
Regenerative Biology and Medicine
In 2010, the MBL established the Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering, where researchers study the ability of marine and other animals to spontaneously regenerate damaged or aging body parts. An understanding of tissue and organ regeneration in lower animals holds promise for translation to treatments for human conditions, including spinal cord injury, diabetes, organ failure, and degenerative neural diseases such as Alzheimer’s. A cornerstone of the Bell Center is a national resource for research on the frog, Xenopus, which is a major animal model used in U.S. biomedical research. The National Xenopus Resource at the MBL is funded by the National Institutes of Health.Neuroscience, Neurobiology, and Sensory Physiology
The MBL’s contributions to neuroscienceNeuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
and sensory physiology also are significant, fostered today by its Neuroscience Institute with more than 100 participating summer researchers. The MBL has been a magnet for the discipline since L.W. Williams in 1910 discovered, and John Zachary Young
John Zachary Young
John Zachary Young FRS , generally known as "JZ" or "JZY", was an English zoologist and neurophysiologist, described as "one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century .....
in 1936 rediscovered, the squid giant axon
Squid giant axon
The squid giant axon is the very large axon that controls part of the water jet propulsion system in squid. It was discovered by English zoologist and neurophysiologist John Zachary Young in 1936...
, a nerve fiber that is 20 times larger in diameter than the largest human axon. Young brought this locally abundant, ideal experimental system to the attention of his MBL colleague K.S. Cole, who in 1938 used it to record the resistance changes underlying the action potential, which provided evidence that ions flowing across the axonal membrane generate this electrical impulse. In 1938, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, OM, KBE, PRS was a British physiologist and biophysicist, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles....
came to the MBL to learn about the squid giant axon from Cole. After World War II, Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley
Andrew Huxley
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, OM, FRS is an English physiologist and biophysicist, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his experimental and mathematical work with Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin on the basis of nerve action potentials, the electrical impulses that enable the activity...
, working in Plymouth, England and using the voltage clamp
Voltage clamp
The voltage clamp is used by electrophysiologists to measure the ion currents across the membrane of excitable cells, such as neurons, while holding the membrane voltage at a set level. Cell membranes of excitable cells contain many different kinds of ion channels, some of which are voltage gated...
technique developed by Cole, laid the basis for the modern understanding of electrical activity in the nervous system by measuring quantitatively the flow of ions across the axonal membrane. Hodgkin and Huxley received the Nobel Prize in 1963 for their description of the ionic basis of nerve conduction (Barlow et al., 1993: 151-172). Following on Hodgkin and Huxley’s work, in the 1960s and 1970s Clay Armstrong
Clay Armstrong
Clay Margarave Armstrong is an American physiologist and a former student of Dr. Andrew Fielding Huxley. He is currently a professor of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania....
and other MBL researchers described a number of the properties of the ion channels that allow sodium and potassium ions to carry electrical current across the cell membrane and Rodolfo Llinas
Rodolfo Llinás
Rodolfo R. Llinás PhD is a neuroscientist. He is presently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine...
described the transmission properties at the squid giant synapse (Llinas 1999). The “scientific career” of the “Woods Hole squid,” Loligo pealeii, is still going strong today, with studies on axonal transport, the squid giant synapse
Squid giant synapse
The squid giant synapse is a chemical synapse found in squid. It is the largest chemical junction in nature.-Anatomy:The squid giant synapse was first recognized by John Zachary Young in 1939. It lies in the stellate ganglion on each side of the midline, at the posterior wall of the squid’s...
, and squid genomics.
Other marine organisms draw neuroscientists and neurobiologists to the MBL each summer, where a history of research into sensory physiology and behavior has been established. Haldan Keffer Hartline
Haldan Keffer Hartline
Haldan Keffer Hartline was an American physiologist who was a co-winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in analyzing the neurophysiological mechanisms of vision.Hartline began his study of retinal electrophysiology as a National Research Council Fellow at Johns...
, an MBL summer investigator in the 1920s and early 1930s, uncovered several basic mechanisms of photoreceptor function through his studies on the horseshoe crab. Hartline shared the 1967 Nobel Prize with summer MBL colleague George Wald
George Wald
George Wald was an American scientist who is best known for his work with pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.- Research :...
, who described the molecular basis of photoreception by showing that the light-sensitive visual pigment molecules consist of a slightly modified form of vitamin A coupled to a protein. Another long-term summer investigator, Stephen W. Kuffler, is credited with “founding” the science of neurobiology in the mid-1960s at Harvard Medical School and he also initiated instruction in neurobiology at the MBL (Barlow et al., 1993:175-234; 203-234). Instructors in the MBL Neurobiology Course have included four Nobel laureates: Roderick MacKinnon
Roderick MacKinnon
Roderick MacKinnon is a professor of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation of ion channels....
(2003 prize), H. Robert Horvitz
H. Robert Horvitz
Howard Robert Horvitz is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.-Life:Horvitz did his undergraduate studies at MIT in 1968, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi...
(2002), Paul Greengard
Paul Greengard
Paul Greengard is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous...
(2000) and Bert Sakmann
Bert Sakmann
-External links:*...
(1991). Another Nobelist, Albert Szent-Györgyi
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt was a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with discovering vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle...
, conducted research at the MBL from 1947 to 1986, most significantly on the biochemical nature of muscular contraction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Frederik Bang and Jack Levin at the MBL discovered that the blood of the horseshoe crab clotted when exposed to bacterial endotoxins even in vanishingly small amounts. From this basic research, a reagent, Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL), was developed that can detect minute amounts of bacterial toxins. The LAL test has resulted in dramatic improvement in the quality of drugs and biological products for intravenous injection.
Ecosystems Science
Ecosystems research became a year-round commitment at the MBL in 1962 with the founding of the Systematics-Ecology program, under the direction of Melbourne R. Carriker. In 1975, the MBL’s Ecosystems Center was established, with George Woodwell as director. The original research focus was on the global carbon cycleCarbon cycle
The carbon cycle is the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon is exchanged among the biosphere, pedosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of the Earth...
, an emphasis maintained today. The Ecosystems Center has a year-round staff of more than 40 scientists who study a variety of ecosystems and their responses to human activities and environmental changes. The center is located in Woods Hole yet has a global reach, with active research sites in the Arctic tundra; in forest, coastal and marine sites in New England, Sweden and Brazil; and on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Ecosystems Center is home to three of the 26 U.S. Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites: Toolik Lake, Alaska; Plum Island, Massachusetts; and Palmer, Antarctica. Scientists in the Ecosystems Center study the effects of forest clearance and land-use change on atmospheric chemistry, watershed processes and coastal ecology, the global-scale anthropogenic enrichment of the nitrogen cycle
Nitrogen cycle
The nitrogen cycle is the process by which nitrogen is converted between its various chemical forms. This transformation can be carried out by both biological and non-biological processes. Important processes in the nitrogen cycle include fixation, mineralization, nitrification, and denitrification...
, and ecosystem responses to global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
. The Ecosystems Center is directed by Hugh Ducklow, a biological oceanographer. The center's former directors, who are still active on the scientific staff, are Jerry Melillo, who studies the biogeochemistry
Biogeochemistry
Biogeochemistry is the scientific discipline that involves the study of the chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes and reactions that govern the composition of the natural environment...
of terrestrial ecosystems, and John Hobbie, a microbial ecologist. The Ecosystems Center is founded on a vision of collaborative, interdisciplinary science; shared lab facilities and instrumentation; and a long-term, large-scale, systems-wide view of ecosystem processes.
Comparative Genomics, Molecular Evolution, and Environmental Microbiology
The Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution was founded at the MBL in 1997. By comparing diverse genomes, scientists at the center are elucidating the evolutionary relationships of biological systems, and describing genes and genomes of biomedical and environmental significance. Microorganisms found in a wide range of ecosystems, including human parasitesParasitism
Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host. Traditionally parasite referred to organisms with lifestages that needed more than one host . These are now called macroparasites...
, are studied. Mitchell Sogin, the Bay Paul Center’s founder and director, started the summer Workshop in Molecular Evolution at the MBL in 1988. In 2003-2004, Sogin launched the International Census of Marine Microbes, an ambitious, global effort to describe the biodiversity
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions...
of marine micro-organisms. Early results from this census in 2006 revealed some 10 to 100 times more types of marine microbes than expected, and the vast majority are previously unknown, low-abundance microorganisms now called the “rare biosphere.” Other Bay Paul Center projects are focused on microbes that live in extreme environments, from hydrothermal vents to highly acidic ecosystems, which may lead to a better understanding of life that could exist on other planets. Activities at the Bay Paul Center are supported by advanced DNA sequencing and other genomics equipment at the center’s Keck Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics Facility.
The Encyclopedia of Life
The MBL is a cornerstone institution in the Encyclopedia of LifeEncyclopedia of Life
The Encyclopedia of Life is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world...
(EOL) project, a global initiative to electronically document all 1.8 million named species on Earth. The MBL is home to the EOL's Biodiversity Informatics Group, which is developing the software infrastructure for the EOL. Also, the MBLWHOI Library is a member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a project for the digitization of literature on biodiversity. It was founded in 2005 and was initially formed by ten United States and British libraries....
consortium, which is providing content to the EOL by digitizing thousands of books and other publications on natural history and the biological sciences.
Summary
The MBL’s role as a unique and important center for biology and ecology is widely recognized. “The history of the [MBL] is more than the history of a distinguished institution. It is also the history of biology itself during the past 100 years,” wrote science historian Garland Allen in 1988 (Barlow et al., 1993: iv). As the MBL enters its 12th decade, it continues to define new directions in the biological sciences.External links
- Marine Biological Laboratory
- MBLWHOI Library
- Woods Hole Scientific Community Publications
- The Biological Bulletin
- Ron Vale iBioMagazine talk about his work at the MBL: "Molecular Motor Search
- MBL Ecosystems Center
- United States Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network
- Josephine Bay Paul Center
- International Census of Marine Microbes
- Encyclopedia of Life
- Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Brown University