The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is
an international center for research and education
in biological and environmental science.
Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1888,
the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution
affiliated with the University of Chicago.
After being independent for most of its history,
it became affiliated with the university on
July 1, 2013.
It also collaborates with numerous other institutions.
== Introduction ==
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 2016, 550 students from 333 institutions
and 58 countries).The MBL's resident research
centers are the Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative
Biology and Tissue Engineering, the Ecosystems
Center, and the Bay Paul Center for Comparative
Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Visiting scientists are affiliated with the
MBL's Whitman Center.
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.
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.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.
(MBL Facts).
Among the scientists with a significant affiliation
with the MBL (scientists, course faculty and
students) are 57 Nobel Prize winners (since
1929); 124 Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigators, early career scientists, international
researchers, and professors (since 1960);
263 Members of the National Academy of Sciences
(since 1960); and 219 Members of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1960).
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.
In September 2018, Nipam Patel became director
of the Marine Biological Laboratory.
In May 2017, Neil Shubin, Ph.D., and Melina
Hale, Ph.D., were named interim co-directors
of the Marine Biological Laboratory, succeeding
Huntington F. Willard.
== History ==
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 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.
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.
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.The
MBL formally affiliated with the University
of Chicago on July 1, 2013.
In order to further scientific research and
education, the affiliation builds on historical
ties with the university, as MBL was led by
University of Chicago faculty members in its
first four decades.
The president of the university chairs the
MBL trustee's board and with their advice
appoints its members.
The Laboratory is a non-profit Massachusetts
corporation, whose sole member is the university.
== Research History ==
=== 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 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.
The availability of cutting-edge imaging instrumentation
in the MBL's Advanced Research Courses puts
faculty and students at the forefront of experimentation.
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.
The MBL has long been a center for the world's
experts in cell division.
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, Michael Sheetz, and others
discovered kinesin, a motor protein involved
in mitosis and other cellular processes, during
summer MBL research.
Vale, Sheetz, and James Spudich received the
2012 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
for their discoveries related to molecular
motors.
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.
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 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); Rudolf Raff (1980–82) (see Davidson,
1993) and Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado and
Richard Behringer (2012-2016).
=== 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
(MBL Facts).
=== Neuroscience, neurobiology, and sensory
physiology ===
The MBL's contributions to neuroscience and
sensory physiology are significant, fostered
today by more than 65 visiting investigators
and resident researchers in these fields,
as well as five graduate- and post-graduate
level Advanced Research Training courses.
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 KS 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 electric
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,” Doryteuthis (formerly Loligo)
pealeii, continues today, with studies on
axonal transport, the squid giant synapse,
squid genomics, and the molecular mechanisms
of Alzheimer's disease.
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).
Albert Szent-Györgyi (Nobel Laureate in 1937)
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 cycle, 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.
The Ecosystems Center is home to two of the
26 U.S.
Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites:
Toolik Lake, Alaska; and Plum Island, Massachusetts.
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 interim director of the Ecosystems Center
is Anne Giblin.
Former directors of the Center 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.
=== Comparative genomics, molecular evolution,
and microbial ecology ===
The Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative
Molecular Biology and Evolution was founded
at the MBL in 1997 and is currently directed
by David Mark Welch.
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 the human microbiome, are studied.
Mitchell Sogin, the Bay Paul Center's founder,
also founded two courses at the MBL: the Workshop
in Molecular Evolution; and Strategies and
Techniques for Analyzing Microbial Population
Structures.
In 2003-2004, Sogin launched the International
Census of Marine Microbes, a 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.
== See also ==
Catherine N. Norton
Rachel Carson (sculpture)
== Notes
