Marine Biology

Sources

Origins of Modern Marine Biology. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, several leading American biologists became interested in establishing a marine station capable of promoting and sustaining advanced research and instruction in marine biology along the lines of successful and influential European biological stations, such as Anton Dorrn’s marine-biology station in Naples (in which four American universities officially participated) or Henri Lacaze-Duthier’s laboratory at

Banyuls-sur-Mer, France. Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born zoologist, (1807-1873) mounted the first such endeavor at Penikese Island, Massachusetts, in 1873, and during the same period his students Alpheus Hyatt (1838-1902) and Alpheus Packard (1839-1905) established summer programs at the Massachusetts seaports of Annisquam and Salem, respectively. These programs were all short-lived.

The Woods Hole Laboratory. The most influential early research station was the U.S. Fish Commission laboratory, at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, directed by Spencer Fullerton Baird between 1871 and 1887. Created to survey and study the offshore fish populations and to manage a hatchery, this laboratory contributed to scientific knowledge mainly in the classification of fish species and marine ecology.

The Marine Biology Laboratory. Hoping to expand the scope of his laboratory in concert with a coalition of research-oriented universities, Baird drew up a plan that was the basis for the establishment of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole in 1888, the year after Baird’s death. Under its first director, Charles O. Whitman (1842-1910), who ran the laboratory until 1908, the MBL established a summer program with instruction in invertebrate zoology in 1888, adding marine botany in 1890, general physiology in 1892, and embryology in 1893. The courses were designed to address problems of marine biology but also employ the specific advantages offered by marine biology in order to push ahead the research perspectives of biology generally. The general-physiology course taught at Woods Hole was the first of its kind in the world. Everywhere else physiology was limited to the study of mammals. At Woods Hole in 1899-1900 German-born physiologist Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), conducted his famous experiments on artificial parthenogenesis of sea-urchin eggs, causing unfertilized eggs to develop into new organisms. Embryology courses at Woods Hole took advantage of the specific characteristics of marine eggs, many of which (including those of the sea urchin) have no outer shell and are transparent.

A Pioneering Institution. By giving the study of marine biology the broadest possible focus, the MBL became a leader in experimental biology. Until universities developed their own research facilities, institutions such as the MBL functioned as centers for scientific research and discovery. Following Dorrn’s model, the MBL allocated benches in its laboratory to participating universities, which sent their most promising students to Woods Hole. In addition to Loeb, the earliest researchers at the MBL included geneticists T. H. Morgan (1866-1945), who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1933, and E. B. Wilson (1856-1939)—who, like Morgan, had earlier worked in the U.S. Fish Commission laboratory—as well as embryologist Frank R. Lillie (1870-1947) and geneticist Nettie Stevens (1861-1912).

“THE END OF SCIENCE”

By the time he delivered the Lowell Lectures on Light Waves and Their Uses at Harvard University in 1899, Albert A. Michelson had come to believe that the age of great scientific discoveries had come to an end and that the physicist’s future role would be in the realm of refining previously established laws through precise measurement:

What would be the use of such extreme refinement in the science of measurement? Very briefly and in general terms the answer would be that in this direction the greater part of all future discovery must lie. The more fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.

Six years after Michelson spoke these words Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, overturning all of Michelson’s assumptions about the nature of the universe.

Source: Albert A. Michelson, Light Waves and Their Uses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903).

Sources

Dean C. Allard, “The Fish Commission Laboratory and Its Influence on the Founding of the Marine Biological Laboratory,” Journal of the History of Biology, 23 (1990): 251-270;

Frank R. Lillie, The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).