The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a famous scientific institution located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (It is not connected with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.) It was founded in 1888, patterned on the Naples Zoological Station, as an independent research institution emphasizing both teaching and research.
The MBL became a sort of working summer resort for distinguished biologists from all over the country. Lewis Thomas, in several essays in the 1970s (eg, the collection 'Lives of a Cell') praised the MBL arrangement in luminous prose.
MBL has historically concentrated on the use of marine animals as model organisms for the study of fundamental problems in biology. Areas such as ecology and systematics are studied too, but are not what MBL is primarily known for. A famous example is use of the squid, Loligo pealii, which has a giant nerve axon that is much more amenable to study than those of other organisms; Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley first eludicated many of the fundamental mechanisms of nerve cells by studying these axons at MBL, work for which they won a Nobel prize in 1963.
The MBL library features a conspicuous, framed enlargement of Louis Agassiz' dictum, in his own handwriting: "Study nature, not books."
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