The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is a research institution for biological and environmental sciences in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States. MBL was founded in 1888 as a private, nonprofit institution. It was overseen by the University of Chicago from July 1, 2013, and returned to independent status on July 1, 2026. As of 2024, 63 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with MBL as students, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, since 1960, there have been 137 Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, early career scientists, international researchers, and professors; 319 members of the National Academy of Sciences; and 260 Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences who have been affiliated with the lab.
History
19th century 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 experimental summer school, the Anderson 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.
University of Chicago professor, Charles Otis Whitman, an embryologist, was retained to also serve as the first director of the MBL. Whitman believed "other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor," and 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.
20th century
Writing in 1972, Lewis Thomas both explained and praised the nature of the MBL as a scientific institution. He wrote about it in his recurring New England Journal of Medicine column called "Notes of a Biology-Watcher", in an installment called "The MBL"; the essay was later collected into the volume titled The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. He said of the MBL of that day, "Today, it stands as the uniquely national center for biology in this country; it is the National Biological Laboratory without being officially designated (or yet funded) as such. Its influence on the growth and development of biologic science has been equivalent to that of many of the country's universities combined, for it has had its pick of the world's scientific talent for each summer's research and teaching. […] Someone has counted thirty Nobel Laureates who have worked at the MBL at one time or another. It is amazing that such an institution, exerting so much influence on academic science, has been able to remain so absolutely autonomous. It has, to be sure, linkages of various kinds, arrangements with outside universities for certain graduate programs, and it adheres delicately, somewhat ambiguously, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution just up the street. But it has never come under the domination of any outside institution or governmental agency, nor has it ever been told what to do by any outside group. […] There is no way of predicting what the future will be like for an institution such as the MBL. One way or another, it will evolve. It may shift soon into a new phase, with a year-round program for teaching and research and a year-round staff, but it will have to accomplish this without jeopardizing the immense power of its summer programs, or all institutional hell will break loose. It will have to find new ways for relating to the universities, if its graduate programs are to expand as they should. It will have to develop new symbiotic relations with the Oceanographic Institute, since both places have so much at stake. And it will have to find more money, much more — the kind of money that only federal governments possess — without losing any of its own initiative. It will be an interesting place to watch, in the years ahead." In 1927, Roger Arliner Young became the first African-American woman to perform research at the institution.
21st century
The MBL became formally affiliated with the University of Chicago on July 1, 2013. In order to further scientific research and education, the affiliation built on historical ties with the university, as MBL was led by University of Chicago faculty members in its first four decades. The Laboratory returned to independent status in 2026. In September 2018, Nipam Patel became director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, succeeding Huntington F. Willard.
Research
Staff 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 2024, 550 students from 273 institutions and 58 countries).
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