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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) history project seeks to document the wonderfully rich history of the MBL. Historians from across America are poring over the archive to bring us more information on the significant contributions that people of the MBL have made to scientific discovery through the years, and you can learn about some of these findings in our featured exhbits. If you'd like to make your own discoveries, then access the archives and see that we have already begun capturing life at the MBL with documents and photographs from as early as 1895. If you would like to hear about experiences from some MBL scientists, staff, and community memebers, then browse through our video interviews.

Shinya Inoué teaching in the MBL Physiology course - photo by Dyche Mullins. Born in London in 1921, Shinya Inoué lived in China; Portland, Oregon; Sydney, Australia; and Japan, before moving to the United States in 1949. Fortunately, in high school he met biologist Katsuma Dan who had spent time at the Marine Biological Laboratory and began a lifelong collaboration of the study of biophysics of living cells.

Find out more about Shinya Inoué

Part of the normal table for Fundulus development created at the MBL by Philip Armstrong and Julie Swope Child.

From the 1890s into the middle of the twentieth century, leading researchers such as Thomas Hunt Morgan, Edmund Beecher Wilson, and Ross Granville Harrison shown here came together at the MBL. They brought their families, including Morgan’s mother seated on the rock, for picnics and parties. Science at the seashore has always been a family affair. This friendly setting allows the scientific conversation to continue well into the night, on weekends, and at the beaches – really all the time.

Find out more about the people behind the place

Black and white photograph of a boat with a man standing on the roof of the boat's bridge, bending over and holding a rope.

Collecting ship Cayadetta photographed by Alfred Huettner c1930. The MBL has always offered a unique set of resources for its investigators ranging from collections of marine organisms to state-of-the-art microscopes. In recent years, the MBL Central Microscopy Facility has featured a partnership with Carl Zeiss, Inc., which brings the latest in optical and photographic equipment.

Watch a film of MBL life captured in 1935

A rhodamine fluorescent dye filled leech motor neuron photographed through a microscope.

Rhodamine fluorescent dye filled leech motor neuron, imaged by Timothy Balmer and Bianca Jones in the Neural Systems and Behaviour laboratory during the summer of 2011. The first neurobiology courses were offered at the MBL in the 1890s by the MBL's first director, Charles Otis Whitman, who himself worked on leeches. Technology has come a long way since those early days, and the neurobiology students at the MBL now benefit from sophisticated microscope and photographic facilities.

Learn more about Charles Otis Whitman

Scan of a historical document which declares the intentions of a number of people to form a corporation under the name of the 'Marine Biological Laboratory' for the purpose of 'establishing and maintaining a laboratory or station for scientific study and investigations, and a school for instruction in biology and natural history'.

The MBL began in 1888, access the archives to find historical records from Annual Reports, Trustees Meetings, Directors’ Reports, Financial Statements including the receipts for the first buildings, and thousands of photographs that go back to these very first years.

Access the archives

Illustration of Planaria maculata regeneration from Nobel Prize winner Thomas Hunt Morgan's classic 1901 book Regeneration. Professor Morgan spent his summers conducting research at the MBL, today his expertise in the biology of regeneration continues to flourish at the MBL in the Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering.

Browse photographs of Thomas Hunt Morgan

Students and instructors from the 1977 Botany course. Since 1888 thousands of students have been taught by distinguished scientists at the MBL. Find out who those students were, what they studied and which resident and visiting scientists they learned from, in our course listings, available through 1990.

Find your course