Karl S. Matlin, Jane Maienschein and Rachel A. Ankeny (eds), Why Study Biology by the Sea?

Why Study Biology by the Sea? addresses the enduring—yet not to be taken for granted—appeal of exploring the life sciences in places linking the beach and the laboratory bench. Academics have sojourned at coastal research stations since the mid-1800s to gain knowledge of saltwater flora and fauna. Their results span a fascinating spectrum, as related in this volume by historians, philosophers and practitioners of science. Every chapter enhances our understanding of the role of marine institutions and/or marine organisms in the history of science, with an emphasis on evolutionary, embryological, neurological, biomedical, fisheries and coral biology.

The collection’s focal point is the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), the Woods Hole, Massachusetts institution in the northeastern USA that has provided a summer berth for diverse researchers since 1888. Jane Maienschein’s opening chapter contextualises its origins and history of adaptation. Persistent financial shortfalls led to its loss of independence in 2013, when the University of Chicago took it over. Despite challenges, the affiliation has sparked exciting opportunities for oceanic research. The University of Chicago Press series in which this book appears, ‘Convening Science: Discovery at the Marine Biological Laboratory’, suggests another fruitful outcome.

Later chapters explore other distinctive facets of the MBL. Kate MacCord analyses the leadership’s early but not inevitable decision to give education equal billing with research and to dismantle discriminatory barriers against women, African American, Southeast Asian and Jewish scientists. Kathryn Maxson Jones illustrates how a pioneering neuroscientist relied on the stations at Woods Hole and elsewhere to obtain squid neurons. Karl Matlin considers how the laboratory’s ‘culture of collaboration and competition’ (p.238) facilitated the discovery of kinesin.

Part One, ‘Marine Places’, examines three additional seaside laboratories with MBL connections. Christiane Groeben discusses the iconic Naples Zoological Station in Italy. Seeking a permanent place to supply fresh specimens and preclude the need to lug around one’s ‘“scientific suitcase”’ (p. 56), founder Anton Dohrn devised savvy solutions in the 1870s to support an independent research institution, including a public aquarium in the tourist town and the country-based ‘table system’ of charging facility fees (p. 41). Naturalists who converged upon Naples to study fertilisation using sea urchins accelerated the rise of experimental embryology and cell biology. As addressed later by Katharina Steiner, Dohrn and guest researchers also helped modernise fisheries science between the 1880s and 1920s.

During and following these transformative decades, coastal research facilities also expanded in modern China and imperial Japan. Christine Yi Lai Luk’s analysis of the ‘Chinese Woods Hole’ at Amoy University illuminates the ‘transnationality of marine research’ (p. 69) by emphasising its role as an exporter of amphioxus for studies of vertebrate evolution. Kjell David Ericson’s chapter on the Misaki Marine Biological Station examines its influential, cross-disciplinary fisheries science programme to elucidate ‘the unstable boundaries of zoology—and marine biology—in early twentieth-century Japan’ (p. 90).

Part Two, ‘Marine Practice’, covers an eclectic mix of research outcomes, including intriguing biomedical connections. Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli explicate how coral biologists of the early 2000s developed the ‘infection repertoire’ (p. 256)—a strategic framework of concepts, techniques, tools and collaborative networks borrowed from infectious disease experts—to attract attention and funding for investigating threats to coral reefs. Medical researchers Marianne Grant and William Aird share details of their risky but rewarding decision to spend time at a Maine island laboratory knee-deep in slime eels to investigate the origins of the endothelium. They call for applying evolutionary approaches to the study of human health and disease, while recognising the hesitance of would-be funding agencies regarding the clinical significance of such studies.

Scientists at coastal research stations have always grappled with choices about how to proceed. In addition to weighing the best options for funding, framing and organising their work, they have faced less obvious challenges that merit attention. To show that mid-twentieth-century developmental biologists selected their experimental species with deliberation—and thereby address problematic historiographical assumptions about marine model organisms—Michael Dietrich, Nathan Crowe and Rachel Ankeny analyse a powerful set of ‘organismal landscape’ diagrams (p. 273) created by harvesting data from a defunct periodical. Delving deeper into ‘what the investigators took to be discoverable using these organisms’ (p. 272) constitutes a critical activity for historians of biology. So does recognising the ‘plethora of choices’ (p. 121) regarding the places of seaside experimentation, as exemplified by Samantha Muka’s chapter on how marine stations of the early 1900s facilitated the study of tropism. Not only did they furnish abundant specimens, they provided indoor areas that could be transformed via lighting, alteration of glass containers and other low-tech fixes depending on the researchers’ needs.

The one thing that keeps the collection from being perfectly shipshape is the lack of cross-referencing, which is most pronounced in the epilogue. Molecular biologist Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado’s focus on biologists’ overuse of ‘just a few randomly selected and possibly nonrepresentative species’ (p. 325) such as mice, fruit flies, nematodes and zebrafish feels a bit out of place, and his title, ‘The Future of Biological Research Will Be Found in the Oceans’, projects an air of inexorableness that overlooks the undercurrent of contingency pervading many of the chapters. I support his entreaties to study ‘the life of our oceans in unprecedented levels of detail’ and to ‘learn from history to shape the future’ (pp. 333–4) but would back them up with other insights from these rich case studies.

In particular, the remarkable history of adaptation exhibited by coastal laboratory builders and their users reveals the need to embrace multiple forms and levels of flexibility, diversity, equity and sustainability. Just as it was never inevitable that the MBL would survive as long as it has, we should not assume that current endeavours to expand biological and biomedical knowledge of the oceans will succeed, especially not in ways that transcend the crassly exploitative. Progress is not a given, and thus, historians have vital roles to play, along with scientists and citizens, as advocates of multidimensional marine biological research.