The Biological century

At the 1988 summer session, the internationally famous Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts celebrated one hundred years of pioneering science. During the centennial festivities, many of the world's most renowned biologists assembled at MBL and delivered the Lab's traditional Friday Night Lectures, which as always were extraordinary and memorable. These lectures have been gathered and judiciously edited here by three eminent participants.

Each centennial lecture is dedicated to one or two MBL pioneers, investigators at the forefront of the "new biology" that emerged toward the turn of the century. The MBL often provided an environment that was conducive to revolutionizing the discipline, replacing its largely descriptive and speculative methods with lively analytical and experimental science.

Combining history and current science, each lecture focuses on a subfield of biology. The speakers represented include John Gurdon on developmental biology, Joshua Lederberg on genetics, Torsten Wiesel on neurobiology, and E. O. Wilson on animal behavior. Benjamin Kamminer provides an account of the work of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, capturing his iconoclastic, tenacious, sometimes outrageous nature, as well as his humor and insight.

And Gerald Weissmann compares Jacques Loeb and Gertrude Steinan unlikely pair bound by their common assent to mechanistic materialism. The history and scientific discovery in these pages should convey for any reader - whether biologist, historian, or interested layperson - the excitement of the renowned laboratory and the drama and frustration of biology in the twentieth century.