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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.
At MBL, typically, marine animals were used as sources of "model systems" for the study of fundamental problems in biology. For example, the squid, Loligo pealii, 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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