Keeping the ‘Fairy Tale’ of the Marine Biological Laboratory Alive | Nature
Cell biologist Mark Terasaki will give US$25 million of his own money to preserve the legacy of a pioneering scientific institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
To the people of Woods Hole in Massachusetts, and to the researchers working at the renowned 138-year-old Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) there, cell biologist Mark Terasaki has become a local celebrity. Since his US$25-million donation to the MBL was announced, people on the streets and at local shops have been stopping him and thanking him for his generous gift. For him, it was an easy decision to give back to an institution and a community that he has been a part of for more than 40 years, and one that has been a leading force in the fields of basic and marine science.
Although he is a faculty member at the University of Connecticut in Farmington, like many scientists around the globe, he rents a laboratory at the MBL every summer to do research. Many researchers see the MBL as a scientific oasis and researcher melting pot of sorts, away from the obligations of their home institutions, and a place to mentor young scholars.
The MBL has a history of nurturing groundbreaking molecular-biology discoveries in its labs and has hosted more than 60 Nobel laureates. Situated on the edge of Cape Cod in Massachusetts and surrounded by water, it is also known for the summer courses and research experiences that it offers to aspiring early-career scientists.
Terasaki did his first stint at the MBL in the summer of 1986. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the structural neuroscience lab of Tom Reese, who was at the MBL and then the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Terasaki would go on to spend two full years as well as seven summers working with the Reese lab at the MBL, after which he started his own lab in 1995 in Connecticut. To him, the MBL felt like a “fairy tale” — the epitome of “what science and research should look and feel like when you were aspiring to be a scientist”. Read more of the article here.