The Scale and Scope of De‐/Reconstructionism in Biology | The FASEB Journal
About 2 years ago, I offered on these pages a story of how a group of residents in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts had mobilized as to a road named for Louis Agassiz. He was for more than half a century the world’s leading geologist and, after immigrating to the United States from his native Switzerland, became an acclaimed zoologist at Harvard. Several roads in tracts of land owned by and near the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole were named for prominent biologists who had worked and taught there. The controversy about Agassiz Road developed from a fact which was known only to some, then and now: he was a devout racist. In addition, he had died before the MBL was founded, and thus naming a road for him was an honorific exception.
As this issue of The FASEB Journal goes to press, the road name change effort has been consummated, with it now named for the American cell biologist Jewel Plummer Cobb (Figure 1). Fittingly, she worked many summers at MBL and was also a passionate advocate for African American students. It was my privilege to serve on the small group behind this name change, and at the installation of the new road signs (Figure 2), I was not the only one profoundly moved. Read more of the article here …