Review paper: The naples stazione zoologica and its impact on the emergence of American marine biology

Abstract

One of the most impressive stages in the development of American biology was the spectacular growth of the biology community at the end of the nineteenth century that catapulted the American work from a relatively poorly developed state to a position of international stature.' To illustrate this growth, we have only to look at the American biology community in 1875 and compare it to the state of biology in 1910. In 1875, there were no graduate programs in biology; Louis Agassiz's death (in 1873) had led to the virtual cessation of biological work at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the major center of biological activity in the United States; and William Keith Brooks received his Ph.D. in zoology from Harvard, only the third such degree awarded by an American university, and the first from Harvard. Only thirty-five years later, well-developed graduate programs in biology characterized the major American universities, the number of graduate students had soared almost twenty-fold over the earlier period, and Edmund B. Wilson, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and other American cytologists were developing sophisticated research programs that ultimately would lead to the chromosome theory of inheritance.2 The immediate question is, "What were the influences that can explain the rapid developments in American biology?"