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Beside the Healing Sea
| Article
# : |
20442 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
3,227 Words |
| Author
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Joseph E. Brown
Joseph E. Brown is a free-lance writer based in Rockport,
Maine, who specializes in science and natural history. |
On a balmy summer day on Mount Desert Island in Maine, a young boy strolls along a wooded path toward Salsbury Cove, fishing pole in hand. At the water's edge, two toddlers poke through tidepools looking for starfish and other marine curiosities. Their parents take a break to nibble a picnic lunch under the pines overlooking Frenchman Bay.
The site easily could be one of the many small, seaside summer resorts that have attracted thousands to midcoast Maine over the past century. And it is a resort of sorts, at least in its laid back, wooded, casual ambience. But there's one major difference from the other vacation settlements that rim 108-square-mile Mount Desert Island.
The main mission at Salsbury Cove is not pleasure, but the pursuit of biomedical knowledge. Each summer an electric, distinguished mix of between 35 and 40 scientific specialists from around the world, a list top-heavy with physiologists, gathers here at the 240-acre Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL), seeking answers to a host of biomedical questions in a cloistered, relaxed environment that perhaps masks the more serious purpose.
David Evans, a zoologist who serves as MDIBL's director, explains that the casual atmosphere is intentional. Free of the pressures of their normal institutions, many of the scientists bring their families. The fact that blue jeans, sandals, and white lab coats form the dress code seems to encourage attendance as well as scientific zeal.
"The laboratory is a sort of working sabbatical. There are few hard rules here, had no one competes in salary or rank," says Evans. "Even the student we began inviting a few summers ago, accustomed to the more rigid structure of the classroom, are sometimes started to meet eminent scientists over a brown-bag lunch", Too, the structures of MDIBL stimulates a free exchange of ideas and helps to merge the knowledge of various scientific discipline.
Wide-ranging studies
Few are the systems, functions, and diseases of the human body that have not been investigated, over the years by MDIBL research teams, who use marine animals such as sharks, skates, flounders, sand dollars and dogfish as comparative lab specimens. All are abundantly available for collecting in Salsbury Cove and in deeper waters just offshore, which may explain why the Maine coast was chosen for biomedical studies nearly a
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