To understand the social movements and relationships it is helpful to put them in historic and geographic context. This was the height of Great Gatsby era of opulence and Robber Barons stretched from Manhattan to Newport building palatial estates in the countryside beyond the city.

Cold Spring Harbor is nestled among them on Long Island's North Shore Gold Coast under an hour to NYC even then by car train and ferry. OHEKA Castle is one of many mansions converted to public venues but excellent ambiance video. ¹⁾

Connecticut is across LI Sound and less than a mile across in places making a crossing easy for boats or strong swimmers. Port Jefferson Ferries shuttle daily from the Gold Coast to New Haven, home to Yale with its own history of covert influence and questionable science.

The South Fork of LI is “The Hamptons” with Montauk Point the farthest end. There Gurney’s Inn became and remains an elite escape destination flanked by Hither Hills State Park and beach that protects a strip of land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Bay.

Between the forks is Shelter Island notorious for bootleggers, gamblers and gangsters. Beyond the tip of the North Fork is Plum Island and BSL4 lab dealing with the most dangerous virus and pathogens.

There are twoferries that leave from Orient Point to New Haven for the public and separate ferry for cleared personnel to Plumb Island. If we sail a little past Plumb Island there is Fischer's Island that ranks high in the old money exclusive getaway spots and a nice sail from there to Newport.

Somewhere between Yale, Plumb Island and Cold Spring Harbor Lyme disease appeared spread by ticks & deer who swim quite far.

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The area of study named was supported by The Long Island Biological Association. Among LIBA's founders and early patrons were such notable American entrepreneurs as Walter Jennings and George Pratt, founders of the Standard Oil Company; J.P. Morgan, the banker; Marshall Field, III, the Chicago storekeeper; William K. Vanderbilt, whose family built a fortune on the Staten Island Ferry and the New York Central Railroad; and Louis Tiffany, whose stained glass creations were already legendary.

Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Field, III (left, in the center) sponsored a gala outdoor circus party in 1932 on their Long Island estate, Caumsett, to benefit the Long Island Association. Guests, each paying $5 for dinner, included George Gershwin and Fred Astaire (right, second from the right).

The membership applied its wealth and enthusiasm with remarkable results, raising $130,000 during LIBA's first five years. Wawepex was renovated as a research laboratory, Davenport Laboratory (now Delbrück) was built in 1926, and 32 acres of land were purchased for expansion.

Photo - Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Circa 1915 - The Harry H. Laughlin Papers, Truman State University, Lantern Slides ³⁾

The Long Island Biological Association

Franklin Hooper, president of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences when the Biological Laboratory was founded. James Memorial Laboratory (right) was built of solid concrete to provide a vibration-free environment for exacting biophysics research.

With construction of two winterized facilities, Nichols Memorial Laboratory (1928) and James Memorial Laboratory (1929), year-round research programs in experimental physiology and biophysics were begun. The Laboratory's first full-time investigator, Hugo Fricke, did some of the earliest work on the effect of X-rays on living cells. In 1930, resident endocrinologists drew national attention when adrenal cortical hormone purified at Cold Spring Harbor was used as the first cure for Addison's disease.

Hugo Fricke (left) was the director of biophysics at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation before becoming the Biological Laboratory's first full-time investigator.

The Long Island Biological Association

Harris saw that the rapid influx of ideas from chemistry, physics and mathematics was splintering biology into a number of subdisciplines. Thus, in 1933, he organized the first Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology as a means to increase dialogue between the various scientific factions. Sequestered on the tranquil Laboratory grounds, geneticists, biophysicists, biochemists, microbiologists, and physiologists could compare notes on a particular research area undergoing rapid advance.

Participants at the first Symposium on Quantitative Biology in 1933 (above), with organizer Reginald Harris in the foreground. In ensuing years the Symposium was the forum for the first public presentation of both James Watson's and Barbara McClintock's Nobel Prize-winning research.

The merit of Harris' idea was apparent, and the Rockefeller Foundation began long-term support of the Symposium the following year. The Cold Spring Harbor Symposium has continued annually, except for a three-year hiatus during World War II, drawing over the years more than 10,000 participants, including 70 Nobel laureates.

In their own words: “The First Hundred Years a History of Man and Science - The Quantification of Biology”

Historically, biology was based on the direct observation of complex living systems in the natural world and considered a descriptive science intellectually inferior to the hard numbers of physics and chemistry. The formalization of genetics during the first decades of the 20th century marked a departure from the observational tradition and the emergence of biology as a quantitative discipline.

William K. Vanderbilt (above, left) and J.P. Morgan (above, right) were among the wealthy local citizens who founded the Long Island Biological Association in 1924. Vanderbilt also served as a member of the board of directors.

Whereas classical evolutionary theory described macro-order changes that took place over millennia, the experimental evolutionists attempted to induce micro-scale hereditary changes over the course of several generations. Their laboratory experiments were simplified abstractions of the grand sweep of evolution. The use of model systems, where variables could be controlled and external influences minimized, was borrowed directly from the physica1l sciences.

The eugenics movement introduced biology to rigorous mathematical evaluation. In the course of analyzing hereditary data, the influential European eugenicists Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, and Karl Pearson developed most of the key statistical measures, including standard deviation, regression, and correlation. Biometry, the application of statistics to biology, became especially important in the emerging field of ecology. ⁴⁾

The Carnegie Institution and John D. Rockefeller's Institute for Biomedical Research, founded the same year, were the nation's major sustained sources of support for the basic biological research during the first four decades of the 20th century.

For many years Charles B. Davenport was director of all three institutions at Cold Spring Harbor: the Biological Laboratory, the Carnegie Department of Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office.

Cold Spring Harbor became a summer camp for science. Courses on zoology, bacteriology, botany, comparative anatomy, microscopic methods, and nature study gave biology teachers hands-on training that was generally lacking from their college preparation.

In 1898, Charles Davenport, a professor of the evolutionary biology at Harvard University, became director of the Biological Laboratory. Over the next several years, he introduced a series of course that investigated “the normal variation of animals in the harbor, lakes, and woods, and the production of abnormalities,” and a course in ecology.

Between 1890 and 1910, more than 2,000 high school and college teachers came to Cold Spring Harbor to learn what could not be learned from textbooks alone.

On December 23, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, authorizing the most massively-funded civilian war in history. It was the culmination of the growth of federal sponsorship of medical research that began with the wartime OSRD. Over the ensuing 10 years, $7.5 billion in support, funneled through the National Cancer Institute, stimulated an unprecedented expansion in basic biological research. The increased funding fell on a biological research community enormously excited by its new understanding of the role of DNA in directing the machinery of life.

By the late 1960s, the confluence of molecular genetics, virology, and animal cell culture was revolutionizing the study of biochemistry of higher cells. Sophisticated methods had been developed to grow mammalian and human cell lines in culture dishes in the manner of bacteria. It had also been demonstrated that certain animal viruses, known as tumor viruses, can “transform” cultured cells into cancerous equivalents. It was thus possible to mimic cancer in a petri dish and to perform controlled experiments on the origin and progression of malignancy.

A Cold Spring Harbor course taught each summer since 1958 was instrumental in introducing researchers to the new techniques for culturing animal cells and their viruses. The potential power of the tumor virus model system prompted a migration of former phage biologists into the field of basic cancer research. Bacteriophages had provided a means to probe the genetics of bacterial cells; now the tumor viruses made possible a similar approach to mammalian cells. ((https://web.archive.org/web/20030819170328fw_/http://www.cshl.edu/History/100years-war.html}}