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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Born in the Recession
Launched in Great Depression, Jackson Labs now thrives
By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech
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Ask any American where the hotbed for genetic research is and chances are good that one of the last places they would mention would be Bar Harbor, Maine. But that’s the home of a uniquely American research laboratory that began with funding from wealthy Detroit auto magnates, donated land, a summer program for college students and the country’s first true geneticist.
The Jackson Laboratory is a world-class research laboratory and perhaps the world’s most diverse lab mouse breeder and supplier. Located in the coastal tourist town of Bar Harbor — better known for Acadia National Park than for genetic research — the Jackson Laboratory opened in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression.
Originally called the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, the not-for-profit mammalian genetics research lab was founded by geneticist and former University of Maine president Clarence Cook Little with money he raised from wealthy captains of the auto industry, Edsel Ford and the aforementioned Roscoe Jackson, president of the Hudson Motorcar Co., for whom the lab was named.
So why Bar Harbor? Because Little’s family friend and summer resident, George B. Dorr, donated land there for the laboratory, the Bar Harbor summer home for many of the wealthy at the time, environment was ideal for raising lab mice, and Little liked the Maine work ethic, which would hold the lab in good stead during economic hard times.
“The lab opened within months of the Depression so to help out, all the men fished and the women grew vegetables,” says Jackson laboratory public information manager Joyce Peterson. “They acted like a commune because they were so far from an urban center.”
Thomas H. Roderick, Jackson professor emeritus and retired senior staff scientist, also recalled the hardy resourcefulness of the early staff. “When I got there around 1958, they were still growing their own vegetables. One of the first questions they asked me was ‘where is your garden going to be?’ ”
According to Roderick, with scant resources to run the lab in the early days, “Little ran it on his charisma and scientific genius.” As an early believer in the genetic origin of cancer, Little and his staff wrote papers on genetics and cancer, which helped generate early funding. Little had noticed that the mouse genome is almost identical to the human genome, so the lab began breeding mice as the ideal animal model for cancer research. Today, in addition to its active research work, the Jackson Laboratory has over 4,500 mouse models available for sale to other labs, far more than the average couple of dozen available through most for-profit animal model companies.
From its humble beginnings 80 years ago, the Jackson Laboratory has grown to an internationally renowned research lab, with over 1,400 employees and an annual budget of approximately $169 million.
Despite the lab’s growth and ability to attract funding from such organizations as the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health, Roderick attributes much of its success to something less tangible. “One thing that hasn’t changed over the years is the familial atmosphere at the lab,” says Roderick. “We’re all family and everyone helps each other. I’ve been at a number of labs, and I haven’t seen this anyplace else.” Peterson sums up the lab’s success in even simpler terms — “We were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.”
Jim Schakenbach is a freelance writer in Jefferson, Mass.
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