The Last One to Go
A poster hanging in a library hallway, bringing at least one observer to tears
Dr. Rebecca R. Helm, an Assistant Professor of Marine Biology at Georgetown University who studies ecology and evolution in the open oceans, tweeted that “I took a picture of [a poster], hanging rather unceremoniously at the time in a hallway in the @MBLScience library [at the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts], because it … sent me to tears.
Mary Steinbach Ulbrich, daughter of a former Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory Director, H. Burr Steinbach, observed that this poster was among three hanging there, all related to an obscure but vitally important moment in history:
“… in the hallway outside the reading room of the MBL/WHOI library on the second floor of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Lillie Building hang three framed documents. The most impressive is a handwritten poster which is signed “the last one to go.”
Dr. Helm described this as “a heartfelt note from a Japanese scientist at the end of WWII, asking the arriving Allied Forces at Tokyo's marine station to spare the science lab [from] destruction. A US captain alerted the Naval base in Woods Hole, and the marine lab was spared.”
Here’s the story of how that happened, as told directly by Dr. Katsuma Dan, the Japanese scientist who wrote that note:
“… the Japanese navy took over the [Misaki Marine Biological] station and changed it to a temporary submarine base. As a result, the laboratory moved to a near-by village.
“When the war was over, the American troops occupied the station, for the reason that the Japanese navy had been there.
“When American officers came there for the first [time] to take over the place, I went there. It was a funny experience. On one side of a long table three American officers and I were sitting, They served beer and canned asparagus with tomato ketchup. This slightly cute menu made me smile.
"But, oh boy, the both sides were pretty much excited. I am sure they were really scared of each other. They yelled whatever they wanted to say at the top of their voice but never listened to the other side.
“[During that racuous initial meeting] I stuck to a major and explained to him that this building originally belonged to the University etc., etc. In ten minutes, he began to see the situation. As soon as I saw the sign of dawning in his chaotic mind, I ran back to the building, wrote a poster asking soldiers to take good care of the place because it is a research institute, pasted it on the wall and took leave from the bak [sic] door leaving the noisy bunch there.”
Mary Ulbrich pointed out that his message, “hurriedly composed on brown wrapping paper with brush and Chinese ink … did indeed make a positive appeal to the U.S. military; on the last day of 1945, Dan was finally summoned by an officer of the U.S. First Cavalry and handed the document releasing the Misaki Marine Biological Station back to the University of Tokyo (Toh-Dai).”
“Dan’s tone in this hastily written poster conveys his love of science and his justifiably optimistic belief that the American military would respect a Japanese scientific station even as they would respect an American one.”
In that poster, Dr. Katsuma Dan wrote:
“This is a marine biological station with her history of over sixty years.
If you are from the Eastern Coast, some of you might know Woods Hole or Mt Desert or Tortugas.
If you are from the West Coast, you may know Pacific Grove or Puget Sound Biological Station.
This place is a place like one of these.
Take care of this place and protect the possibility for the continuation of our peaceful research
You can destroy the weapons and the war instruments
But save the civil equipments for Japanese students
When you are through with your job here
Notify to the University and let us come back to our scientific home
The last one to go”
Do you recall – however hazily for some of us – having learned in school about cell mitosis (biological division into two daughter cells, the process by which most cells divide) and meiosis (division into four cells, relevant to reproductive cells)?
It turns out that, especially in the years immediately following his having created that ad hoc poster on the wall of the Misaki Marine Biological Station, pleading that the lab and its instruments be preserved and its scientists and their students be allowed to return, Dr. Katsuma Dan played a key role in the world’s knowledge about how mitosis works.
As noted by a long-time teacher, Olivann Hobbie, who delved into the background of Dr. Dan’s story12, he and his students used “marine invertebrates as model organisms to study fundamental questions in cell biology and embryonic development.” Through direct observation, they “discovered many of the fundamental aspects of fertilization, development, and morphogenesis.”
“Dan was particularly interested in mitosis, a process that forms two nuclei immediately before a cell divides. To settle a long-standing debate over the existence of a mitotic spindle, a complex apparatus that pulls packages of DNA into the two nuclei, he encouraged his student Shinya Inoué to construct polarized light microscopes and look for evidence of organized polymer networks in living cells. Together with Daniel Mazia, he was the first to isolate the mitotic apparatus and subject it to biochemical study. This work demonstrated conclusively the existence of the mitotic spindle and initiated the modern biochemical study of mitosis.”
For another instance of a scientist determinedly working on fundamental problems of biology in the midst of the chaos of World War II, see Following a Question.
Olivann Hobbie also described another – perhaps in some ways formative? – connection between Dr. Katsuma Dan’s world-changing scientific work, which he valiently sought to maintain even in the midst of wartime disruption, and Japan’s role in World War II: his father, industrialist “Takuma Dan, then chief executive of Mitsui, the largest Japanese conglomerate,” was assassinated by “a fanatically nationalistic Buddhist sect” in 1932.
This occurred during a time during the 1930s when “several [Japanese] prime ministers were [also] killed because they were seen as too liberal or opposed, even mildly, to the militaristic expansion of Japanese power.”
Hobbie wrote: “During this turbulent period [of the 1930s], however, intellectual contact with the West continued; thus Katsuma Dan was able to spend summers at Woods Hole doing scientific research until 1940. ... He returned to Japan with his wife and family after the outbreak of World War II but before Japan’s attacks in Southeast Asia and on the U.S.”
Following the war, “from 1951 on, Japanese scholars … were invited to study at American universities as Fulbright Scholars. Jean and Katsuma Dan, with their five children, returned several times to Woods Hole after the war to resume research and friendships.”
It was in 1952 that Dr. Dan, in the Department of Biology at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Dr. Daniel Mazia, in the Department of Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, had their collaborative paper on “The Isolation and Biochemical Characterization of the Mitotic Apparatus of Dividing Cells” published, whose key finding was “that the mitotic apparatus behaved as a single unit.”
Dr. Jean Clark, Katsuma Dan’s wife, was herself a notable and accomplished researcher. She served as a Professor of Biology at Ochanomizu Women's College, and also helped “found the Tateyama Marine Research Center and taught there with her husband.”
Dr. Clark did “pioneering work in invertebrate biology using electron microscopy.” She made a pathbreaking discovery of “the acrosomal reaction, a critical step in the penetration of sperm into egg during fertilization.”