Perplexed Monkeys

The Bio Labs have a stock of plants as well as animals. On the top floor, less than 100 yards long, is one of the world's strangest greenhouses. It contains:

A rubber plant from Brazil; a vanilla tree; a plant that curls up when you touch it; a flower that eats ants; sugar cane; and a monkey-puzzle tree--supposed to be the one tree that monkey's can't climb.

It's probably the only greenhouse where weeds and orchids grow side by side, and where people pay more attention to weeds. It's certainly one of the few greenhouses where plants wear bandages. Professor Kenneth V. Thimann put them on after injecting hormones into the stems to see how growth was affected. His investigation of plant galls may lead to new information on animal cancers.

In the field of plants, Professor Paul C. Mangelsdorf has recently developed a custom-built corn for New England gardens and named it the Dwarf Harvard Hybrid. The corn, now on the market, is ideally suited to New England gardens and climate. Mangelsdorf's hybrid corns are proving revolutionary for the world's food supply.

The biologists have dozens of other projects. Some are digging for fossils in Vermont; some are trying to find how insects got their wings; some are learning how the human eye sees; and one man is studying the effects of sewage disposal in the ocean. There's a project for every professor, and there are 32 professors.

To carry on these activities, the Biology Department and the two Institutes of Botany have acres of facilities all over North America, including an Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, a garden in Cuba, a forest in Petersham, and a concrete tank in Woods Hole full of diatoms, molluses, and sea water. But the most amazing place of all is the 400-room laboratory on Divinity Avenue that carries a two-foot cucumber