History of house:
The main part of house was the carriage house of an estate that burned down in 1919. House side additions were made around 1952-3. It has been owned by the Metz family for many years, first by Charles W. Metz (1889-1975), a geneticist, then more recently Charles B. Metz, a fertilization biologist who started the Fer-Gap reproductive biology course at the MBL and was the editor of the Biological Bulletin for many years. Photos, autobiographical material, etc

C.W. Metz studied the fungus gnat Sciara coprophilia. An individual female of this species produces either all males or all females. The mechanism involves the elimination of chromosomes in the fertilized egg, and is considered by some to be the first documented example of "imprinting".

Hyatt Road:
This is named after Alpheus Hyatt (1838-1902), who was the first president of the MBL. He apparently got his Ph.D. with Louis Agassiz, a central figure in early american biology and the founder of the Penikese Island school (the precursor of the MBL). Along with E. Cope, Hyatt was the most prominent American neo-Lamarckian (i.e. against natural selection). He was responsible for a "remarkable collection of fossil cephalopods" at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, his particular specialty seemed to nautilus. He has the father of the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington.