On August 28, 1934, Cornelia Maria Clapp — the dominant scientific presence at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole since 1888 — died in Harwich Port, Massachusetts. She was seventy-seven. The MBL had a building named for her in 1975, forty-one years after her death.

Clapp was born in 1849 in Montague, Massachusetts. She studied at Mount Holyoke College, received her doctorate from Syracuse in 1889 and another from the University of Chicago in 1896, and spent her career alternating between teaching at Mount Holyoke and researching at Woods Hole. Her published work on fish embryology — particularly the dogfish and teleost — was foundational in establishing the MBL's scientific reputation in comparative anatomy and embryology.

In 1888, the Marine Biological Laboratory opened with nine researchers. Four of them were women. Within five years, women constituted a substantial proportion of the research community — not because the MBL had a progressive policy, but because academic institutions had no positions for women and the MBL, as a new independent research station, had no entrenched hiring structure to exclude them yet.

By the early twentieth century, as the MBL became more prestigious and more institutionalized, the proportion of women in senior research roles declined. The institution that women had helped build during its formative period was progressively occupied by men as it became worth occupying.

This pattern — women building the institution during its scrappy founding years, men arriving as it becomes prestigious — appears across the history of research institutions: the MBL, Bell Labs' computational department, the early NASA, the early computing industry. The work that establishes the field's methods and culture is done by women during the period when the field has low status. As status rises, the field becomes male.

The MBL has a building named for Clapp. The naming happened in 1975.