Chapter 5: "Western Biological and Doc"

Western Biological (Pacific Biological) on Cannery Row. Home of Doc.

Concrete tanks behind Western Biological that housed "the larger animals, the sharks and rays and octopi..."

An assortment of chemical bottles still on display in Doc's basement...

Ed "Doc" Ricketts, 1897-1948. This photo hangs on the wall in Western Biological.

Western Biological deals in strange and beautiful wares. It sells the lovely  animals of  the sea, the sponges, tunicates, anemones, the stars and buttlestars, and sun stars, the bivalves, barnacles, the worms and shells, the fabulous and multiform little brothers, the living moving flowers of the sea, nudibranchs and tectibranchs, the spiked and nobbed and needly urchins, the crabs and demi-crabs… (Steinbeck 23)

From this room come smells--formaline, and dry starfish, and sea water and menthol, carbolic acid and acetic acid, smell of brown wrapping paper and straw and rope, smell of chloroform and ether, smell of ozone from the motors, smell of fine steel and thin lubricant from the microscopes, smell of banana oil and rubber tubing, smell of drying wool socks and boots, sharp pungent smell of rattlesnakes, and musty frightening smell of rats… (Steinbeck 24)

Gregorian Chant (Link to music)