At first, it just didn’t make sense. It was 1963, and a young research fellow at Johns Hopkins medical school was spending the summer on Cape Cod, studying blood coagulation in an animal totally unfamiliar to him – the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, a catcher’s mitt-shaped creature with an evolutionary history stretching back nearly half a billion years.
Image: Jack Levin, MD, carrying out his early studies with horseshoe crabs in the late 1960s. Photo courtesy of Jack Levin
