BAR HARBOR — True to its roots, The Jackson Laboratory is committed to breeding a passion for research among America’s youngest scientists.

David Baltimore

Five years later, “Pete” Little would found The Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory as a cancer research center, prioritizing education as one of the Lab’s key missions.

In one form or another, those Jackson Lab summer sessions have not only survived, but thrived. They now attract high school and college students from throughout the United States.

Hundreds of students compete not only for about 30 scholarships and stipends, but for the chance to rub elbows and trade insights with some of the world’s most accomplished biomedical researchers, all while living rent-free on the coastline of Downeast Maine.

The Lab’s Summer Student Program is one of many educational efforts that year-round devote the Lab’s extensive resources to research and teaching. Throughout the school year, 10 students from area high schools participate in after-school internships that immerse them in hands-on research. Other programs offer sabbaticals to high school science teachers and hands-on, real-world laboratory experience for University of Maine students. Lab scientists even staff an outreach workshop that exposes local second-graders to microbiology explained in its simplest terms.

The Jackson Laboratory is no stranger to Nobel laureates. Since 1960, 17 Nobel Prizes, including one in 2007, have been awarded for scientific discoveries involving strains of mice bred at the Lab or for the application of genetic principles first developed by the Lab’s founder, C.C. Little.

Some of those 17 winners of science’s most coveted prize first realized their enthusiasm for genetic and biomedical research as students-in-residence in the Lab’s Summer Student Program. Among them was David Baltimore, who in 1975 shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with the late Howard Temin. Baltimore and Temin first met while students at the Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor in 1955.

“I was only 17, between my junior and senior years in high school in Great Neck, N.Y.,” Baltimore told The Ellsworth American. “I had done well in science in high school, but I had no concept of myself as scientist, because I had no role model.”

Baltimore, now 69 and president-emeritus of the California Institute of Technology, said he had never set foot in a science laboratory before arriving at The Jackson Laboratory

“Jackson Lab was a revelation and a very, very positive experience,” he said. “I had the greatest fun doing research and learning about all this stuff that I knew nothing about. I was surrounded by wonderful people who were devoted to the program.

“We each worked with three faculty members on three different projects. All three turned out to be world famous: Elizabeth ‘Tibby’ Russell, Willie Silvers and Don Bailey.”

Baltimore said Temin was five years older, about to enter his senior year at Swarthmore College.

“He was the college guru for the high school program, and seemingly had an answer for every question we had,” Baltimore said. “He was something of a legend.”

Baltimore wound up attending Swarthmore, too, where he honed his interest in molecular biology and began exploring the structure of DNA. His 1975 Nobel Prize was awarded for discovering that viruses can induce cancer through cellular interactions with DNA and RNA.

“Howard was a biologist, and I’m a biochemist, and we were working independently,” he said. “But the work we did in parallel proved that was true.”

Like many who have been through the Summer Student Program, Baltimore said it defined his career and changed his life.

“Because of that summer, the rest of my life was determined, at least in my own head,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone else has ever been as affected by that experience as I was, except maybe Howard.”