16 MARINE SCIENCE 



by sound propagation. Predictions will also be made for fishermen 

 and the beginnings of these too are already successful. 



Under "control" and "use" for defense applications, the most crucial 

 problem can be summarized by saying that we must make the sea 

 transparent. Not by changing the sea, but by finding ways that we 

 can look right through it and have surveillance over the comings and 

 goings just as our aircraft radar control networks do in the atmos- 

 phere and as the satellite Tiros is now doing for large-scale happen- 

 ings on the earth as a whole. 



Under "control" there are distant vistas of stirring the ocean waters 

 to stimulate productivity, or of fertilizing the ocean with trace ele- 

 ments to promote growth of its life. But more urgent and closer at 

 hand than the control of the unruly ocean are aspects of control that 

 we may be exerting unwittingly by using the ocean as a radioactive 

 garbage dump. We urgently need much more study by biologists, by 

 radiochemists and radiophysicists to make sure that we are not doing 

 something to the ocean in this way that our succeeding generations 

 will blame us for. 



Like any good science, oceanography, even if not directed to specific 

 aims, will of itself develop byproducts which will help every man, 

 woman and child; byproducts in new and more abundant foods, in 

 medicine, in providing and distributing fresh water and in minerals. 



Wlien you hear about ocean resources in detail later, the emphasis 

 will naturally be on fisheries which will become increasingly impor- 

 tant for the supply of human protein as our population increases. 



But, of course, the most useful substance we get from the sea is 

 fresh water. We have not forgotten this but our committee felt that 

 the artificial production of fresh water from the sea is presently being 

 pursued vigorously and need not concern the oceanographer. 



On the other hand, the understanding of the physics of clouds, of 

 the natural evaporation from the sea, of the heat and material ex- 

 change across the sea's surface where it meets the air, these may all 

 contribute ultimately to a possible control of rainfall which could 

 then insure the better distribution of natural fresh water in time and 

 space. 



In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I want to leave these most important 

 topics of the scientific technological, military, and economic impor- 

 tance of the ocean which I have touched upon and turn to what this 

 U.S. program in oceanography might contribute to the understand- 

 ing among human beings and what it might contribute to the 

 humanities. 



Nine months ago there was an International Oceanographic Con- 

 gress in New York where nearly 1,000 oceanographers from all over 

 the world came together. There was some controversy, but it was 

 the controversy of scientists who, irrespective of nationality, were 

 bound together by their common interests. It was the healthy con- 

 troversy of each propounding his explanation, of one building on 

 another's mistakes. There was an atmosphere of fellowship on the 

 recognition that the mistakes in science are the sturdy, lower rungs 

 we ascend toward understanding. 



Already the reports of this committee under Dr. Harrison Brown's 

 chairmanship have had a profound effect in stimulating oceano- 

 graphic work in other countries. We must by all means continue this 



