708 NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 
As a distinguished British gentleman, Sir Frederick Brundett has remarked: 
"The World must be mad to spend more in a year on space research than has been 
spent in studying the oceans in the last hundred years". MY 
3 TA en PS 
Ships, of course, are the primary capital investment of oceanography. But M4 
there are also buildings, Oceanographers do not spend all their time at sea, 
but must process data, analyze results and prepare reports. It has been said i 
that for every day at sea there are ten days of work on land. Another way of ; 
putting this is that there should be nine or ten researchers and technicians 
ashore for each man at sea. This requires buildings, and one of the most strik- 
ing aspects of our oceanographic institutions is their crowded condition. WNo- 
body seems to have enough space to work in and everybody needs more buildings. 
Sometimes a close mingling of people has an advantage -- more ideas get exchanged. 
But there is some limit to this, beyond which people simply get in each other's 
way. 
Our oceanographic effort is not however, overstaffed, even if the buildings 
are crowded. Indeed, we are not sure where all the people are coming from to 
staff the vessels and the shore facilities for our expanding oceanographic fleet. 
Recruitment, in spite of all the public interest, is not as fast as we would like 
it to be. We think there are about 500 - at the most - real oceanographers in the 
business in the United States and the shortage is already acute in two fields -- 
straight physical oceanography (which ~alls for more rigorous mathematical back- 
ground than other phases of the field), and taxonomy -- the people who must 
identify all the kinds of plant: and animals found in the ocean, or at least those 
which are most abundant. According to one federal agency, the manpower require- 
ment for taxonomy is much smaller than for physical oceanography. This was 
evidently written by someone who did not know what he was talking about, for the 
identification of organisms is not amenable to computer techniques, and it has 
taken years to get some of the most important animals identified. Our most crit- 
ical need is biological oceanographers - good ones, who are specialists in 
various critical groups of organisms. 
At any rate, we have ships -- perhaps more than we need - buildings, but not 
enough for the people we do have in most places, and people - critically short 
in some fields. What are we doing with what we.have? 
There are two broad aspects of oceanographic effort. The first is what is 
known as surveys -- this is essentially similar to the mission of the Weather 
Bureau-continuous retaking of observations at the sea to gather data for the chang- 
ing environment, and to find out what is there at present. One of the great inter- 
national efforts of this character is currently in progress, the International In- 
dian Ocean Expedition. This involves ships of many nations including USA and USSR. 
Much of the work of the US Navy's Oceanographic Office, the Coast and Geodetic 
Survey ships and the Bureau of Fisheries is essentially survey in nature. This 
must be kept up year after year, although some aspects of it maybe processed by 
computers for more rapid results. Promising steps in this direction have been 
taken by the Navy. An adjunct to the survey function of oceanography is the 
National Oceanographic Data Center, where all data that can be reduced to square 
holes on IBM Cards is being assembled. The Soviet Union operates a similar data 
center, and the two are exchanging information. 
The other aspect of oceanography is that involving research into special 
phases or problems -- sometimes this involves surveys as well, but often expedi- 
tions are undertaken to explore special problems or phases. Some of these have 
