NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 TLT 
We have such an isotope sewer of our own in the Columbia River, but the studies 
that should be made -- of the structure of fishes -- conditions of glands -- num- 
bers of scales -- fin rays and vertebrae -- are yet to be made. It means nothing 
to catch a fish and measure its radioactivity if we do not look for possible 
damage. To take a fishes' background count and conclude it is not affected be- 
cause it still swims around is misleadings we do know that fish get thyroid cancers 
or tumors from radioactivity. In examing the published work on the effects of 
radioactivity on marine organisms, one is struck by the preliminary -- progress 
report sort of atmosphere of these reports. When are we going to get down to 
some serious work on this problem? The editors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 
may be justified in getting the hands of their clock back a few minutes, but this 
clock of pollution cannot be set back or halted, unless we are willing to accept 
our obligation to our environment more seriously than we so far done. 
I have discussed the biological aspects of the inexahustible sea because I 
am a biologist. I can say little about other hopes expressed for man's future 
from the oceans -- the mining of manganese nodules from the deep, or of phos- 
phorite from the waters around Los Angelese A large chemical corporation did take 
out a lease to go after this material but found that its costs estimates were off 
by a factor of perhaps ten, and abandoned the effort. While the difficulties may 
not be unsurmountable, some of the desired resources must be in much shorter 
supply on land than they are now to make reclamation from the sea justifiable. 
Our best success so far has been with evaporating salt (another ancient industry) , 
and obtaining magnesium from sea water. This is done on such a scale that the 
incidental fresh water obtained is now the principal water supply of an entire 
town in Texas. We have great hopes for fresh water from the sea -- or should we 
say Los Angeles has. But the prospect of economical fresh water from the sea is 
still so far off that we seriously discuss reducting most of the major rivers of 
this state to a shambles of dams and ditches to deliver water South of the 
Tehachapi. If we do manage to produce fresh water from the sea, will we tear up 
all these waterworks? 
As for many of the fanciful submarine tractors, self prepelled nets and the 
like that have been suggested it must be remembered that the sea is a very diffi- 
cult medium for machinery. It has enough salt to corrode but not enough to be a 
good conductor, and pressure makes it necessary to fill potentially collapsible 
spaces with incompressible fluids or construct heavy reinforcing against it. 
Most of the elaborate devices of the Sunday supplements have yet to leave the 
drawing boards, and the few that have been built, such as a self propelled sub- 
marine tractor, have been plagued with difficulties. The sea has long been a 
graveyard of fancy instruments. Someday, of course, our ingenuity will solve most 
of these problems and some of the fancy gadgets will go forth to find out how in- 
exhaustible the sea really is. In the meanwhile we spend our money on atomic 
Submarines -- how many of these things do we have now, anyway -- and on rockets 
to the moon. But, as one gentleman on a national scientific committee put it, it 
is still more essential for us to study the ocean's bottom rather than to scratch 
the moon's behind. 
A ff 
The netvona Research Council thinks our oceanographic budget should be 600 
million by 1970; at present it is probably not more than 150 million per year and 
it is probable that the efforts by other countries are correspondly financed. 
This brings us to the final consideration in this notion concerning the inexhausti- 
ble sea -- we are not going to get much for nothing out of the sea. Man never has, 
for he has fished the sea at the peril of his life and loss of ships and gear. 
So far, in all the long history of fishing, we have used essentially the same gear 
