Accession No.: 2004-50
PROCESSING RECORD
SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY ARCHIVES
______________________________________________________________________________
Foundation for Ocean Research
Foundation for Ocean Research Records, 1975-1980
Physical Description: 5 record center cartons
Description: The collection consists of the office records of the Foundation for Ocean Research from
1975 to 1980. The material includes office records, financials, legislative monitoring files,
correspondence, meetings, and interviews.
Excerpt from “John Dove Isaacs III, 1913-1980” by Richard Seymour and Paul Dayton. IN: Coming of Age: Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, A Centennial Volume 1903-2003. Robert L. Fisher, Edward D. Goldberg, and Charles
S. Cox, eds. La Jolla, California: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2003. pp. 57-63: “John Isaacs was a close
friend of a San Diego entrepreneur philanthropist named Robert Peterson. Peterson and a partner created the
Foundation for Ocean Research (FOR) mainly to fund Isaacs' most speculative ideas. Among these was the notion
that graduate students freed from the distractions and aggravation of competing for laboratory or field investigation
resources and working together in a highly supportive environment would be far more creative than their peers
embedded in the Scripps establishment. An off-campus facility was created with shops, laboratories, office space,
and support staff. Isaacs met at least once a week with a group of specially selected graduate students who were
supported by FOR Out of this experiment in education came a number of demonstrations of Isaacs' ideas, including
the salinity power concept and the breath heater. Isaacs believed that the concept of attempting to warm scuba divers
by heating their suits through various means was wrong, and that most of the heat loss came from breathing cold dry
air from their tanks and then exhaling warm moist air at the expense of their body heat. He conceived of the idea of
adding a very small amount of hydrogen to the breathing air and then passing it through a platinum catalyst that both
warmed it and formed water vapor. It worked spectacularly, was patented, and was licensed by FOR, after Isaacs'
death, to an entrepreneur who saw its much larger potential in medical applications for reducing the stress on
patients who breathed cold, dry oxygen. The FOR as incubator provided a rapid means of testing many of John
Isaacs' ideas. He tossed them out around the FOR conference table and a student could decide to work on one of
them, occasionally leading to a Ph.D. dissertation. One such was his 1970s idea that the rotational momentum put
into the atmosphere by lines of cars passing in opposite directions would increase the incidence of tornadoes in
North America (where cars pass on the side proper to induce counterclockwise rotation} This difficult to prove
concept was not readily accepted by atmospheric scientists, although the Berkeley physics department scientists took
it very seriously when Isaacs presented a lecture there on the subject. In the last years of his life, he expressed some
serious disappointment about the FOR experiment. It seemed to him that the students worked on his ideas
exclusively, rather than generating their own and that they spent little time thinking about their projects, as opposed
to working on them, except under his direct questioning at the weekly seminars. Perhaps the FOR students who most
closely met his ideal of creativity and self-motivation were the Vidal brothers. They were Mexican nationals and
worked jointly on different aspects of submarine hot springs off Baja California. The brothers discovered
thermophilic bacteria that thrived at temperatures above the boiling point of water long before the discovery of the
mid-ocean ridge hot springs with their surprising collection of radically different life forms. Without the Isaacs
inspiration, FOR gradually disappeared, although the weekly seminar continued for a few years under the guidance
of one of his ex-students.”
Isaacs, John Dove: Schwartzlose, Richard A.; Nierenberg, William Aaron; Peterson, Robert O.