Accession No.: 87-32
PROCESSING RECORD
SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY ARCHIVES
Foundation for Ocean Research
Foundation for Ocean Research Records, 1965-1988
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: 33 record center cartons, photographs, slides, audio, film &
video
DESCRIPTION: The collection consists of the records of the Foundation for Ocean
Research from 1965 to 1988. The material includes FOR's minutes, by-laws, tax and insurance
accounts, patents, employee records, proposals, projects and grants, payroll and property
taxes, contributions, ledgers, inventory and receipts and correspondence. There is quite a bit of
correspondence and material concerning the Rancho Zorro property. Also, the collection
includes a few boxes with photographs, video cassettes, audio tape recordings, slides, and
movies. The collection also consists of material on the Halophyte Program led by Peta Mudie .
Bank statements, cancelled checks and computer cards have been discarded.
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.”
John Isaacs; Richard Schwartzlose; William Nierenberg; Robert O. Peterson; Ray Watt
