Accession No.: 87-39
PROCESSING RECORD
SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY ARCHIVES
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Foundation for Ocean Research
Foundation for Ocean Research Records, 1980-1987
Physical Description: 1 record center carton
Description: The collection consists of the records of the Foundation for Ocean Research
from 1980-1987. The material includes Trustees correspondence and meetings, proposals
projects.
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; Robert O. Peterson
.