ABSTRACT
Introduction The complex causation of the yearly plankton production cycle in the sea could only be determined once reliable chemical analyses of the inorganic nutrients available in sea water became available beginning in 1902. The first reliable analyses were made in Kiel by Emil Raben. By the mid-1930s, W. R. G. Atkins and H. W. Harvey at Plymouth applied colori metric nutrient analyses whose origins were in the synthetic dye industry and in public health studies of drinking water. None of the techniques used in studying the plankton cycle (which Raben characterized as ‘problem children of analytical chemistry’) was devised for that purpose; each came, often after long delay, from pure or applied chemistry. Every major advance on which production studies depended was linked with the arrival of a chemist to work on biological problems. Through adaptation rather than revolution, chemists, working in new settings with marine biologists, brought modifications of established techniques to a new problem - the understanding of how marine production is controlled in nature.
