ABSTRACT
In 1964, not long after I began teaching at university, I met the late Jerome Wiesner. Dr Wiesner had just left the White House, where he had been Science Adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to return to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1 ‘Tell me’, Dr Wiesner said to me when he found out that I was a historian of oceanography, ‘why, when they have already collected so much data, do oceanographers keep needing to go to sea to collect more and more?’
