Biographical Memoirs Volume 57 (1987) / Chapter Skim
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John Dove Isaacs III
John Dove Isaacs III
Pages 88-123
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Ranch life gave him a solid background in practical ecology as well as an opportunity for his strong naturalist instincts to clevelop. Early in life John showoct intense scientific curiosity and a capacity for invention.
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By the following year he had saved enough money to return to college at Oregon State, where one of the attractions was Mary Carol Zander. When school was out, John got a job as a forestry service lookout on Mt.
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off his shoes anct pants, put on a life jacket, anct committed himself to the river. He vaguely remembered seeing one large wave fling the boat on the unforgiving rocks anc!
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As a young commercial fisherman working out of the Columbia River, Isaacs was outraged one day by a passing tourist who said something to the effect that "these fishermen don't know much about what they're doing." John—with a 6-foot 3-inch frame and one of the highest recorded I.Q.'s in the state of Oregon rather firmly suggested that this unwary soul sit down and observe while he dissected a salmon and explained in detail the function of each organ and tissue. John Isaacs was a fisherman throughout his life, and he appeared to enjoy cold, wet, miserable weather as long as he could fish.
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John Isaacs was present at four nuclear test series; he especially distinguished himself during two of them. The first was Crossroads in 1946 for which {ohn's job was to measure waves from the blasts.
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Using automatic cameras that fire every three seconds he had the fantastic luck to get a picture of the Baker shot's lightect bubble breaking the surface. During the Castle series at Bikini in 1954, John became very concerned about the possibility of the shots causing a tidal wave that wouIc} wash over some of the islets on which
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There was no substantial ticial wave, but ~ am convinced that if Isaacs' hunch tract not been followed, lives would have been lost both to the blast and the subsequent radioactivity. John Isaacs likect to think, ant!
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He was also expert at ping pony and clelightect in "teaching" it to graduate students who had an overly high opinion of their prowess. He lovect chess, including blind chess, Kriegspiel, and triple cylinclrical chess, but he often had a hard time fincting worthy opponents.
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His unconventional approach was to examine (with Andrew Soutar) the yearly layers of unclisturbed sediment layers in the Santa Barbara Basin.
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The buoy was helc! about 100 feet beneath the sea surface by a slencler steel wire some 6,000 feet long; the wire connected the buoy to a heavy anchor clump installed on a sea-mount, which furnishec!
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in an estuary would be lost as soon as any structure was built because the kinetic run-up would be much recluced. In the 1970s he and various associates at the Institute of Marine Resources, including Walter Schmitt, Geralct Wick, and Davict Castel, reexamined the utilization of energy from ocean waves.
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Large salt dome Largest H-bomb Tornado Lightning flash Human daily diet Melting ice cube Striking typewriter key 10 Flea hop 26 024 22 017 1014 - 109 10° After carefully considering the implications of the above, he concludect (in Science) that the sun's radiation for one year could fuel the leap of i041 fleas.
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Isaacs' name does not appear on it but, as he liked to say, "There's no limit to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care who gets the credit." John Isaacs was committed to the conservation and protection of natural resources, but he was incensed by regulations that attempted to control the discharge of human wastes into the sea. It was his opinion that: The return of organic waste and plant nutrients resulting from the most natural of acts to the sea is most probably beneficial.
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"Don't you know that most sea animals live in a soup of fecal material anal feed on it ctirectly? " During the first clecacle of work by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (of which this writer is director, Isaacs was the chairman of the scientific consulting boarcl that guidect its efforts.
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; the establishment, by the National College Sea Grant Program, of the annual John D Isaacs Memorial Scholarship for excellence in marine science by a high school student; and the endowment of the John D
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Fortunately, John Isaacs recordec} his for a plenary adciress to the Pacific Science Congress at Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1975. Those who remember his unique manner of expression will recognize the following excerpts from that speech as pure vintage Isaacs: I believe that the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, covering more than one-third of the planet, hold and conceal minerals, energy, food, aesthetic resources, and intellectual challenges of immense potential to the peoples of the Pacific Basin can we but learn to discern these possibilities and intelligently approach them.
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his major energies, however, to work on a book that he envisioned as presenting a total conceptualization of current multidisciplinary knowledge of the sea. It was his belief that a broad anct penetrating study of the sea and man's interventions anc!
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106 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS "The sea again challenges our sciences and our institutions and presents again those same opportunities to guide ourselves out of the present age and into a new and future world." On June 6, 1980, John Isaacs passed as Mark Twain put it "to that mysterious country from whose bourne no traveler returns."
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HE- 116- 130. Survey and reconnaissance of miscellaneous Pacific Coast beaches.
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HE-116-223. Preliminary report on harbors, havens and anchorages of the Pacific coast from San Francisco to the Straits of Juan de Fuca.
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Water-table elevations in some Pacific coast beaches. Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, report no.
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Preliminary report on the Mark II wave direction indicator and recorder. Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, report no.
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Scripps Institution of Oceanography, SIO Reference no.
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The changing Pacific Ocean in 1957 and 1958. (Presented at California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Symposium, Rancho Santa Fe, California, June 1958.)
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Disposal of Lozo-Level Radioactive Waste into Pacific Coastal Waters. (A report of a working group of the Committee on Oceanography.)
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(Proceedings of Conference on the Feasibility of Conducting Oceanographic Explorations from Aircraft, Manned Orbital, and Lunar Laboratories, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, August 1964.) Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Reference no.
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Large-scale anomalous sea surface conditions in the North Pacific. In: Proceedings of the Fourth U.S.
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Long-distance telemetry of environmental data for the North Pacific study. In: Proceedings Oceanology International 69, First International Oceanology
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The operational results from the North Pacific study. In: Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting, Marine Technology Society, Washington, D.C., Tune 29 - July 1, vol.
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:636 -37. Unstructured marine food webs and "pollutant analogues." Fish.
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Publ., May:193-99. Potential trophic biomasses and trace-substance concentrations in unstructured marine food webs.
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Southern California Coastal Water Research Project findings. In: Marine Pollution and Marine Waste Disposal, ed.
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Oregon State University Sea Grant College Program, Publ.
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Challenges of a wet planet. Paper presented at Technology and Ocean Space Conference, Oregon State University Sea Grant Program, April 29, 1978.
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