A national oceanographic program

In February of 1957 a group of oceanographers and representatives from various agencies of the Federal Government met at the request of Dr. Bronk, President of the National Academy of Sciences, to discuss the question of whether or not the Academy should make a study of the status of the marine sciences. Present were representatives from the Navy, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, the Atomic Energy Commission, small and large oceanographic institutions, and other groups concerned with the marine sciences. They soon discovered that they had in common the knowledge that their day‐to‐day, month‐to‐month problems in the development of various programs could not be solved without a considerable increase in the development of marine sciences in the United States