Roger Revelle

Roger Revelle wiki Harvard Center for Population Studies ex-director.

"Revelle was aware of the rather uninspiring and conventional research in marine biology and tried to start a revolution in the discipline in 1954 with a million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Five young faculty members came to the SIO to apply modern concepts and technologies from biochemistry and microbiology to ocean science. As chairman of the Oceanography and Fisheries Panel of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation, he contributed substantially to that committee's 1956 report. He went on to the chairmanship of the U.S. National Committee for the International Biological Program in 1961.

"Revelle played a key role in the creation in 1970 of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). It was he who suggested the objective for the ICSU's International Geosphere-Biosphere Program initiated in 1986: "To describe and understand the interaction of the great global physical, chemical, and biological systems regulating planet Earth's favorable environment for life, and the influence of human activity on that environment."

"Global integration of national scientific advances was high on Revelle's list of priorities. He recognized complementary roads to his goals: the nongovernmental organizations affiliated with ICSU and the intergovernmental organizations under the auspices of the United Nations. The latter brought the political sectors into the scientific arena. Revelle was deeply involved in a wide variety of U.N. and ICSU activities for nearly four decades.

"He was a prime mover in the establishment of the International Oceanographic Commission (IOC) in UNESCO in 1956, the creation by ICSU in 1958 of the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research (SCOR), and in 1969 of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment. As the first president of SCOR, he participated in planning the International Indian Ocean Expedition. As president of the first International Oceanographic Congress at the United Nations in New York City in 1959 he finalized these plans for implementation in the mid-1960s. The congress brought together a thousand registrants from fifty-four countries...

"He then accepted an appointment as Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Policy at Harvard University, served as Director of the Center for Population Studies from 1964 to 1974, and continued in the chair until 1978. "