Why Whales

"Why, of course everything anybody can learn by investigating the ocean and the organisms that live in it will be useful to somebody in some way at some time." So said the late Edward Wyllis Scripps, journalist and humanitarian, before founding the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California. Last week came news of a characteristic undertaking of this institution. It stood sponsor for a whaling expedition off the San Clemente Islands.

The crew of the whaler Lansing were killing whales at an average rate of two per day and lashing them alongside for scientists to cut from the base of the whale brains the whale pituitary glands. After each operation, the carcass was set adrift, the small gland pitched into a barrel. When the Lansing returns, Dr. Max S. Dunn will attempt to analyze whale pituitaries into their constituent elements to discover what agency or force causes whale tissue to assume such prodigious proportions, perhaps what agency or force is the source of all animal structure and life. Possible "usefulness": a better understanding of how to produce mammoth food fish, poultry, circus freaks.