Abstract

Marine biology and biological oceanography are two disciplinary subfields that have long struggled with their definitions. Should marine biology simply be considered a part of biology that takes place in the marine environment or is it a distinct entity, with conceptual problems and methodological approaches all its own? Similarly, biological oceanography could be seen as a necessary adjunct to physical and chemical oceanography or it could be defined more as an extension of biology into the marine realm. In the United States, these issues were directly addressed from the mid 1950s through the mid 1960s in a series of events that shed light on how marine biologists came to a working definition of their field that provided a broad methodological tent for practitioners and, at the same time, allied the field to oceanography during a period in which exploration of uncharted areas drew considerable funding from the post-WWII federal agencies charged with keeping American science at the forefront