Alpha Helix: a floating laboratory for comparative physiology in the 1960s and 70s. What happened to her?

Anybody reading papers on how animals work from the 1960s and 70s cannot fail to notice that much of the work on certain topics, Bill Dunson’s research on sea snakes for example, was done on board the Research Vessel Alpha Helix in what seemed a series of idyllic expedition cruises in biologically interesting parts of the world. Later, there appeared to be no reference to Alpha Helix. What happened to her?

R/V Alpha Helix

Before looking at what happened after these voyages, it is worth considering her history. The driving force behind her funding, construction and operation was Per (‘Pete’) Scholander (1905-1980), the famous physiologist who worked on survival in the cold and at sea, as well as in other fields like plant physiology. Scholander was then at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In 1962 he succeeded in getting funding from the National Science Foundation of the USA (NSF). I am not sure whether the vessel was classified as a ship or a boat but although owned by the Scripps, it was funded throughout by the NSF and operated as a national asset.

The vessel was named Alpha Helix after the structure of proteins discovered by Linus Pauling. I cannot see why because the work done on board bore no relation to the chemical work of Pauling nor was it intended to. Reading between the lines I suspect some political motive.

In Scholander’s biographical memoir, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen wrote:

…in 1966 the ship started on its first cruise, the Billabong Expedition to the Great Barrier Reef. A National Advisory Board, initially chaired by Baird Hastings, evaluated applications for use of the ship. Over the fourteen years the ship remained in service as a floating physiological laboratory, expeditions went to Australia, the South Seas, the Amazon, the Antarctic, the Galapagos, the Bering Sea, and other sites. Several hundred scientists from all over the world have participated actively in these expeditions, and the records of Scripps Institution show that the work on the Alpha Helix has resulted in a total of 547 publications in recognized scientific journals—an impressive record for the relatively modest funds invested in the Alpha Helix.

Details of the various cruises and of the structure of the organisation set up to sort out who was invited and that to run the vessel can be found online (see below). Initially the participants were mainly US based (NSF grantees had priority) but the foreign scientist were on board for many of the cruises. In 1967 Dennis Bellamy (then in Sheffield and later in Cardiff) was one:

…I was asked to be the lead biochemist on Knut Schmidt Nielsen’s Alpha Helix expedition to the Amazon Basin.

So why was the whole concept scrapped in 1980? It seems that interest in using Alpha Helix had waned by the late 1970s—crazy as that sounds now. NSF support was withdrawn and the vessel was sold to the University of Alaska where it was used mainly for oceanographic work. After being in dry dock in 2004-2007, she was sold to a private company and then in 2014 to the Autonomous University of Mexico and based at the port of Ensenada. Alpha Helix is now an oceanographic research vessel. Indeed her whereabout can be traced on Marine Traffic under the name Buque Oceanografico Alpha Heli. This is where she was on 5 May 2018:

From Marine Traffic

Information on the history of Alpha Helix can be found here, here, here and here.

Schmidt-Nielsen K. 1987. Per Scholander 1905-1980. Biographical Memoir, National Academy of Sciences 56, 387-412.