Mr. Packard and the Deep Blue Sea : Using Cash and Family Ties, the Electronics Tycoon Is Bringing Underwater Mysteries to the Surface.

The long drive winds through 90 acres of apricot trees and up to the top of the hill where David Packard lives alone. Inside his house, which can barely be seen from the road, the great industrialist sits rigidly in a straight-backed chair, dressed in a tweed jacket and coordinated slacks.

He’s a big man, a onetime three-sport athlete at Stanford. But he’s 80 now, and as he shifts his 6-foot, 4-inch frame from one position to another, he moves cautiously. He gazes across the groves he has harvested in the Los Altos Hills, and he talks about the past. But he doesn’t want to dwell on it. Packard has a new vision: He wants to explore the ocean deep. It is a passion he has come to late in his years, the culmination of a long, productive life.

Starting in a garage with less than $600 capital in the late 1930s, Packard and his partner, William R. Hewlett, built an electronics giant in Northern California. Hewlett was the innovative engineer, while Packard had a special talent for managing the firm and guiding it into prosperity. Even after it had grown into the world leader in the design and manufacture of electronic measuring equipment, Packard still roamed its halls, talking with his people, admonishing them to keep their objectives tightly focused.

Both Hewlett and Packard made fortunes. And the Packards--David and his late wife, Lucile--created a family foundation that funded a range of health, family-planning, conservation and educational programs. Yet, Packard wanted to create a unique legacy, one that would, as he said one recent morning, give something back to the engineers, scientists and others who had enabled his company to thrive. But what?

The foundation had put tens of millions of dollars into what he considered “everybody else’s programs,” and Packard wanted something that would bear the imprimatur of his own family. He asked his son and three daughters--among them Julie and Nancy, who shared their father’s love of nature and had become marine biologists--to come up with ideas.

The answer came out of nowhere one evening in 1976. Nancy and her husband, Robin Burnett, were brainstorming at their Carmel Valley home with fellow biologists Steven Webster and Chuck Baxter. Margaritas in hand, they were trying to come up with a use for Knut Hovden’s old cannery. The dilapidated structure stood on the Monterey waterfront between Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, where the four young biologists were doing research, and historic Cannery Row. The university had purchased Hovden’s place to serve as a buffer between its oceanographic laboratory and the tourist shops creeping along the stretch of old sardine-packing factories given fictional life by John Steinbeck.

No one seems to remember who thought of it first, but by the time the tequila was gone, the four had decided that the old cannery could be turned into a public aquarium. Monterey already had an aquarium, but the biologists wanted to create something different, a distinctive institution that would take dry-landers on a tour of the undersea world and the creatures and plants that live there. The idea was proposed to Packard, who at first showed little enthusiasm. “I didn’t know anything about aquariums,” he recalls. “They never interested me much.”

Nevertheless, since the sea had become so important to members of their family, Packard and his wife took the proposal seriously. They visited almost every major aquarium in the country, concluding that most had been built with severely limited budgets. The trip convinced them that building an aquarium, if it was done properly, would be an ideal gift from a fortunate family to the public. And Packard’s vision included a vital adjunct to the aquarium: a world-class research institute that would design technology to probe the oceans’ secrets.

The package seemed the perfect choice for the spectacular shoreline at Monterey. No community on the West Coast is more closely identified with the sea. The sardine fleet is gone now, destroyed by exploitation, and Cannery Row, once stinking with fish and character, has joined the ranks of boutique villages. But the sea remains.

Monterey Bay and its rocky shoreline wraps around one of the nation’s newest and most spectacular marine sanctuaries. In a too-rare stroke of wisdom, Congress last year designated the picturesque bay a federally protected area, prohibiting activities such as ocean-floor mining and oil drilling that could damage a region that hosts one of the richest aquatic communities in the world. Just yards from the shore, the ocean bottom begins to drop into an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon. Monterey Canyon provides a deep-sea habitat brimming with exotic creatures that are thriving in water as unpolluted as that along the coast of any industrialized country. It is a very special place.

More than two miles deep, the canyon is home to sea life ranging from giant whales to tiny ocean-floor creatures. It was this canyon, so rich in life and so devoid of human understanding, that got Packard’s juices flowing. And it is one reason he established the research institute and gave it a unique charter.

Little is known about the waters deep beneath Monterey Bay, nor the depths of any of the world’s oceans. Those unanswered questions, as much as the influence of his daughters, stirred Packard. “He was fascinated by the unknown, the exploration aspect of it,” Julie Packard recalls. “There was a void there to be filled, and the reason we had so little knowledge about it was largely because of technology limitations. And so he just got really enthused about the fact that we know virtually nothing about the majority of our planet, because no one has thrown the technology behind it to make that exploration possible. He got really excited about that.”

“It’s the most important frontier that we have left,” the industrialist tells me in his large but unpretentious hilltop home, his once-robust voice now subdued. Packard put $55 million into the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And he invested another $13 million in its unique offspring, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which he later switched to full-foundation funding and which promises eventually to be the pacesetter in undersea studies that Packard has envisioned.

Packard wants the institute to play a significant role in probing the ocean’s influence on global weather patterns, but the heart of its research will be to study the creatures that inhabit the sea, to learn more about these innumerable life forms. The institute’s charter is to develop the technology and the equipment needed to carry out that research. And its work will enable scientists at the aquarium to keep their exhibits novel and complete.

The aquarium--designed by the architectural firm of Esherick Homsey Dodge and Davis--already “is a world leader in design and innovation,” says Ruth Shelly, deputy director of the Stephen Birch Aquarium-Museum in La Jolla, which is part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “Their seemingly unlimited funding allows them to experiment with new techniques. They have the R & D (research and development) money that we can’t afford.”

Unlike other major aquariums around the country, the Monterey facility, which opened in 1984, is tightly focused on one region, the rich habitat that lies at its doorstep. “That makes them unique,” Shelly says. And with the aquarium a critical and turnstile success, the Packards have turned its focus and funding to the research institute.

MONITORS ABOARD THE POINT LOBOS, A SPECIALIZED VESSEL OF THE RESEARCH institute, are recording the drama unfolding more than 2,000 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay. Bruce Robison, a senio scientist at the institute, has sent the ship’s unmanned robotic submarine down to explore the depths of Monterey Canyon, and he can hardly believe his luck. The small submersible, tethered to its mother ship above, is closing in on a rare vampire squid, a species only recently photographed alive for the first time.

“We’ve been catching them in nets for years, so we’ve known about them for a long time,” Robison says, watching the submersible slowly gain on the strange creature. “But we haven’t known about their behavior until this year when we started seeing them with the ROV (remotely operated vehicle.)”

The submersible approaches the squid, and ports are opened on a transparent cylinder along the side of the device. Pumps begin sucking water through the cylinder, and the squid, captured by the flowing water, is swept inside. The ports close, and Robison has his prey, only the fifth of its species ever to have been caught alive.

Meanwhile, back at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, several hundred people are sitting in a dark auditorium, watching the capture live on TV monitors. The aquarium is one of the few places in the world where the public can peer over the shoulder of a scientist who is conducting research. “Live from Monterey Canyon” is part of the extraordinary association between the aquarium and the research institute, and in the beginning many of the scientists were cool to the idea.

“I was a little skeptical at first,” admits the gravel-voiced, bushy-bearded Robison. “But then I sat in the audience and watched the effect that it has on people. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain to the public the excitement of doing exploratory research. If this lets them catch some of the excitement and they see that oceanographic research is neat stuff, then . . . that displaces whatever discomfort I might feel in thinking about the 350 people looking over my shoulder.”

The institute is now building a more advanced robotic submersible, and Monterey Canyon is rapidly becoming one of the world’s most intensely explored bodies of water. All because the institute is striving to meet the primary goal set forth by Packard: to create the tools marine scientists need.

“We’re in a unique position,” Robison says. “We have the opportunity to do the sort of exploratory research common in the 19th Century, when natural historians were sent off to explore unknown regions of the Earth.”

For years Robison envied those pioneers, thinking that much of science’s romance had died with the exploration of the globe’s remotest reaches. But the early adventurers, limited to surface ships, were unable to probe the depths of the sea, the Earth’s last frontier. “We get to explore in the 20th Century using 21st-Century technology,” Robison says, his eyes flashing with excitement. “We get, in a sense, the best of the past and the future.”

In the early days, he says, scientists tried to understand the sea on the basis of the creatures they could dredge up in nets. “But there’s only so much you can learn from a dead fish,” he says. “We knew what a lot of the pieces of the puzzle were. But we couldn’t put them together in functional units because we didn’t know anything about their dynamic aspects, what their behavioral patterns were like, what their activity was. We knew we were missing a lot, but we had sort of hit a wall.”

Even manned submersibles developed primarily for the military were of limited help, because they were designed to study the ocean floor. They were not effective in exploring that portion of the sea where so much of the planet’s marine life thrives--the vast column of water that lies between the bottom and the surface. “If an alien civilization were to send a scouting party to Earth with instructions to study the dominant animal communities on Earth, they wouldn’t be walking around up here,” Robison says. “They would be down in the ocean.”

Only vehicles such as the robotic submersibles being developed by the Monterey institute can enable scientists to fully explore the deep sea, he believes.

Scientists hope their research will lead to a better understanding. For instance, so little is known about plankton, the microscopic animal and plant life that makes up the most abundant food resource on the planet, that humankind may be unconsciously damaging the sea’s ability to produce it.

EVEN THE BIOLOGISTS WHO FIRST PROPOSED THE AQUARIUM ARE SURPRISED by its success. It has drawn five or six times more people than expected, an average of around 2 million a year, according to Julie Packard. The only person who doesn’t seem surprised is David Packard. He knew it would work, he said, because he decided to do it right. It may be the only subject that could have brought him out of retirement to talk with a writer.

Packard considers the young aquarium part of a growing enterprise that someday will set the standards for oceanographic research, but it is clear that something else is at work. The aquarium was a way for Packard to bring his family together in a joint project. In varying degrees, his wife, their son and three daughters each played a role in its creation.

Packard admits that during the years he and Hewlett were building their company into a world-class high-tech firm, his professional life kept him away from his family much of the time, especially from 1969 through 1971, when he served as deputy secretary of defense for President Richard Nixon.

His children grew up in one of those tony areas of California where the very rich try to handle their wealth discreetly. But the same kind of self-discipline required to achieve success can easily drive wedges between a father and his children.

Packard’s children recall that he expected a lot of them, and when asked if he may have demanded too much, he pauses and looks out across the rolling hills and the million-dollar homes of Los Altos. “I was fairly tough with my son,” he says softly. “Probably too tough, but he’s done very well.” The son, David W. Packard, chose not to follow his father into a technologically oriented career. Instead, he became a professor of humanities at UCLA, and now runs a small theater in Palo Alto.

Packard’s oldest daughter, Susan Packard Orr, is in the computer business, but she is a specialist in software, not the hardware that was the focus of her father’s company.

The youngest daughter, Julie, 39, recalls her early years as she sits in her office at the aquarium. Having inherited her father’s managerial skills, she has been judged the member of the family best suited to run the enterprise. At first sight she seems a bit austere, with her brown hair tied tightly at the back of her head. But her deep-brown eyes sparkle when she talks of the aquarium. Historic Cannery Row is waking up outside her window, fish-laden trucks stopping at the restaurants, then rumbling on up the narrow street. The morning sun streaks through the window, softening her features.

“No, no,” she says to a question she has heard many times before. She did not have an aquarium when she was a little girl. She never particularly wanted one. And the Monterey Bay Aquarium was not a gift from her daddy, an easy way for a rich man to show his affection for his marine-biologist daughter.

He has given her something else instead, she says--a love of nature and a sense of responsibility. “He and I had a vegetable garden every year,” she says, seemingly reluctant to invite a stranger into her personal memories. “That was the one childhood thing that my dad and I did together. Grow vegetables.” It was her responsibility to water the plants. “It was grim when they died. I felt it was my fault when the deer came and ate the cantaloupes,” she says with a laugh.

But she stops short of describing him as a close father, this man who became a confidant of Presidents. His main influence on his children, she says, “was expectation. He didn’t have to say much, but we knew that we had to achieve something in life.”

The aquarium was designed, Julie Packard says, to bring the undersea world to life for its visitors. The result, she hopes will be a greater awareness of the oceans and their creatures. “We are such a terrestrially oriented animal that marine conservation is just barely on the consciousness level,” she says, embracing her subject like a grade-school teacher leading a group of children through the tide pools. “I am totally committed to seeing that change.”

By mid-morning the aquarium is full of people, young and old, getting their first look at creatures they never knew existed. One of the most popular exhibits is the Planet of the Jellies, a large darkened room with eerily backlighted tanks full of jellyfish, but these particular jellyfish are not deep-sea species. Until recently even scientists who studied these creatures had never seen them in this setting. Many jellies live in the deep sea and are reduced to gooey slime when brought to the surface in research nets. But the jellies in this aquarium are alive--gossamer creatures that swim with the orchestrated grace of ballerinas, among Earth’s most delicate living organisms.

A young girl gazes in awe at one of the exhibits as the jellies pulsate around the tank in a graceful, alien dance. Later, Julie Packard thinks of that girl--and the thousands of others, including her own 7-year-old twin daughters, who have wandered through the aquarium and stared with wide-eyed amazement at a new world. “I believe in wonder,” she says.

ONLY TRACES OF THE OLD HOVDEN CANNERY HAVE BEEN PRESERVED within the 216,000-square-foot aquarium, which blends with the rocky shoreline and the aging buildings of Cannery Row as though it has always been there. So carefully has the character of the area been captured that it is hard to believe that the gray concrete walls are less than a decade old.

“We wanted to do it in a way that was new and refreshing,” recalls Steven Webster, the aquarium’s director of education and one of the four biologists who, over margaritas, envisioned the facility. “What made that a challenge was to bring into the exhibits whole pieces of living communities.” They have met the challenge.

The centerpiece exhibit is a giant kelp forest. It was the kind of idea that had a special appeal to the scientists who initially proposed the aquarium, although some doubted that the thousands of visitors the aquarium would need for financial viability would pay to look at seaweed. Packard himself had insisted that the entrance fees remain high enough to support the aquarium, which is why it costs $10.50 for adults and $4.75 for children under 12.

“We really didn’t know, up until the very end, whether we could even grow kelp,” Julie Packard recalls. Backup plans included plastic kelp, or bringing in fresh kelp every few weeks, but the worry was unwarranted. The kelp forest has thrived inside a 335,000 gallon, three-story tank, which is continuously flushed with crystal-clear water from the bay. The tank also provides a home for the many creatures that inhabit kelp beds along the California coastline.

Walls of windows seven inches thick hold back the water. They were built by a Japanese firm so protective of its technology that the aquarium staff was barred from observing the installation.

The idea behind the kelp exhibit and others at the aquarium was to break away from typical aquarium design--rooms full of fish-filled tanks--and to offer visitors instead a lifelike-but-dry undersea experience. Most of the designers at Monterey are divers, men and women personally acquainted with the largely inaccessible world that covers nearly three-quarters of the globe.

“If you are a diver, you are in awe over how beautiful everything looks down there,” says David Powell, a lean man with a serious beard and a weathered face, looking as though he just came ashore on a raft. “It’s like you’re entering a new world.” His experience as a diver, he says, made him want to work with public exhibits. “It was a way to share what I had seen.”

Powell works to keep creatures from the deep alive and well in captivity. Many of them, to be displayed in future exhibits, live in water so deep they never see sunlight; yet they must adapt to a lighted environment so they can be observed. Powell says that when they’re kept in darkened tanks that are only illuminated periodically, most creatures adapt surprisingly easily.

No matter how carefully an aquarium is designed, it will always remain an enclosure, subjecting sea creatures to limitations they have never known before. That has posed one of the greatest challenges at Monterey: how to fence in species from long-ranging tuna to fragile jellies.

“A jelly is an animal that lives in a world without walls,” Powell says. Most are so delicate that they will collapse if they just brush against the glass walls of an enclosure, so the trick was to construct an environment in which the jellies could swim freely inside a small tank. To do that, Powell and his staff created gentle currents in the tanks that constantly move the jellies toward the center, shielding them from hard surfaces.

Even Powell admits that some creatures will probably never be exhibited. Some are too large, such as the giant squid, a fictional villain of myriad sea tales, with a span of 30 or 40 feet between the tips of its two longest tentacles. This monster squid lives in the deep sea, Powell says, and marine biologists are convinced that it would be almost impossible to capture one without killing it, and that it would be equally difficult to create an artificial habitat large enough to house one safely.

But even these creatures may be exhibited under another innovation at the Monterey Aquarium. Biologists hope to use undersea cameras to capture the image of these exotic animals and transmit live pictures back to a screen in the auditorium.

It is too early to know whether the Monterey project will ever revolutionize our understanding of the sea, but Packard believes that he has opened the door. It is a modest beginning, far smaller than such major research facilities as Scripps Institution of Oceanography. But when he is gone, the aged industrialist says, the Packard Foundation will be worth about $2.5 billion.

Then it will continue to support a wide range of programs, especially science education, but the research institute will be its centerpiece, making the Monterey program to marine science what the J. Paul Getty Museum is to art. The budget for the Scripps Institution’s research operations, for example, is $75 million a year. The aquarium at La Jolla, meanwhile, was completed last year for less than $14 million, about 25% of what Packard put into the Monterey facility.

Furthermore, work is progressing on the Monterey institute’s second research ship, which will be able to travel anywhere in the world, expanding the institute’s scientific expectations to a global level.

“We really don’t know what’s going on out there,” Packard says. “We’ve got to find out.”