James Lovelock has risked reputation, livelihood, everything by going it alone. What has this meant for the man behind the still-controversial Gaia? Was it all worth it? And will the forthcoming autobiography of this passionate individualist reveal all? Michael Bond got a sneak preview at his Devon hideaway.
WHEN biology professors at British universities teach their students about the Gaia hypothesis they tend to avoid mentioning its originator, James Lovelock. After three decades, his theory that life on Earth regulates its environment to keep itself healthy still carries connotations of New Age hippiedom and fantasy. It seems Lovelock’s name has become associated with anti-science.
This is curious, because many of his peers believe Lovelock to be a rigorous and methodical scientist. And he has always been highly critical of the more extreme Gaia supporting environmentalists who, he says, “are not just ignorant of science, they hate science”.
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On the surface, this is just another irony for a man whose life appears full of contradictions. He is an “independent” scientist seeking acceptance for his work from the scientific establishment; a hero of environmentalists and a supporter of nuclear power; an entrepreneur who doesn’t want to be rich; a self-professed recluse with a large circle of friends.
For four decades he has eschewed the stability and comradeship of a university research department for a laboratory at his home, previously in a Wiltshire village and now in Devon. “If we want company we get it by going to a conference two or three times a year, that’s more than enough,” he says.
Yet Lovelock is a “people person” to the extent that he will lend his support to businesses or groups not just because he agrees with their science, but because he likes the people who run them. This may have got him into trouble on occasion. In 1974, he was accused of being “in the pockets of the aerosol industry” after appearing at a US Congressional hearing as a witness for DuPont, which was defending the use of CFCs. Though he admits he misjudged the destructive effect of CFCs on the ozone layer, he doesn’t regret defending the industry. “Some might say I was a bloody fool, but I think I just did what came naturally,” he says. “I liked the people, they seemed to be a very honourable, decent bunch of scientists.”
So the contradictions, he insists, are skin-deep-the products of false perceptions and misunderstanding. It is not difficult to see how he could have been “misunderstood”. His relationship with academia has been an uneasy one, “too much a loner ever to feel a part of collegiate life”. Judging from the reluctance of academics to breathe his name in front of their students, this feeling seems mutual.
Loners are mistrusted in science, and Lovelock has always done things differently. He is, after all, an inventor-hardly a conformist profession. He came up with his first invention when he was scarcely 10 years old: a crude wind gauge or anemometer that he held out of the windows of trains to measure their speed. His mantra became “seek the flaw in everything orthodox and accepted”, an attitude born of growing up in an argumentative family with a father who voted Conservative and a staunchly Labour mother.
He assures me his childhood was very happy, though it was hardly conventional. He was brought up mainly by his grandmother because his parents “had no time to care for a baby”-they were working too hard running their art business. Yet he bears them no grudge and was close to them both. The family has been dogged by illness. His father’s first wife ended up in a mental hospital after the birth of their second child. Lovelock’s first wife, Helen, died in 1989 from multiple sclerosis. And his youngest son is mentally handicapped and lives at home.
As a child he spent more time talking to adults than to other children. His mother insisted he had the best education available to a relatively poor family, so she sent him to a grammar school. He hated it, but remembers being surrounded by clever pupils, and discussing particle accelerators with them at the age of 13.
He trained as a chemist and then worked for the Medical Research Council in London. But the relationship was sometimes uneasy: to the amazement of his colleagues he chose to wear a surgeon’s outfit instead of a lab coat, which he considered “too much of a uniform”.
After 20 years, he left the MRC to become an independent researcher, partly because he was having some success as an inventor in the field of gas chromatography, and partly because he was sick of being permanently employed. “It gave me a feeling there were tramlines going all the way to retirement and the grave. Life was all laid out. This was awful. I thought, to hell with it, I’m going to break free.”
It was a tough move. He had four children to support, little money, and had lost the security of being part of the academic establishment. This was impressed on him when his first submission to Nature since becoming independent (a paper about detecting life by measuring entropy reduction) was returned with a curt note: “We don’t take papers from private addresses.”
Then there was the practical side of ordering dangerous chemicals from home. Try asking for a few kilograms of potassium cyanide or a curie or two of a radioactive element, he says, and “the police, not the van driver, would call on you the next day”.
To reassure suppliers and clients, Lovelock formed a company, winning contracts for consultancy work (mainly chemical engineering) from NASA, Shell, Hewlett-Packard, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Britain’s Ministry of Defence and others. By all accounts he has been a very successful scientist, living on work that spun off from his inventions. Yet he rejected numerous opportunities to make serious money during his independent career when it would have been easy for him to market a successful product. He didn’t, because he feared he would have to sacrifice his science.
In today’s commercial environment, such idealism might appear foolhardy. But for Lovelock, science is a sufficient end in itself. More than that, he believes that too much money can be the ruin of it by stifling creativity. “Scientists aren’t made, they’re born,” he says, and throwing money at them won’t help. “You don’t get painters or musicians that way.” He maintains that it is perfectly possible to become a famous scientist on nothing more than state benefits-another view that may not endear him to the scientific establishment. He would also have research departments in Britain cut their staff by a fifth-leaner could well equal fitter, he reckons, with everyone pulling their own weight.
Listening to Lovelock talk, you realise this is not the rant of an embittered, isolated scientist. Rather, it is the judgement of a scientific purist. Take his response to a question about his electron capture detector, which he invented in 1957 and which detects minute concentrations of pesticides and other pollutants. The detector helped scientists discover that chlorinated pesticides such as DDT had spread throughout the world-sparking the environmental movement in the 1960s. Did he lose out by not fighting for the patent, which was seized by the US government in 1964? “It was probably a good thing,” he insists. “If I’d been allowed to keep it I’d have had so much money and not done the science I have done.”
Is Gaia a product of this scientific idealism? Or is it another contradiction: Lovelock’s near-solitary practice of science produces a theory deeply rooted in dependency and interconnectedness? Quite the opposite, he protests. “Everything that happens in the great Earth system is the result of some individual somewhere doing something slightly different. If it succeeds and it’s improving the environment then it will take over its part of the ecosystem. If it fails, it dies out. So it’s down to individuals.”
Lovelock’s intuition that living organisms regulate the temperature of Earth’s surface and the chemical composition of its atmosphere to keep it suitable for life came to him while working on experiments to detect life on Mars at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1965. He saw from new astronomical data that the atmospheres of Mars and Venus were dominated by carbon dioxide and close to chemical equilibrium-profoundly different from Earth’s, which seemed to violate the laws of chemical equilibrium and could only have been maintained in such a state by biological processes.
Other scientists, brought up on the conventional wisdom that life merely adapts to its environment, were appalled. Many of them have now come round to it and accept certain environmental process on Earth as Gaian. For example, plants and bacteria are believed to help control the temperature of the planet by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and depositing it in the soil, where it helps weather rocks.
Similarly, algal plankton on the surface of the ocean are thought to play a part in controlling temperature by emitting dimethylsulphide gas (DMS), which forms tiny particles in the air on which water vapour can condense to form clouds. Clouds keep the planet cool by reflecting solar radiation back into space. The late Bill Hamilton, who was at Oxford University, improved this theory by offering an evolutionary explanation for why the algae emit DMS-they use it to get themselves airborne and aid dispersion (91av, 30 May 1998, p 29).
But some scientists, especially neo-Darwinists, are still strongly critical of Gaia. In particular, they ask how evolution by natural selection could have led to a planet with a self-regulating environment. Lovelock concedes that this is the greatest challenge to his theory, and unlike some of his supporters he is not convinced that the answer lies in complexity theory (91av, 14 December 1996, p 28). But he says there can be no doubt that natural selection and Gaia are compatible. “I’m a hundred per cent Darwinist. But I would say that Gaia theory stands to Darwinism much as relativity stands to Newtonian physics. It doesn’t in any way replace it, it merely extends it.”
So what would Darwin have thought of Gaia? “I like to think he would have said, oh yes, that’s obvious isn’t it?” says Lovelock. He has come to regard Darwin as a historical friend, for although they are from different disciplines they took similar paths-both independent scientists working in secluded country houses, and both remorselessly attacked by their peers for their views.
Many criticisms of Gaia have focussed on its terminology. As New York University biologist Tyler Volk puts it, words such as Gaia-coined by Lovelock’s friend, the late author William Golding-and superorganism “either ready readers for an Earth-hug or raise their hackles”. Lovelock is unrepentant. But in his yearning to have his theory accepted, he now refrains from using the word Gaia in conversation. “I always think it grossly unfair that people accept the selfish gene as a metaphor-and I think it’s a lovely metaphor-but they won’t accept Gaia or the living Earth. You’ve got to use metaphor to explain science, it’s part of a process of giving people a feel for the subject.”
Lovelock insists he is grateful to his critics-especially the most scathing such as Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University in Canada and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins-for helping him to turn a loose hypothesis into a firm theory. Yet few living scientists have been so vilified by their peers. Doesn’t it get him down? “It gets very painful after a time. It’s a matter of quantity. A torrent of bad criticism can become quite depressing. At the end of the 1980s I began to feel that this was a complete dead loss, that I’d wasted 20 years and wasn’t getting anywhere.”
It is easy to see why Lovelock might take criticisms of Gaia personally. Rarely has a scientific theory been so closely reflected in the character and life of its originator. Lovelock lives with his second wife Sandy in a house surrounded by 35 acres of managed wilderness, including 20 000 planted trees and every species of British dragonfly, run as a charity-his own backyard Gaia.
At 81, Lovelock still buzzes with enthusiasm for science. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst describes him as “the most creatively mischievous mind I’ve ever encountered”. He seems driven as much by the fun and excitement of it all as by the results. His lab, in a barn near his house, is a schoolboy’s dream-and a health and safety inspector’s nightmare. It’s crammed with chemicals and archaic equipment and smells of benzene. He says he would find it impossible to work in the safety-conscious, “nanny-like” restrictions of modern labs.
But despite that energy and intellectual acuity, Lovelock reckons there is little more he can add to Gaia, preferring to let others such as Tim Lenton at the University of East Anglia carry the flame. All the same, he would dearly like to see it accepted by the mainstream in his lifetime. It would give him something to say to critics on his death bed, he says wryly.
And after that? He’ll put his trust in Gaia, of course. “It is comforting to think that I am a part of her, and that my destiny is to merge with the chemistry of our living planet.” Such confidence about death is not, he hastens to add, born of blind faith. It is just that the scientific evidence is strong enough for him to take the chance.