The Good The Bad…And The Ugly - James Lovelock, Richard D. North

Ecologist, The, Dec, 2000 by James Lovelock, Richard D. North

James Lovelock, now 81, is no ordinary scientist. While others toil away in universities and corporations, he has spent the past 38 years deliberately detached from such institutions. His house and laboratory nestle together in a converted water mill on the edge of Dartmoor. Yet despite his apparent isolation, Lovelock is deeply in touch. For this is the man who has been called 'the Gandhi of modern science', and who provided the twentieth century with what may be one of its most important theories of life on Earth: the 'Gaia' hypothesis.

Lovelock's Devon idyll is a long way from Brixton, where he was raised as the only child of working-class parents in the 1920s and 30s. Lovelock was precocious, and learnt more from the books he read in Brixton library than he did at his highly regimented and detested school. Already passionate about science, his horizons were expanded by contact with the Leakey family, into which his mother's family married.

A firm of photographic chemists in Pimlico provided Lovelock's first job. They insisted that he take classes for a chemistry degree, and imbued in their trainee an abiding passion for accurate measurement, rather than the fudging of results that Lovelock observes is 'so normal' in a university training.

A key factor in Lovelock's unique ability to take an overview of life on Earth was his breadth of knowledge and experience, particularly the extraordinary diversity of disciplines. His autobiography, Homage to Gaia reveals that, to earn his keep while a student in Manchester, Lovelock chose to work not in a hospital laboratory or in the chemical industry, but on a farm in rural north Lancashire. The next 20 years saw him thriving at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research, where 'I must have gone through every single division of the institute: chemistry, biophysics, experimental biology, virology, physiology, you name it!'

Then, in 1961, Lovelock received an invitation to join NASA as a consultant at their Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California, where scientists were designing experiments to test for the presence of life on the Moon and on Mars. Lovelock felt compelled to question the assumptions underlying the basis of the experiments; that life on other planets would have a very similar form to that of organisms on Earth. He was hauled into the senior researcher's office and given two days to come up with his own idea as to how life could be detected on other planets. His answer thrilled his boss, was written up immediately in Nature, and not only led to a technique that NASA still uses today, but in September 1965, also inspired Lovelock to conceive of the Gaia hypothesis.

When Lovelock first mentioned Gaia to his colleagues, few saw the radical implications. It was not until 1970 that he found a colleague, the young biologist Lynn Margulis, who had the necessary vision to develop the concept with him. Together, they published two complementary and ground-breaking papers in 1972. The new theory presented the global atmospheric system as if it were a living organism, and -- even more radically -- attributed purpose to it. In 1979, when this theory was presented in the popular book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Lovelock's theory became the subject of furious debate.

Oddly, it was the name Lovelock had chosen for his theory -- Gaia was the Ancient Greek goddess of the Earth -- more than the theory itself, that seemed to annoy many scientists. Richard Dawkins devoted a chapter of his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype to trashing Gala. Colleagues, including fellow members of the Royal Society ignored it.

Many other thinkers, however, welcomed Gaia with open arms. Philosopher Mary Midgley hailed it as a breakthrough -- 'the first time a theory derived from scientific measurements has carried with it an implicit moral imperative -- the need to act in the interests of this living system that is so much bigger than us, yet on which we all depend'. And in her book Sacred Gaia, Anne Primavesi has developed Gaian insights into a synthetic belief system that could appeal to followers of all religions.

Few would today deny that Lovelock's key insight -- that life is, and has been, the main influence on the Earth's climate over the past four billion years -- has been borne out. More significantly, perhaps, Gaia has entered popular discourse via its adoption by a burgeoning green movement, for whom the Gaia theory provides evidence that the planet is, indeed, a living whole, and that life and human activities are interconnected. Lovelock has inspired and remains friends with environmentalists such as Jonathon Porritr, Sir Crispin Tickell and Edward Goldsmith.

Many wonder how someone with such a brilliant mind, breadth of knowledge, and scientific wisdom could have been marginalised from mainstream science. 'The Gala book may have harmed my relations with the Royal Society and the establishment, but as far as educating other scientists and the general public are concerned, it has done a tremendous amount of good,' he says. But above all, this eminently human scientist retains his humility -- something some of his peers might like to learn from.