20120508_JL
Source: BBC Radio 4
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666h
Date: 08/05/2012
Event: The Life Scientific: James Lovelock
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
- Jim al-Khalili: Theoretical physicist, author and science communicator
- Christine Lovelock: Daughter of James Lovelock
- James Lovelock: Independent scientist, environmentalist and futurologist
- Lynn Margulis: Biologist
- Jonathon Porritt: Environmentalist and writer
SatNav voice: After 300 yards, bear right.
Jim al-Khalili: I'm driving through these difficult Devon lanes to visit a scientist whose theory - Gaia - has spread way beyond the world of science, to poets and philosophers, to spiritual gurus and green activists. The key idea is that the whole planet Earth, from the bottom of its crust to the outer limits of its atmosphere, including all living things, acts as one giant, interconnected and self-regulating system - Gaia - named after the Greek goddess of the Earth.
[Sounds of a car stopping and a person getting out.]
Jim al-Khalili: And it's here that James Lovelock has spent the past 50 years, developing his Gaia theory. Working as an independent scientist, not affiliated to any university or research institute, but, rather, surviving on the profits from his multiple inventions and, more recently, charitable contributions to his Gaia Foundation. Perhaps his greatest invention was the electron capture detector, an exquisitely sensitive device capable of analysing the tiniest quantities of the different gases present in our atmosphere. And I guess this was the garden where he - rather than digging up his rosebed - actually planted a home-made bomb underneath it and blew it up.
Jim Lovelock - welcome to The Life Scientific. Or should I say: thank you for inviting me.
James Lovelock: Oh thank you so much for coming. I'm looking forward to this.
Jim al-Khalili: Jim, when you first came up with Gaia, did you ever imagine it would have such a profound impact on such a wide variety of people?
James Lovelock: I was kind of puzzled and amazed that people should take an interest - a spiritual interest, and those sorts of things - in it. And remember, I was a fairly old-fashioned - in modern terms - scientist. Anything spiritual seemed so far from the world I lived in and anything to do with it, that I just couldn't come to grips with this at first. I was forced to, in the end, but, I mean -
Jim al-Khalili: It means different things to different people, doesn't it.
James Lovelock: Yeah, and to me, and everybody else, too, yes.
Jim al-Khalili: Do you regret the name "Gaia", in some sense, that -
James Lovelock: No. No way.
Jim al-Khalili: - somehow it lends itself to being popularised out - way outside of science?
James Lovelock: Yeah, but look ahead to 50 years ahead, and now - I think it'll be looked at quite differently then.
Jim al-Khalili: Now being associated with such a grand idea as Gaia might lead people to think that you'd come up with it sitting in this wonderful armchair of yours, or maybe walking around in the countryside. The reality is that your life scientific really had much more gritty, down-to-earth origins, didn't it.
James Lovelock: Absolutely.
Jim al-Khalili: You worked as an apprentice.
James Lovelock: At Murray, Bull and Spencer's, yes.
Jim al-Khalili: Photographic firm...
James Lovelock: Humphrey Desmond-Murray was a good old Victorian gentleman. Rather plump - sort of Mr Pickwick look. And he was a damn good scientist. But he was a funny old man - he said "The moment you get your degree - and you've got to get a degree" - and he said "I'll pay the fees" - "but the moment you get your degree, you're sacked. I can't afford to pay graduates." And I learnt more science, I think, there than I did at university. There were so many techniques to handle.
Jim al-Khalili: Now later on you got a job as a junior scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research in north London. You say in your autobiography that you would never have got that job at the National Institute, had you not had elocution lessons.
James Lovelock: They were not anywhere near as egalitarian as they are nowadays. I was amongst some of the best scientists, medical scientists, in the country. But I feel had I had a strong Brixton accent, that would not have been the case.
Jim al-Khalili: Can you recall your strong Brixton accent?
James Lovelock: It's very difficult to go back what, about 80 years, to what I was when Hugo cured me!
Jim al-Khalili: Cured you? [Laughs].
James Lovelock: Well, call it what you like.
Jim al-Khalili: Go on. Let's see what you can do.
James Lovelock: Yes. Wo' a lo' o' little bottles.
Jim al-Khalili: Well worth the effort. Thanks, Jim. [They laugh.]
James Lovelock: Incidentally, I had a colleague, Owen Lidwell. He was a PhD from Oxford. My degree from Manchester was a bottom 2nd in chemistry. Nowadays you wouldn't even be allowed to get in through the front door of the place.
Jim al-Khalili: I don't know how apocryphal this is, but apparently you have some claim to have invented the first microwave oven.
James Lovelock: I think I probably did. We were using the oven for reviving frozen animals -
Jim al-Khalili: So may I ask why you were freezing animals?
James Lovelock: I was in the Department of Experimental Biology, at the time. Two of its members had discovered, quite accidentally, that you could keep cells alive at low temperatures, and this obviously had great potential for frozen tissues, for blood, and there was a technique for bringing them back to life. But it was typical old-fashioned science - it was very cruel. You took this frozen hamster and put a near red-hot spoon on its chest, so as to heat the heart first. But they got enormous areas of burn on their chests, and I did not like this one bit. And so I used radio-frequency heating to warm the animal, which is much better than putting hot spoons on their chests, because it heats the animal from the inside out. This worked like a dream, and it led to papers in the Royal Society, and all sorts. But I got ambitious. I thought: I don't want to play with these old-fashioned - "valves" they called them, in those days - I'd like to try a magnetron, it's a much more exciting device. So I borrowed this one from the Navy, and made what was in effect a small microwave oven.
Jim al-Khalili: Now, of course your most famous invention was the electron capture detector -
James Lovelock: Sure.
Jim al-Khalili: - an exquisitely sensitive instrument for detecting the presence of tiny, tiny amounts of chemicals in the atmosphere. You described it as a fascinating distraction with no apparent use.
James Lovelock: That's right. It was. There was no reason to invent it, or even spend time working on it. In fact, I went to Sir Charles Harrington, the director, and said "Will you mind if I spend a few weeks doing slow electron physics, rather than medical research?" He said "I don't care what you do, as long as it's good science. Do anything you like -"
Jim al-Khalili: So you had no views to what you could use it for?
James Lovelock: No, none whatever. But just imagine a civil service lab now, like that was, a civil service lab. The line manager would want to know: "Why are you taking time off to do this? It's not on the work description - "
Jim al-Khalili: And yet here's this instrument that went on to be tremendously important, used to detect CFCs in the atmosphere, which was then - the connection was made with the ozone layer. Do you feel most proud of that particular use for it?
James Lovelock: I don't feel any sort of pride. I don't rate my inventions in terms of significance or - it's just fun when you do them. The freedom at the MRC was wonderful. I loved it. I really did.
Jim al-Khalili: And yet, round about that time, round about the age of 40, you were starting to also think about moving direction. Eventually, you did end up leaving, and giving up this steady, well-paid job.
James Lovelock: Well, if you'd spent 20 years in Paradise, you can't help getting bored. There's a kind of - there must be something more - better or more interesting over that hill, and you want to climb it.
Jim al-Khalili: Here's your daughter, Christine Lovelock, reminding us about that time and the big change in your life?
Christine Lovelock: It's incredibly difficult to give up a job with a really good pension, when you're in your 40s, and you've got four children, and my youngest brother was autistic. He didn't have to do any work at all, he could have just carried on for the next 20 years and had the salary and drawn his pension. He always said it was like tramlines to the grave. I mean, he got very depressed by that. He wanted more excitement and more adventure, but - I think it took great courage, actually.
James Lovelock: Good for Chris. Now that's, that's dead spot-on, right. For several years, I'd been thinking "You know, what's going to be the outcome of working at this wonderful institute?" In many ways, I'd thought I'd probably got the best job, as a scientist, in the country. But I think it was April 1961, I came in to work one morning at Mill Hill, and lying on my desk was a letter with an American stamp on it. When I opened it I could not have been more surprised. It was a letter from the Director of Space Flight Operations at NASA. NASA was only then three years old. And to be actually invited, personally, to be a scientist on the first lunar and Mars missions. I mean - ah, couldn't turn that down. This was too good to be true.
Jim al-Khalili: What had they seen in your work? Was it your electron capture detector work?
James Lovelock: Yes, it was. You see, I had a track record, then, as an inventor of exceedingly sensitive but very small and easy to use instruments.
Jim al-Khalili: That could go on board spacecraft.
James Lovelock: Yes.
Jim al-Khalili: And this is - we're talking, this is the early '60s, and at this time, there was this idea that Mars was teeming with alien life. And the people, thinking about how we would detect life on Mars, were essentially the biologists.
James Lovelock: That's right.
Jim al-Khalili: You came to work with them, and offered a very different perspective.
James Lovelock: Totally. And they didn't like it, because it was not a biological perspective. I didn't realise it, but I'd so upset the biologists that they complained to the director. He was quite abrupt at first, when I went to see him. But then he said "What's this all about, you upsetting the biologists? NASA's paid a lot of money to hire these guys, and they're supposed to be the best biologists in the country. What are you doing?" And I said "Well, I think they're going about looking for life on Mars the wrong way."
Jim al-Khalili: So their idea was that life on Mars should be very similar to life on Earth.
James Lovelock: That's right.
Jim al-Khalili: And you're saying "Why should it be?"
James Lovelock: That - exactly. So he said "Well, what would you do?" I said immediately "Well, I'd send an experiment to look for low entropy on Mars."
Jim al-Khalili: This is a much more, sort of, physical, chemical way of doing the subject, that life does something to its environment, some evidence things haven't just been left -
James Lovelock: That's right.
Jim al-Khalili: Was this the origins of the Gaia idea?
James Lovelock: Undoubtedly, yes. And it was almost instantaneous, it was like a Eureka moment.
Jim al-Khalili: It was a single moment, that you remember -
James Lovelock: Yes, in an office I shared with Carl Sagan. And in comes an astronomer, Lou Kaplan, with a great bunch of charts from the Pic du Midi Observatory in France. And we ask Lou "What does it tell us?" and he said "Oh, it's quite simple, Mars and Venus are both almost nothing but CO2 , with just traces of other gases present. And I knew instantly that meant Mars was lifeless. And then it flashed into my mind - my god, what about the Earth? It's got this highly reactive atmosphere - what keeps it constant? And that was it -
Jim al-Khalili: And that's where it all started -
James Lovelock: - something's regulating it. I should add there that Carl Sagan immediately came and said it couldn't possibly be - you could never get the Earth regulated by the life on the surface, you know - preposterous idea. And then he said "On the other hand" - that was like Carl - he said "we astronomers know that the Sun's warming up all the time, so why on earth aren't we boiling, now?"
Jim al-Khalili: How come it's still okay now...
James Lovelock: It's still okay, and of course that was it, for me.
Jim al-Khalili: So the original ideas for Gaia weren't so much that life can influence or affect its environment and atmosphere, but the fact that gases like oxygen and methane are stable over millions of years - there must be some regulation -
James Lovelock: That's right.
Jim al-Khalili: - taking place.
James Lovelock: The thing is self-regulating. There must be feedback.
Jim al-Khalili: How were these ideas first received?
James Lovelock: The physical scientists, the meteorologists, climatologists loved it. They received it exceedingly well. The biologists just hated it. They mounted a sort of intense war against it. It was really rough. They just couldn't see it, because I think most scientists - and I think you'll agree with this - are not very good at thinking cybernetically, which is really pure mathematical physics. And if they can't get their minds into that, they don't know instinctively that Gaia's a good answer to the way the Earth regulates. It doesn't move them.
Jim al-Khalili: Was that part of the problem with Gaia, that these different scientists weren't used to applying some of their ideas in another field, and it was, sort of, an alien concept to them?
James Lovelock: It is, and it's a problem with modern science. They just don't talk to each other about their sciences. They may all be members of the same bridge club, or something like that, and they're all friends, but they don't talk about their sciences.
Jim al-Khalili: And the biologists, in particular, really wanted to see the evidence.
James Lovelock: That's what they said, but, as far as I was concerned, there was ample evidence. I would ask them: how on earth can you have a planet, have a stable atmosphere with reactive gases that react quite quickly with each other, unless something is producing them and regulating the rate of production? Otherwise it blows up.
Jim al-Khalili: And that's what's so unique about Earth's atmosphere -
James Lovelock: That's right.
Jim al-Khalili: - that has oxygen and methane in just the right amounts, that keeps it stable. Any more -
James Lovelock: That's right.
Jim al-Khalili: - and it would blow up. Well, certainly your chief collaborator, microbiologist Lynn Margulis - whom you once described as "the only biologist that took Gaia seriously" - was interviewed on the BBC science programme Horizon in 1985. And although there wasn't much evidence for Gaia back then, she was utterly confident that before too long, there'd be no shortage of evidence to support the Gaia hypothesis. Here she is:
Lynn Margulis: We have seen a phenomenon, namely the regulation of temperature, the regulation of gas composition of the lower atmosphere. We have seen that it's directly involved with surface life. Since we have not discovered or worked out all the mechanistic details - and I certainly agree that we are nowhere near having finished that job - people say "I don't believe it. You don't have a mechanism, therefore the phenomenon of regulation doesn't exist." Those people will be biting their tongues, another decade or so.
[James Lovelock laughs.]
Jim al-Khalili: That was Lynn Margulis in 1985, suggesting that there'd soon be plenty of evidence for Gaia. Well, here we are, over a quarter of a century later. How much evidence has been found?
James Lovelock: I think more than enough. I think there were 10 or more tests you can apply to the theory. And none of them were turned down as no, noes. And the majority of them have come up with quite positive yesses. So in any ordinary way in physics, a theory that did that well by now would be just almost standard fact. Not so, Gaia.
Jim al-Khalili: Just after Lynn made that statement, a particular mechanism was found, that showed how living creatures - in this case, sea algae - might regulate the temperature of the atmosphere. Was this enough to satisfy and pacify the biologists who were criticising Gaia?
James Lovelock: Not a bit. No, in fact they desperately tried to contradict it. Which, of course, is right for science.
Jim al-Khalili: And to this day, despite what you would argue, is much more evidence in support of Gaia, many evolutionary biologists, like Richard Dawkins, are critical of Gaia because they cannot see how the different species can act in coordinated fashion, so somehow work altruistically to maintain the right conditions for all life.
James Lovelock: Exactly. But -
Jim al-Khalili: It's the selfish gene, isn't it, that idea.
James Lovelock: That's right. But if you speak to Richard Dawkins, he will acknowledge that his great colleague and mentor, in many ways, was Bill Hamilton. And he did a television programme just before he died. And in it, he said he thought Gaia was a Copernican idea. Words to that effect.
Jim al-Khalili: That it was so revolutionary, it was equivalent to Copernicus's theory that -
James Lovelock: We were on the wrong track -
Jim al-Khalili: - the Earth goes round the Sun.
James Lovelock: Now whether Richard will acknow - I think he will acknowledge it, because it's on record, this television programme.
Jim al-Khalili: To what extent you think it didn't help the cause, that Gaia was taken up by the New Age movement -
James Lovelock: Of course it -
Jim al-Khalili: - it had this spiritual dimension.
James Lovelock: But of course it does. And that's inevitable. But they shouldn't use that as an excuse for rejecting it. Robert May, I think, made one of the most cogent remarks of the lot. He referred to me as the "holy fool". And I took that as a very great compliment. Because I was somebody who'd blundered into a field, and would turn out to be the saviour in the end. I'm puzzled as to why there should have been any objection to it, from square one.
Jim al-Khalili: So, for you, the issue about looking for mechanisms to prove Gaia, the evidence that Lynn Margulis was saying would soon be coming - you didn't need it, to convince -
James Lovelock: Yes, that would be the icing on the cake, yeah... Cake's real.
Jim al-Khalili: So, so - what is the problem with Gaia not being accepted?
James Lovelock: The problem is that they keep looking for evidence, as if that was important. It isn't. The whole idea is the concept. It's high-class science, all right. But it is, kind of, an undertow, at the moment, a kind of groundswell. It's not acknowledged publicly.
Jim al-Khalili: Well, whatever its status, as a scientific theory, either now or some time in the future, Gaia stresses how interconnected biological life is with the chemistry and temperature of the atmosphere. And has perhaps paved the way for much of our current understanding about many of the mechanisms behind global climate change. Certainly it's been used as a rallying cry to encourage us all to take action. And for green activist Jonathon Porritt, Gaia's unifying influence is more important than the science behind it. He's full of respect and admiration for both Gaia and you, Jim Lovelock, even though he doesn't agree with everything you've said.
James Lovelock [laughing]: I've said a lot!
Jonathon Porritt: For me, Jim is one of no more than three or four people who've had a huge impact on everything I've done, as sustainability activist. He's helped shape my world view. He's given insights into things I would never have really appreciated. I suppose, above everything else, he's reminded me of the value of independence, of cantankerous, obstinate independence. Sticking to the things that you think are right, and making those the absolute cornerstone of everything you do in life. But the fact that Jim has played that part in my life, doesn't mean to say that I agree with everything that he argues about today. For instance, I think he's completely and nearly insanely wrong about nuclear power.
James Lovelock: Well, it's a mutual difference. I think he's insanely wrong about it too, but in the opposite direction. But that doesn't stop us being friends, and having immense respect for each other. Nuclear energy provides the safest source of high-powered energy there is known on Earth, at the moment. Its record is incredible. I mean, there's been incredible fuss about this Fukushima incident. What would happen to the fields the windmills around - wind turbines around Europe if we had a Richter 9 earthquake? I think the whole lot would topple over. And quite a few people would be killed, whose houses happened to be in the way.
Jim al-Khalili: You see, I can just hear the chorus of people saying "You know, what about the effects of radiation?" This fear of cancer, and you counter that by famously having said that you would be prepared to bury all the high-level nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant produced in a year in a concrete box in your back garden, to heat your home.
James Lovelock: Exactly. I would. I worked with radioactivity since about 1950-something, and I'm in my 90s. I'm not frightened of it. I think this is the problem. An awful lot of people know nothing of science, and the danger of radioactivity has been made like - and I'm old enough to remember it - the kind of attitude an awful lot of country people had, about going to the village graveyard on a dark night. Of ghosts -
Jim al-Khalili: The fear of the unknown, something you can't see -
James Lovelock: - the fear - purely fear -
Jim al-Khalili: Certainly, I mean statements like that are bound to rile anti-nuclear campaign-
James Lovelock: Well, that's why I made it.
Jim al-Khalili: Oh, so you're being deliberately mischievous, then? [They laugh.]
James Lovelock: I always am! I think it's part of the game. To call nuclear dangerous is just damn silly. Not a soul has died from Fukushima.
Jim al-Khalili: Now, possibly even more controversially than the issue of nuclear power, and your support of it, has been your ominous pronouncements on climate change, and whether or not it's too late to do anything about it.
James Lovelock: I think it probably is. But I don't have evidence that would convince you. There's a lot of climate change deniers who are not just paid servants of the oil industry, or something like that, as they're demonised as being. They're sensible scientists. There is no great certainty about what the future is going to be, so legislation based on green pressure to say "Well, in 2050 the temperature will be so much..." and everything, is not really very good science at all. It's based on supposition. But having said that, I think they may not be far off the truth. We are moving in a direction which won't do humanity any good at all, if we just go on doing it.
Jim al-Khalili: Now, just to make it absolutely clear to me and the listeners, you know, the idea of Gaia is that the Earth self-regulates. It makes sure that things stay nice and stable for life. Here we are, puny humans pumping a few hundred parts in a million of CO2, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere, causing catastrophic - potentially catastrophic consequences to the climate.
James Lovelock: Not yet.
Jim al-Khalili: Not yet, no. But, you know, it may well happen, if we don't do something about it. But why - but why can't the planet heal itself? Why can't it absorb this change that we're doing -
James Lovelock: How do you know it won't? I think it will. But it just doesn't have the same time constant as we do. It thinks in terms of millions of years, or even hundreds of millions of years. It doesn't respond like us. You see, there was a natural event 55 million years ago, when an accident caused the release of about the same amount of CO2 in the air as we will have put in a short while. And the temperatures really zoomed. There were crocodiles swimming in the Arctic Ocean. And God knows what the rest of the Earth was like. But in a hundred million years, it's sunk bank to normal. Now that's a heck of a long time. But that's -
Jim al-Khalili: We can't wait that long.
James Lovelock: - the Gaian response.
Jim al-Khalili:: Looking back on your long career, to that point when, in your early 40s, you decided to leave the scientific establishment, as it were, do you think that has been a help or hindrance to you, in developing ideas like Gaia?
James Lovelock: No, I consider my life in science, before I left the National Institute in 1961, to have been a long, long apprenticeship. And I needed that apprenticeship to get to know all of the different sciences, and the people who worked in them. And then I was equipped and ready for a career for the rest of my life, as a trans-disciplinary scientist.
Jim al-Khalili: And scepticism that you've had towards Gaia. Do you think that was a price partly paid for the decision that you made, in your 40s, to become an independent thinker, outside of the traditional scientific community?
James Lovelock: I know it sounds the oddest thing to do, but believe me - and for anybody out there who's thinking of doing it - it's the most wonderful thing to do. And I keep on saying that scientists are just like artists, if they're creative. And would you, if you were an artist, want to spend your life in an institute for fine art, quibbling with other academics about the different styles of painting? You'd rather be in your garret, doing your masterpiece, and selling a lot of gewgaws in some tourist place to pay the way. And I mean that's been my life as a scientist.
Jim al-Khalili: Imagining yourself as an artist, what would you say has been your greatest masterpiece? Will it be the electron capture detector? That early microwave oven? Or would it be Gaia?
James Lovelock: Gaia, every time. It's given me enormous satisfaction. I think it's right. So why should I regret anything? And much more than that, at 93, which I'll be in July, I can look forward to the future.
Jim al-Khalili: Jim Lovelock, thank you very much. It's been a privilege to visit you in your wonderful home here in Devon, and to find out about your life scientific.
James Lovelock: Oh and thank you, all of you. It's been a wonderful experience.