The Light Paper

James Ephraim Lovelock was born into a Quaker family in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire on July 26 1919. His mother was a fervent suffragette who believed in smoking as a gesture demonstrating the equality of women. She encouraged her son to smoke, a habit he later blamed for recurrent health problems. The family moved to Brixton and he went to the Strand School, but he struggled with dyslexia and felt socially isolated for much of his childhood.

He left school early and took a job as a lab assistant while studying for his A-levels in the evenings. When war came, he was studying for a chemistry degree at Birkbeck College. He became a conscientious objector, finished his degree at Manchester University in 1941, then started working for the National Institute for Medical Research where he remained until 1961.

By 1943 he was no longer a pacifist, but in the event, he was turned down for the armed services because his work was too valuable. In 1948 he received a doctorate in medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in 1959 another doctorate in biophysics from London University. Between 1946 and 1951 he worked at the Common Cold Research Unit at Harvard Hospital in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

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Lovelock’s research led him to file more than 50 patents, most notably for the electron capture detector, invented in 1957, the device which virtually launched the environmental movement. With it, Lovelock conducted some of the earliest studies of CFCs and suggested how sulphur from marine algae circulated worldwide and played a part in cloud formation.

Its use also led to the discovery by other scientists of the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues in the natural environment, work which inspired Rachel Carson to write The Silent Spring, the bible of the early “Green” movement. More recently, the detector has enabled meteorologists to follow the movement of air masses across continents and is also used in ocean research.

Although Lovelock became a hero to many in the environmental movement, the admiration was not reciprocated. He regarded the movement as a “potent force preventing environmental reforms”, because many of its claims about, for example, the dangers of nuclear power, were based on dubious scientific evidence.

Lovelock resigned from the National Institute in London in 1961 to take up the job with Nasa and became Professor of Chemistry at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. After returning to Britain from America in 1964, he operated as an independent scientist, working in a converted barn near Launceston, Cornwall.

He was a visiting professor, first at the University of Houston and then at the University of Reading. From 1986 to 1990 he was president of the Marine Biological Association.

In his later work, Lovelock developed his Daisyworld programme to investigate why it is earth has a profusion of life forms. After showing on his computer how daisies could regulate temperature, he then introduced rabbits to graze on them, foxes to eat the rabbits and so on.

He found that, although the various populations of creatures risked lurching from boom to bust, because of the way they interacted with one another, they did not do so; the populations remained stable. In another experiment, he populated Daisyworld with 50 different kinds of daisies each reflecting the Sun’s heat to a different degree, then increased the heat of the sun.

The stress produced a brief spurt in diversity as other daisies proliferated. This led him to suggest that when the earth warmed a couple of degrees after the ice ages, the rich diversity now found in the tropics was the result.

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A slender figure, with glasses, wavy grey hair and a quizzical expression, Lovelock had flirted with Communism in his youth, but in later life became a fan of Mrs Thatcher, after she appeared to embrace his theory in her first major speech on environmental issues.

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