Instant Genius - What can the father of Gaia theory tell us about our future? - James Lovelock

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

This week on the Science Focus Podcast, we spend some time with James Lovelock – the visionary scientist and environmental thinker who this month turns 100 years old. James Lovelock is best known as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that our planet and all the life on it functions as a single self-regulating organism. Less well known is that he also developed scientific instruments for NASA missions to Mars; he invented the electron capture detector, with which he became the first person to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere; and he even carried out influential work in cryopreservation, bringing frozen hamsters back to life. James Lloyd, staff writer at BBC Science Focus, visited Lovelock at his Dorset home to look back at his life and achievements. If you like what you hear, then please rate, review, and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. You can also subscribe and leave us a review on your favourite podcast apps. Also, if there is anybody you’d like us to speak to, or a topic you want us to cover, then let us know on Twitter at @sciencefocus. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: How can we save our planet? – Sir David Attenborough Why is Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific legacy so often overlooked? - Martin Clayton There is no Plan B for planet Earth – Lord Martin Rees Could leaving nature to its own devices be the key to meeting the UK’s climate goals? – Mark Lynas Are we facing an insect apocalypse? – Brad Lister Air pollution is killing us, here's how you can stop it – Gary Fuller Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It was almost like the first really positive love letter. That was a letter from the director of spaceflight operations of NASA in only two years after they'd been founded. And would I come and join them in their explorations of the moon and Mars? Well, having read science fiction as a kid, I mean, this is a lot like a bolt from the blue. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly,

available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. We'll look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. This week, we spend some time with James. James Lovelock, the visionary scientist and environmental thinker, who this month turns 100 years old. James Lovelock is best known as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that our planet

and all the life on it functions as a single self-regulating organism. Less well known is that he also developed scientific instruments for NASA missions to Mars. He invented the electron capture detector, with which he became the first person to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere, and he even carried. our influential work on cryo-preservation, bringing frozen hamsters back to life. James Lloyd, staff writer at BBC Science Focus, visited Lovelock and his Dorset home to look back at his life and his achievements. I was also wondering, you've worked in so many different areas of science over your career,

being in medicine, biology, geoscience. Looking back, which of your achievements would you say you're most proud of? Oh, heavens. I don't know. I've never really thought about it. I'm really much more of an engineers than a scientist. The scientist I admired most of all, had in mind as a model, was Faraday, of course. He was illiterate and in numerous, to a large extent, and yet look back at what he did. So I think, no, I've been very lucky.

I've had it. The world has been changing in such a way that questions have arisen all the time that could be answered, the solutions could be given. And I've been lucky enough to have the answers for them. I mean, World War II was a typical example of this. They just raised questions at a rate that we haven't seen before or since. I was wondering, what were you involved in in World War II? Were you in Britain at the time?

I was in Britain all the time. I was a student at first. I was very fortunate. My parents were quite poor and my father was retired about it because I was the late product of his. And so they had very little money. I couldn't go to university, not because they couldn't afford to send me, but because there wouldn't be the money coming in to support the family, which was the normal working class thing in those days.

And so I had to get a job, and I was lucky enough to get a job with the firm of consultants in London, who were consultants as the photographic industry. And they covered the whole damfield from lenses right the way down to the synthesis of colour dyes and whatnot. And I learned an immense amount of science right across the field. Not just science, it was engineering, making things, solving problems, and realizing how important it was to do it properly and be accurate, because you can't give fake results to a customer.

It just wouldn't do. And that was a lesson that I think has been with me all my life and has been very valuable. Then when the war started, they shut down Birkbeck College, which I was attending as an evening class student. And I was lucky enough to get a place at Manchester and went and took chemistry. for a year and a half. And at the end of that time, I was, of course, we were deep in the war, and there's a question of you.

I would ordinarily have had to have joined up. But I was brought up a Quaker, and it was almost a duty to be a conscientious objector, which I did. And they gave me unconditional exemption, so I could do what I like. And it turned out there was a job going at the National Institute for Medical Research,

at Hampstead in London. And that was, I was lucky because I was taken on there. And the director was the president of the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale. And its standard was exceedingly high. And I mean, it's as good as going to Oxford or Cambridge in these times. And I learned an awful lot there. And as the director said when I joined, he said, my boy, he said, don't expect to do any science here. So the war started.

It's all ad hoc problems to be solved preferably yesterday. And so it wasn't. I loved it. And you mentioned there that you've brought up a Quaker. Do you think that's had an impact on your worldview and how you think about your science, how you think about the environment? I think so, yes, perhaps. because the Quaker Sunday school that my parents sent me to and I was a child in Brixton, in South London, and it's quite extraordinary because they didn't teach theology. They taught cosmology in the Sunday school. And so that sort of reinforced my interest in science generally. And you talk about being an independent scientist in a way.

You've been largely free to do your own thing. Yeah. Do you feel quite fortunate to have had the chance to have had that freedom? If you do your own thing and only earn a small amount of money, you can do any science you like. You don't need a lot of money to do science. You don't need ultra-microscopes and whatnot. You can usually find in practice you can borrow time on one of them or things like that. So, no, I would recommend any youngster who wants to do science or engineering to consider doing it on this own rather than being taught.

Why is that beneficial? Does it give more freedom, essentially? It's not just the freedom. It's so you have to think. and find the right answer. Whereas all you do at a university is learn how to pass exams and give the right answers. Because it's practical.

The employers really want to select youngsters who are intelligent enough for the kind of jobs they'll have. They don't give a damn about what they were taught. so you're wasting maybe two or three years and you said earlier that you think of yourself almost more as an engineer than a scientist so for your career obviously you've been involved in a lot of while you're an inventor essentially you invent things

well I'll give you an example one of the biggest surprises I had in my life it was almost like a first really positive love letter that was a letter from the director of spaceflight operations of NASA only two years after they'd been founded and would I come and join them in their explorations of the moon and Mars?

Well, having read science fiction as a kid, I mean, this is like a bolt from the blue. And I dropped my permanent civil service job with the MRC and shot off to California like a rocket. So it's like the 1950s then? Yes, the end of the 1950s. Yes. And they wanted me, not because I was clever,

or because anything like that, but because I'd invented detector devices that were quite small, and a few centuries long, used virtually zero power and would detect all the kind of life's characteristics substances they were interested in that might potentially be on the surface of Mars, Mars or Moon. And it was this, there's this kind of engineering stuff that they wanted me for.

They couldn't give a damn about the science. So what were you involved in then when you went over to California? What were you doing for NASA? Well, I've got two bits of hardware on Mars that were on the Viking. Okay. And what's the job of these instruments then? Is it looking for? to analyse the atmosphere and surface Mars. And what have they found, or what are they not found? This is not a very suitable place for life. So you're quite, you don't think that humans are going to Mars, is that right?

You don't think Mars makes a very good place for humans to move to? I think they're mad, completely. It's absolutely crazy. I mean, we've got a beautiful planet here, absolutely beautiful. And with far less effort, we could treat that better and make it desirable to live in. Whereas Mars is a monumental effort to shift stuff there and make it fit for life. If you ever could. So do you think all the missions to Mars, like the rovers were seeing like curiosity, for example, and the orbiters.

Do you think they're a waste of time or do you think they are still useful? Worse than a waste of time. I think it's absolutely disgraceful, and you should appreciate this. We know now more about the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. And if we're concerned with the climate of the Earth and its future, it's much more important to know about our ocean than it is about the surface of Mars. So if you have this as a thought experiment,

but say you were given, let's say, a billion dollars, maybe more to spend on any area of science, where would you spend your money? I wouldn't. I wouldn't accept it in the first place. I wouldn't want it if it would tie me down. You'd be surrounded by thousands of bureaucrats and people who knew exactly how you should spend it. That's true, yeah.

There'd be a lot of paperwork. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole if they offered it. No, you do it only by yourself. Somebody comes to you and says, how would you? Well, in fact, they did. one of my first experiences at Jet Propulsion Labs was go along and see the biological experiments that were being proposed to send to Mars

and there were a whole bunch of biologists and they solemnly went out into the Mojave Desert and collected various forms of life to see if they could demonstrate its presence there. Well, this was assuming that life on Mars was the same as a little just because of both deserts. And I thought, this is madness. And it so happened.

I read Schrodinger's book, What Is Life? I don't know whether you know it's a lovely little book. And so I went to see the boss who had called me and threatening to take my job away because I was so upsetting the biologist. But I took Schrodinger and said, what we should do is look for an entropy reduction. somehow on Mars, not look for life. So why would that show that life?

So he said, how would you do it? He said, it's very well talking about an entropy reduction, but that's very theoretical, you know, something practical. So you've got until Friday to come with an answer. And I went back and I thought, well, that's the end of this job. But it wasn't because when I came back on Friday, I said, it's dead easy. All you have to do is measure the composition.

of the atmosphere of Mars. And if there are, the atmosphere is made of gases that react with one and reduce energy, then you sure as hell its entropy is lower than it would be if it were just a random collection of odds and ends. And then that would be a sign that life was... And it's a simple experiment to do. And sure enough, it's the way to do it. And I said, look at the earth.

And he's got an atmosphere with methane and oxygen. mixed. There's not any of that you can do the same as the surface, see if the surface reacts with the atmosphere or not. And is that what your instruments on Mars are doing then? That's what they were sent to do. Yeah. And they so far have found that there aren't these reactive gases,

or there isn't this reaction going on? Yeah, they didn't find it. Another thing I was going to ask you about is talking about your inventions was the electron capture detector? It's a different story. I'll tell it, and you can can it or not. At the time, before this Mars letter came, I was working in the biology department of the MRC

on freezing animals and bringing them back to life again. In fact, we succeeded that. Nobody seems to know it, but we actually froze hamsters and brought them back until they were like blocks of blocks of wood. And they brought back to life again. What were you trying to find out by doing this? Don't ask me, it's all part of medicine.

I mean, there would be reasons for freezing a part of somebody and then reviving it. It's kind of cryogenics, I suppose. It's all good technique in medicine. That was, I think, the prime reason. But I was doing this, and it turned out that one of the important things with resistance to low-temperters and freezing is the degree of saturation of the fatty acids that compose the lipids of the animal or whatnot. The more unsaturated the hour, the more resistant the thing is to freezing. It's just a matter of melting point. The lower the melting point.

If you've got fat in your tissues, what you don't want is it goes solid. It's not going to help. And anyway, I was working on this. And I wanted to know the composition of the fatty acids. And Archer Martin had just invented the gas chromatograph. And this was, of course, an instrument that you could analyze things like unsaturated fatty acids. So I ran up to his lab, which was just one floor above me, and said, do you think you could analyze this sample of fatty acids for me? And he looked and said, because we'd love to analyze it.

He said, but there's not a hope in hell. He said, I said, why not? He said, it's too little. you've got to bring about a hundred times as much. Our instrument isn't that sensitive. And then he looked at me and grinned and said, of course you could invent a better than sensitive detector for us. That stirred the engineer.

Oh, hell with it. It was a problem. And it was a wonderful institute. The director, Sir Charles Harrington, said, I went to him and said, do you mind if I take a few weeks off and work helping Archie Martin. It's mainly work on the physics of slow electrons.

He said, I don't get the damn what you do, as long as it's good science. And that's the sort of boss you really need. And so I invented that thing, and it was by far the most sensitive detector in existence. It was so sensitive that if you tiptoe for a pint bottle of a perfluoricotin in this room now, you could pick it up in Japan a week later in the atmosphere. And it was used in America on a grand scale to see what would happen if there was an H-bomb explosion on the West Coast. They were able to release per fluorocon and the atmosphere. and traced it all the way across the continent.

So I was going to ask you, would you be able to, I'm sure you get asked this question a lot, but would you be able to explain Gaia theory to someone who's, if someone hadn't come across it before, how would you explain it? So how would I explain Gaia theory? It sees the earth as a system made up

of all living things, all the rocks, all the atmosphere, all of the ocean and all of living things I've mentioned that. And these interact together to sustain a state that keeps the living part of it surviving. It has to. If the living part dies, then so does the whole darn system then goes back. it'll become another rocky planet, like the ones that we have already,

Mercury on outwards. Yeah. And that is the thing that's remarkable about it. There are many remarkable things about the Earth that make you ask the question, how can this happen? I mean, one of them is that if you measure the effective temperature of the Earth from space, it's considerably high than that of Venus

which is very surprising which is very surprising and the reason being it's pumped down conduct side to a point where the radiation outwards is quite quite great and that gets rid of the excess heat

and it helps cool the whole planet and that's a fairly remarkable stage of affairs to happen it couldn't happen by accident At least one can't conceive of it happening by it. That's one of many, many attributes of the earth that suggests that it is nothing. But there is no, I don't think there's anything

that would constitute a proof in. There's no equation as such for it. That's right. Yeah. Do humans play a role in the guidelines, Could Gaia theory exist without the presence of us, without the presence of humans? Oh yeah. Do we play about it? Well, obviously we're playing a huge part now with climate change. And then trying to change the climate so it's to stop it getting too hot.

Stop the earth's getting too hot. That's terribly important because we're at a very dodgy edge now as I think it was Sir John Horton who first raised the point. If the seed temperature rose about 47, the earth would rapidly go on to what Hansen refers to as the Venus Express. The water would evaporate from the ocean to the point where the loss of heat of space was hampered by the greenhouse effect of water vapor to an extent that there's nothing to stop it just rising indefinitely. Right. But indefinitely, I mean, lifting it up to super-futable. critical speed, which will then dissolve rocks. And when that happens, the magma becomes continuous with the atmosphere. And it doesn't last much longer than that before becoming a planet like Venus. So do you think climate change is the greatest threat then to humanity? Indeed,

yes. Yes. And to the existence of a rocky, of a, sorry, a living planet like this. have you had a lot of opposition to Gaia theory over the years? Have you found a lot of resistance in the scientific community? Particularly in America. Why do you think that is? What's the main kind of line of? Well, I think the university ethos is still built on Aristotelian thinking in a cause and effect. And you just cannot make models.

of that type on such a basis. Right. And the clash is too big. So they say, oh, no, we don't want this. So there's no proof for your theory, essentially. There's not like a lot of areas of science where you can get a definitive proof. Yes.

And do you think the name had any impact in how it was perceived at all? Well, it wasn't mine. Yeah, where did the name come from, Gaia? Truthly enough, it came from a physicist. All right. And that was Bill Golding, the author. Oh, okay.

He happened to be a neighbor of mine in a village in Wiltshire where we both lived. And he was very interested in my trips to JPL and wanted to know what's going on. When I came back and I said, he's got this theory about it. He said, you're going to come out with a theory like that. You better give it a good name. So I said, well, what would you say? Well, what would you suggest? He said Gaia, the Greek name for the earth.

So that's how it got its name. It wasn't me. It was Bill Golding. And he was a Nobel Prize winning author. That's the author of Lord the Flies? Yes. Is that right? Yeah.

Do you regret calling it Gaia now? Would you? No. No. If you could go back in time, you wouldn't change its name. I don't worry me one bit. We're living here. We're very happy.

Why regret anything like that? You're set to turn 100 in July. Obviously, you must have seen so many changes to the world and to the way we live during that time. Do you view the rapid progression of our species as a good thing? Obviously, technology, for example, seems to be developing at such a fast pace. I was wondering, from your environmental perspective,

Do you see this development as a positive thing? I've never actually compared the rate of progress of humans in terms of things they can achieve and do and whatnot as a species with past life. I'm not so sure that we are the fastest. The change from life, before there were the present multisolular organisms that have prokaryotes and eukaryotes combined with the advantages of both.

It was a gigantic step. And that was the larger one than this. Now that took place about 700 million years ago. How do you feel about the future of our planet? Are you optimistic about, from a human point of view, I guess, are you optimistic about the direction we're going in? I'm a bit worried. I've got a lot of grandchildren, great grandchildren come to that.

Yes, I think it could be very dodgy in the intervening periods. And what would you like to see happen in order to help? I don't think anything I would like to see. happen, it's going to happen, it'll just happen. Do you think it'll come from politics or science or somewhere else? I think it'll come from outside the earth. I mean, for example, or within the earth,

at the moment there is a gigantic volcano emerging in the Pacific. You probably know about this. And its potential, if it expands a good bit further, to change the climate absolutely drastically and in a way that could be fatal to an awful lot of us. So that is more than enough to worry about without predictions based on what we're doing with cars and diesel engines and so on.

I was also going to ask, we've talked a lot about the things you've done in your career, it's about Gaia theory, your inventions. Looking forward, what do you hope your legacy will be? What do you hope that people will... There's no work to do. I've got another book to write. That was James Lovelock, talking about his life and career.

His new book, Novesine, is out now, and you can read an accompanying interview exploring the themes of his book in the summer issue of BBC Science Focus, which is out on the 17th of July. In the meantime, if you're after more mind-expatting knowledge that even centenarian scientists would be amazed by, the current issue of BBC Science Focus

is packed full of features, news and interviews to help you make sense of the world around you. In the latest issue, we explore the lives of the Technicolor dinosaurs, meet the scientist who wants to redefine masculinity, and find out the truth about CBD oil. And just one more thing, we now have more than 75 episodes of the Science Focus podcast, each of which is well worth a listen. So why don't you go back and listen to a few?

We think you really enjoy them, so be sure to let us know what you think in the comments and reviews. It really helps us get the show out there. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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