The books read at my family home at Orpington tended to be political: Gollancz’s famous Left Book Club made up many of them, with their characteristic yellow jackets and black print which stood out like grounded wasps on our bookshelves. I was well versed in the socialist litany and swallowed without qualm books like Edgar Snow’s Long March and, of course, anything good about the Soviet Union. Even the novels at home tended to be political, like Cronin’s famous book, The Citadel. It was only after working for several years for the Medical Research Council, target of much of Cronin’s diatribe, that I realized that things were not so simple as portrayed in his book. Shaw was my mother’s bible and prayer book combined. My grandmother happily was less intellectual. She would walk at least twice a week the mile or so downhill towards Orpington High Street to visit the Penny Library. She borrowed what she called her ‘little bit of love’, what she read were the Mills and Boon books of her day. The Delahuntys gave me the other side of literature, not the political other side but the reading for pleasure rather than for instruction. Mary opened my mind with Yeats and such craftsmen of literature as CE Montague, and such light-hearted books as the Penguin Weekend Book and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. I think that, by taking in this and missing much of Todd’s expertise in the specialist branch of chemistry, I lost little. So few scientists are able to express their science in a readable and interesting way, and I owe the Delahuntys a debt for opening my mind to literature. More than this was the way that they gently plucked away the prickles and thorns of a childhood in the wild.
One Sunday morning Mary’s mother, Helen, insisted on coming with me to the Friends Meeting House. Instead of walking, as was my usual way, we took the tram to the centre of Manchester. The Meeting House was an imposing building with a large central hall, containing pews arranged in a square several rows deep. The Manchester Friends were good speakers and when moved by their internal voice of conscience would rise and give forth, sometimes for as long as twenty minutes, an amazingly coherent and relevant comment on some contemporary affair. I was envious of their ability to speak so well and was never able to get up and contribute myself. It was not until many years later that I discovered that such extemporary speaking needs a lot of prior preparation. After the meeting Mrs Delahunty was grateful and revealed how she had always wanted to experience a religious service other than in a Catholic church. She expressed the wish that her own priest would talk even half as much on interesting topics as those that she had just heard. It was not fair, though, to compare the capacity to entertain of the elite of the Society of Friends in Manchester with that of a humble parish priest.
In 1941 Mary’s mother asked me what might happen now that Germany was at war with the Soviet Union. I replied, ‘It is wonderful news for us. There will be a lot less bombing, as they will need their planes for the Russian campaign. War with Russia defeated Napoleon; perhaps it will be Hitler’s ending also.’
I have wondered how I passed my degree examination and, still more, why Professor Todd should have recommended me for employment at the National Institute for Medical Research. It was an institute run by his father-in-law, Sir Henry Dale, at that time President of the Royal Society, and one of the most distinguished labs in the country. Did he see in me a good chemist who had done poorly in examinations because of privations or did he see me as a superb technician? Professor Todd was the best of professors—an outstanding, active scientist, yet one who cared for his students. He would appear suddenly in the teaching lab and move around the benches like the hospital consultant visiting the beds of his patients. When he came to me, our conversation was never about chemistry, always about politics or the war. I remember him coming in one morning carrying a frown of considerable disapproval on his face. He towered above me. ‘Lovelock,’ he said, ‘is it true that you’re a conscientious objector?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m a Quaker.’ His prepared lecture, no doubt intended to bring me to my senses, crashed before it had even flown. I think he saw conscientious objectors as the cowardly who used a legal loophole to escape fighting for their country. But in his mind also was a belief that Quakers were brave dissidents who had odd views but which were acceptable and civilized. The conversation began again, Todd now in his lively role trying to flesh out the curiosity, ‘What do Quakers really think?’ asked he. Students rarely ever realize that such encounters are the real examinations. Todd had little respect for set examinations and said that he would not ask questions at the examination on anything in his class lectures. I think he saw the degree examinations as a mere formality. My rapid passage through the maze of set analyses may not have passed unnoticed.
It is good to have a short spell as a student, but I found my eighteen months at Manchester enough. The thought of the seven-year stints to a medical degree or a PhD, which are now the lot of the average student, appals me. For those aiming towards an expert profession like medicine or law, I suppose it is not so much of a problem, and better than employment in a factory or an office, but for the creative, it is a cruelty. It is, from the nation’s point of view, a near criminal loss of their skills. For me the mix of daytime employment as an apprentice and evening class study was ideal. Full-time study at a university certainly supplied my social needs but, apart from the job recommendation, added little to my capacity as a scientist.
Near the end of my time at Manchester University, local firms invited students to apply for jobs. This nearly always meant a free lunch, so of course we went willingly. Professor Todd, as ever solicitous of his students’ welfare, insisted that we take no employment offering less than £300 per year. Inflation adjusted, I think this corresponds to something approaching £20,000 to £25,000 a year now. Among the firms offering jobs were ICI, Thomas Hedley—a branch of Proctor & Gamble—and British Celanese. I took the tram to the factory of Thomas Hedley in West Manchester to arrive there at 9.30 am, and along with other students we went to a room full of desks. They gave us the thick books of a psychological profile test with multiple-choice questions. Compared with the university examination in those days it was an easy task with which to earn a lunch. The questions took an hour to complete, and then we toured the plant in groups of one or two and were quizzed about our interests and why we wanted to work for the firm. It was so different from the casual interview that one had with a British firm; at these a small panel, rarely more than three people, judged the applicants by their accent, demeanour, vitality and so on. Two weeks later, they invited me back to the plant and told me that the tests confirmed their personal decision to offer me a job. I was amazed. It was not what I had been expecting. As a young idealist and socialist, I was full of the dogmas that work for an industrial firm was a form of slavery: a bondage where I would be obliged to sell my talents for a pittance while they made profits from them. In truth, they were offering a well-paid industrial job doing a skilled necessary task. My disdain, though, was increased by the thought that it was also unexciting science. As a southern Englishman, I was by culture polite, whatever were my inner thoughts, much as the Japanese are now. Before I could say diplomatically that I had prospects elsewhere to consider, they added that their tests showed that I was an ideal choice for employment in marketing. They also said to me that the same test showed that I was quite unsuited to scientific research. This incredible news gave me an honourable exit, for I truly wished to do nothing but science. I had certainly not come this far to be diverted into a purely capitalist occupation: marketing. Many years later, in 1959, the American Company, Proctor & Gamble, that owned Thomas Hedley, invited me to their headquarters in Cincinnati to give a lecture on lipid biochemistry. It was in their Distinguished Scientists series of lectures. The story of my encounter in Manchester gave me just the opening I needed. It received a good and cheery laugh from the audience, who had their own experiences of psychological profile testing. I still sometimes wonder, though, if Proctor & Gamble were right. Maybe I have wasted my life in the wrong job. Perhaps if I had become a marketeer, Proctor & Gamble might
now rule over more than the world of soaps and detergents.
3
Twenty Years of Medical Research
The second stage of my apprenticeship began one morning in June 1941, when they called me to the student office and asked if I would be interested in a job working for the Medical Research Council in London. This seemed much more to my liking. It was research and it was medicine, something needed but posed no conflict for me as a conscientious objector. In a few days, I received a letter from Robert Bourdillon of the National Institute for Medical Research at Hampstead (NIMR) in North London, an Institute established by the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the 1920s. The MRC was an unusual governmental body in that it was responsible directly to the Crown through the Privy Council. This gave it an independence from political meddling and, more importantly, from the Treasury.
I travelled down to London for the strangest interview yet. The National Institute was at that time housed in a disused hospital on the top of Holly Hill in Hampstead. It was a pleasant, warm, red-brick edifice with the Victorian embellishments of towers and turrets and sited in its own spacious, shrubby grounds. It even had a croquet lawn where we played in the summer after lunch, and tennis courts. I went in at the sandbagged front entrance and announced myself. Helen Hyslop, who was then receptionist, telephoned Dr Bourdillon and asked me to wait. While I waited the few minutes before entering the Institute, I had no thoughts for the girl there, yet in less than two years we were to be married. Robert Bourdillon appeared: a tall lean man in his late forties, with an angular face and a warm smile. ‘Come along with me,’ he said, and we went to his office in one of the Gothic turrets at the south end of the building. He started by saying that Professor Todd, the Institute director’s son-in-law, had recommended me for the job. He then told me about the work that he was doing to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. He and the authorities were much concerned that under wartime conditions, an influenza epidemic like the one in 1918 could occur again. It could be devastating if it happened in the packed conditions of the air-raid shelters. He and his colleague, Owen Lidwell, were trying to combat this threat by devising barriers to the spread of airborne infections. Did I think I could contribute to this work? I replied, ‘I’d love to try’ Then he started to ask questions about me. He was obviously worried about my conscientious objection. He had himself fought in the First World War as a pilot and was decorated for his bravery. He tried the usual impossible-to-answer questions such as ‘What would you do if a German soldier entered your house and tried to rape your mother?’ The standard pacifist reply to this one was ‘anything I could do to stop it happening’. As always this line of questioning reveals little and he went on to ask me what were my hobbies. When I said mountaineering, his face, which was marvellously expressive, lost its look of concerned irritation and expanded into reminiscent delight. ‘Where do you climb?’ he asked. ‘Wales and the Lake District, and sometimes Derbyshire.’ ‘Have you climbed the Idwal Slabs?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I never got far up the Holly Tree Wall.’ He knew that those are moderate and difficult climbs respectively. He quizzed me about the details of them and when I had satisfied him, it was clear that the test was over. He had, I think, been worried that conscientious objectors were cowardly people, rather than those with awkward principles. You could not be a coward and a rock climber, not for long that is.
We then went to the lab where I met Owen Lidwell, and found him to be an Oxford physical chemist with a DPhil. He looked like a young farmer, but I came to know him as a talented scientist and mathematician. He showed me the equipment they were using, nearly all of it made in their workshop on the same floor. There was an ingenious device for collecting and counting the number of bacteria in the air. They called it a slit sampler because it drew air rapidly through a slit, which impinged the bacteria onto an agar culture plate that rotated slowly under the slit. It recorded the bacterial abundance of the air as it varied with time just as does a CD writer, or a tape recorder, record sounds. In another part of the room there was a giant photographic flash tube several feet long, which when discharged could illuminate the droplets of a sneeze. Owen Lidwell told me that he was having problems with the accurate measurement of air pressures. The rate of flow of air in their slit sampler depended on the pressure difference across the slit. He used a water manometer to indicate the air pressure, and the column of water was in a narrow glass tube, about twelve inches long. The water tended to stick to the walls of the glass tube making accurate measurements difficult. I remember suggesting to him that he try adding a little of the surfactant, Aerosol OT, to the water, something I had learnt in my apprenticeship but which is almost never taught at a university. It worked, of course, and made my welcome that much warmer.
Robert Bourdillon then took me to see Christopher Andrewes, head of the Virus Division, for whom I should have to work as well, and we then went to the Director of the Institute, Sir Henry Dale. Dale was a Churchillian character, bluff and direct. He challenged me straight away about my conscientious objection saying, ‘This is a government institute and you may be directed to do work that conflicts with your conscientious objection. What would you do about that?’ I remember replying that I recognized that life in wartime involved everyone and that I had to make fine distinctions about behaviour at the time and on its merits. I saw no reason, I said, from talking with Dr Bourdillon to expect any conflict over what he expected of me. Having, like Bourdillon, applied what he considered a test of integrity, he then moved on to tell me about the Institute and its structure. It was, for its time, a wonderfully democratic place, in the Greek sense, that is. If you were a member of the scientific staff, which is what I would shortly be, there was a great deal of freedom to do whatever seemed right scientifically. Technicians and office staff, on the other hand, were treated like other ranks and were there to do what they were told. We were the officer class and expected to show initiative. I realized that the job was mine when Sir Henry Dale asked abruptly, ‘Can you start on Monday?’ And so began the final twenty years of my apprenticeship as a scientist.
‘Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, trap the germs in your handkerchiefs.’ These words were on posters everywhere in the UK and their message showed the flash photograph of a cloud of fine particles coming from a sneeze. The photographs were taken in the Hampstead lab, and they illustrated the nature of our work. We wanted to know what organisms were floating in the air that Londoners breathed. Using Bourdillon and Lidwell’s slit sampler, I was soon collecting airborne micro-organisms in the London air. I remember using the sampler in a hospital ward and recording the effects of bedmaking and the shaking of blankets. It was scary sometimes to find that the blanket shaking had released billions of such pathogenic organisms as haemolytic streptococci into the air, the air that I, as an experimenter, had been breathing. One of the many places I took the slit sampler to do measurements was a deep underground shelter. It was an old disused tube tunnel near London Bridge and on the south side of the River Thames. It was about half a mile long and had been fitted with lights and two-tier bunks, and housed tens of thousands during the bombing. The air in the shelter was foul to breathe but, as with all bad smells, after a few minutes’ exposure, the nose adjusted and it became at least bearable. They told me that during the height of the Blitz in 1941, the air in this tunnel was so bad that a cigarette would not burn. A match would strike but the wooden shank of the match went out. I now know that this meant that the oxygen in the air was lower than thirteen to fifteen per cent, although more than ten per cent, otherwise some of the inhabitants would have died. It is odd that combustion is more sensitive to oxygen deprivation than we are. The shelter seemed to be just the place where epidemics could start and spread.
There was reason behind the fear among my medical colleagues of an influenza epidemic. The one in 1918 killed over seven million people, more than the number of casualties of the First World War. I would spend nights in this mephitic place sampling the air. The in
habitants, working-class Londoners, tolerated me and even drew me into their strange lives. Here was my first experience of birth. A young pregnant woman went into labour one night and the well-qualified nurse from the first-aid rooms built into the tunnel came to her assistance. When someone asked, ‘Where’s the father?’, the young woman replied, ‘I don’t know anything about a father; it was just a come and go in the shelter.’ I cannot remember whether this event was the stimulant but soon I found myself coming and going, in between sampling, with a warm and passionate nurse from Guy’s Hospital. We made love behind the locked doors of the first-aid room. It was an exciting but exhausting life. I rarely ever seemed to find time to sleep. I counted and recorded the samples from the night’s work after twenty-four hours’ incubation in the Institute’s hot rooms. These were large rooms kept at 37°C, with shelves on which were spread the culture plates. There always seemed to be plates that needed counting immediately. Fortunately, it soon became apparent that, bad though the air in the shelter was, the inhabitants were incredibly healthy.
Homage to Gaia Page 11