Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  Hampstead is hilly and anyone living as far down the hill as we did in Gayton Crescent enjoyed aerobic exercise walking up the narrow steep streets to the Institute. One of the joys of wartime was the absence of cars. All streets were pedestrian precincts and life conformed to this pattern. It was not so easy, though, on dark moonless nights as I stumbled my way upward to my weekly firewatch duty at the Institute, where all staff were required to spend one night a week. Our main task was to be ready to extinguish the small but numerous incendiary devices dropped by German aircraft. When off watch, we slept in a room on the ground floor, which had about eight bunks in it. On watch, we either patrolled the building or spent time on an upper balcony looking south towards central London. There was a button on this balcony connected to the fire alarms of the building. It was on firewatch duty here that I enjoyed some of the most valuable teaching of my apprenticeship. Old and senior scientists did their firewatch duty, and when bombs or missiles came close by, they would in their relief afterwards turn to me and do what I can only call a brain dump. Taciturn, uncommunicative scientists in their post-fear relief would start talking to me as if I were a combination of an old friend and a father confessor. They seemed to feel a need to pass on the secrets of their scientific craft to the nearest young scientist. Once a VI flying bomb passed by so close that I could see the rivets that held it together. It passed on and I was vastly relieved. Just being there on the balcony was enough; in the aftermath my distinguished companion told me those essential parts of his scientific life, and it was those revelations that prepared me for a life as a cross-disciplinary scientist.

  One of these famous older scientists was the eminent bacteriologist, Bruce White. He was a rotund and cheerful man who, when elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, said his ambition was to retire and open a pub called The Jolly FRS. He had a room in the basement where he would often sleep and eat. He invited me to dinner one night and said to me as I sat down, ‘Do not cross the white line on the floor—on the other side of the line anything you touch may carry typhoid organisms.’ He added as an afterthought, ‘Of course, the flies won’t obey the rule.’ I never knew to what extent he was joking, but my skin itched as we ate. He was a model for me of the lone scientist, one who, like the artist or the novelist, does his creative work best alone. Because of his unusual skills, they gave him the puzzling problems of wartime that others had failed to solve. Thus, when the police found some white tablets strewn across a field in Somerset, first they tried to get them analysed by their forensic chemists and, when they failed to identify them, the problem came to Bruce White. What were they? Were they some subtle poison put there by the enemy or saboteurs? The chemists could only say that they were tablets of some unknown alkaloid. Bruce White reasoned, ‘They are probably a medicine, and one tablet will not be a harmful dose. I’ll try by taking half a one and see what happens.’ He tried this experiment after supper one night and told me he spent the night pacing the corridors of the Institute with an irrepressible erection, almost a priapism. The tablets were the drug yohimbine, accidentally dropped in the field by a vet who had been using it to enliven a reluctant stallion.

  I worked for a while during the war at an American Air Force base in East Anglia. It was not far from the market town of Kettering and close to the small village of Grafton Underwood. Here in 1943 was a new airfield from which flew B17s or as we in England called them, Flying Fortresses, on their daylight raids on German-occupied Europe. RB Bourdillon’s small group was asked to investigate and try to prevent the spread of common colds amongst the American aircrew. For reasons I do not know, this work fell mainly on me. My colleagues, Owen Lidwell and Frank Raymond, were engaged on other jobs. You may wonder why anything so trivial in wartime as a cold was worth wasting time on. Surely, we could do things that were more important at this time in the war when our very survival was threatened? No, it was not the consequences of a bureaucratic blunder; the common cold can be a miserable, agonizing handicap to a crew member of an unpressurized aeroplane at 20,000 feet or more. Remember also that all the crew of a B17 wore oxygen masks—can you imagine sneezing while wearing an oxygen mask? Worse were the agonizing pains of eardrums distended because the Eustachian tubes blocked by the cold prevented the normal release of excess pressure in the middle ear as the plane ascended. Most of us have felt this when travelling on ordinary aircraft with a cold, but for us, except in emergencies, the internal pressure of the aeroplane never falls below that equivalent to a height of 5000 feet. A small change compared with that experienced by the bomber crew. After a recent radio programme in which I described my working on the common cold at an airbase in wartime, a commentator asked if there was not something better that I could have been doing, for this was such a trivial illness. Among the listeners was the navigator of a Halifax bomber, which flew over Germany in those days. He sent a warm letter telling me how utterly miserable it was to fly with a cold, and how glad he was to know that someone at least had tried to do something about it.

  Robert Bourdillon was allowed to use his car during the war for our journeys to military establishments. I met him at his home in Frognal in Hampstead early one frosty morning in 1943. Cars were unheated in those days and driven with the side windows open to stop the windscreen from misting. An army-issue balaclava helmet framed Robbie Bourdillon’s gaunt face and we were both wrapped in cast-off army clothing so that we must have looked like a pair of caddis fly larvae as we travelled north. Our journey took us along near empty roads through Hitchin and Bedford until we came to Kettering and then turned off down country lanes to the flat fields of Grafton Underwood. We checked in at the gate to the airfield and were met and taken to the station hospital by the medical officer, Captain Mitchell Spyker. Mitch, who was soon to become a close friend and regular visitor to our home in Hampstead, was a rotund little man who survived the war and became a coroner in Columbus, Ohio.

  In the Second World War there was a fair amount of envy from the native population of the pay and conditions enjoyed by our American guests. Over-sexed, overpaid, and over here was a common complaint, which of course was quickly met with the pointed response: maybe, but you are under-sexed, underpaid, and under Eisenhower. Yet, in my days at Grafton Underwood I felt nothing but a deep sympathy and compassion for the appalling lot of those brave young men who flew their B17s, and I found them surprisingly good humoured considering their conditions. At one time, their life expectancy was no more than five missions, so dangerous was it to fly in daylight over Germany. They lived in long cold Quonset huts—tubes of corrugated iron lit by no more than two 60-watt bulbs and heated by a single coke-burning stove. The huts existed in a sea of mud extending in all directions. What an appalling place it was in which to wait for death.

  The moral problem of my conscientious objection haunted me in the first years at the NIMR. In 1944 I decided to give up my exemption from service. I had not the heart to stand by nursing my convictions while the rest of the community, not least the brave merchant sailors, brought in the food that fed me. Not logical, and perhaps no more than a response to tribal pressure, but the urge to resign my objection was so strong that I applied for my exemption from military service to be cancelled. Quite soon, they called me to an induction centre where an army officer quizzed me. After some quiet questioning, he told me that I would soon receive orders directing me for training as a medical orderly. This was somewhat of a shock, but logical from the viewpoint of the army. I had expected at the least to join my friends of student days, Teddy Hesketh and Geoffrey Elias, who were in the Royal Air Force as radar specialists. I doubted if I would make a good orderly. When the orders eventually came, I asked to resign my post at the Institute. Within minutes, the new director, Sir Charles Harington, a famous biochemist and the discoverer of the thyroid hormone, called me to his office. He looked at the orders and said ‘What’s this nonsense? You, a medical orderly, ridiculous.’ ‘But I am due to report to the barracks in two days’ time,’ I replied. ‘No, you wi
ll not. The work you are doing here is much more important and I will see that they exempt you on that account.’ Sure enough, they did exempt me and, somewhat bemused by it all, I continued working at the National Institute for the rest of the war.

  Robbie Bourdillon’s small back room of science worked on other wartime problems as well as cross infection. We became experts on the effects of heat radiation and devised ways to lessen the painful burns of servicemen exposed to flash or flame. We travelled to army sites where flame-throwers were tested. I shall not forget the fierce radiant heat from the wall of flame projected by one of these weapons. At twenty yards from the flame, the radiation was enough to burn exposed skin. Lidwell and I were ordered to measure the radiant heat flux that would cause burns by using the shaved skin of live rabbits. Neither of us was anti-vivisectionist but the thought of burning even anaesthetized rabbits was more than we could stomach. We came almost instantly to the same conclusion. We would have to burn ourselves. At first, it was exquisitely painful. Then, quite remarkably, after about a week of burns the pain lessened and became a sense of pressure, not pain. Perhaps we were so interested in the science that excitement caused our endorphins to flow and act as natural analgesics. There was some fieldwork as well as these ordeals in the laboratory. We measured the radiant heat and the protective effects of woollen blankets. These, to our surprise, were as or more effective than asbestos. Animal hair seems to have evolved to protect its wearers against heat radiation in forest fires. Hair or wool does not easily burn and when it does the superficial fire leaves a protective coat of carbon bubbles. Strangest among our workplaces was a bombed-out set of streets in Canning Town, East London. Here the army was trying out street fighting techniques.

  Our first daughter Christine was born on 16 September 1944. The twin boom of the first V2 weapon to hit London marked her a child of the coming Space Age. The V2 was the forerunner of all the large launch rockets that have carried instruments and men into space. Londoners recognized it by the two consecutive bangs, the first of its sonic boom as it re-entered the atmosphere, and second the explosion of its warhead. We had all that summer endured the deadly but less frightening V1 flying bombs. These were an early and inaccurate version of the cruise missile. The V1s were bearable because they flew in a straight path, never deviating—so long as the path did not cross your position the bomb was obviously going elsewhere and you could relax.

  When peace came in 1945 we returned to full-time work on air hygiene. As a junior, I knew nothing of the Institute politics, but it soon became apparent that there was competition for space in the small Hampstead laboratory. Scientists returning from the war needed room, and air hygiene was low on the list of priority topics. Bourdillon moved to Stoke Mandeville Hospital to work on neurological problems, and Lidwell and I were moved to work in a department of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine run by Ronald Bedford, an air pollution scientist. Air hygiene now had an MRC committee to oversee our work and Lidwell and I were both members. The main concern of the committee was an attempt to control the spread of childhood infections in primary schools of the borough of Southall. The idea was to irradiate the top part of each classroom with UV. The committee hoped that passage through the irradiated region would destroy the virus-and bacteria-carrying particles from the children’s coughs and sneezes. Measles, mumps, chickenpox and streptococcal infections were among the target organisms. It was a set of experiments well suited to Lidwell’s talents and inclinations. The problem was that he wanted to use me, the junior colleague, to do the legwork while he did the statistics. I made it clear that if he expected me to spend most of my time taking air samples in the Southall schools I would find a job elsewhere. Fortunately for me, the MRC agreed that it would be wasteful to use me that way and they gave me the chance to complete and submit my experiments on the killing of airborne bacteria by chemicals as a PhD thesis. In this way the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine served as a second university for me. The fact that I was a fully paid MRC staff scientist made the studentship unusually easy, especially since by now our second daughter Jane had been born.

  At the end of a year at London University the MRC offered me a stark choice. I could return to Hampstead as a junior member of the biochemistry department on a three-year contract at my present salary of £400 per year. Alternatively, I could transfer to Harvard Hospital at Salisbury as a member of the virus division led by CH Andrewes at a salary of £600 and with tenure. Without hesitation, I chose the move to Salisbury and it was not the higher salary and tenure that made me do it. Had the untenured poorly paid job been in Salisbury I would still have chosen it. The attraction was the chance to live and work in the country. Post-war London was a dreary place and neither Helen nor I wanted to bring up our two daughters there.

  One day in September 1946 a large Ford station wagon drew up outside our twenty-room barn of a house in Gayton Crescent, Hampstead. Keith Thompson, the genial driver from the Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU), had come to collect my family and our luggage for the journey to Salisbury. It was all a dream come true. We would have a warm, centrally heated flat at a site on the edge of the then heavenly Wiltshire countryside. I would have a seven room well-equipped laboratory all to myself and medically trained colleagues in the lab next door.

  The CCRU was just outside Salisbury on the road that runs to Blandford and Dorchester. During the Second World War, it had been an infectious disease hospital of the United States Army. In the early stages of the war, Harvard University approached the UK Government with the generous offer of a civilian research hospital intended to cope with the epidemic infectious diseases that war might cause. Their offer was welcomed and the prefabricated units were built on the outskirts of Salisbury. However, by this time the United States had entered the war and it was used as a military hospital. At the end of the European war, Harvard University donated the hospital to the UK with the single condition that it remain a research hospital for infectious diseases. Their generosity was gratefully accepted and it fell to the MRC to find a use for it. Christopher Andrewes proposed that it serve as a human volunteer hospital for experiments with the common cold. To some this use of the Harvard University gift seemed frivolous, since the common cold was so trivial an infection. In fact, the common cold is a serious source of lost working time, and knowledge leading to its cure is a prize well worth the effort. The hospital itself was well-constructed from prefabricated wooden units. They were wonderfully equipped by the standards of the time and supplied with efficient heating. There was ample accommodation for the staff, good laboratories and numerous isolation wards for housing the volunteers.

  The next five years were idyllic and shared with my medical colleagues Edward Lowbury and Keith Dumbell. We worked on topics such as the spread of infection from pocket-handkerchiefs. It is hard now to recall that once almost everyone with a cold used a cotton handkerchief to mop up his or her running nose. This rag soon became sodden with nasal secretion and was a potent aid for organisms wishing to find a new host. I like to think our paper in the British Medical Journal helped to replace the cotton handkerchief with the disposable paper tissue. This was something better destroyed than recycled.

  Living at Harvard Hospital gave me a chance to return to Bowerchalke, the village that had so entranced me as a schoolboy. I went there again on a bicycle, this time with Helen, and in the spring of 1947. The hospital was on Coombe Road, which ran southwest from Salisbury and in the direction of Bowerchalke, some ten miles away. In 1947, the United Kingdom was as poor as an underdeveloped country is now. Food and fuel were rationed and there were few cars on the roads. It was a cyclist’s delight. The journeys up the Chalke Valley to Broadchalke and Bowerchalke were wholly unimpeded by traffic and the air was fresh and free of exhaust fumes. More than this, in spite of an easterly air stream from Europe, the sky was a clear and sharp blue, free of the obstructing haze that spoils fine weather in Europe now—a haze that represents the exhaust fumes of the tens of
millions of vehicles in that densely populated continent. Bowerchalke was just as it had been, except that no teas were on offer anywhere. We went through the village and up the hill to Wood Yates on the main road, and turned left back on the main road to Harvard Hospital and Salisbury. I took comfort in the thought that Bowerchalke was now only twelve miles away. Maybe one day we could move there.

  There was a prevalent notion among common cold virologists that immunity to the disease was short-lived and this was why we catch colds so often. One evening in a discussion on this topic, Christopher Andrewes suggested that we do an experiment with volunteers on a desert island. We could isolate them for three months and then test their immunity. It so happened that there was a small deserted island off the north coast of Scotland near the small town of Tongue. In the summer of 1949 we rented the island and refurbished the cottages still standing to make them suitable temporary homes for the student volunteers and MRC staff. It was hard work and involved frequent trips by boat carrying the three months’ supplies of food and equipment.

  We had just moored the village boat at the decrepit stone quay of Eilean Nan Ron when Mr Anderson, the boatman, took me by the arm and asked quietly, ‘Tell me, Doctor, what is it that you are all doing here on this island?’ He spoke that clear precise English that is a joy to listen to, the tongue common on the northern and western fringes of these islands. Mr Anderson was no Celt; his tall lean figure, blue eyes, and light complexion spoke of Scandinavia. We often forget that Scotland was once a Norwegian colony. He was also the headman of the village of Skerray and looked the part. His question, what were we doing, had been simmering a long time. Here we were spending what was, to the villagers in the austerities of 1949, a fortune refurbishing the houses on the island that had been deserted for decades, and just for a few months’ use. We were there to do an experiment on the common cold and we needed temporary accommodation for the student volunteers who would spend their summer in total isolation on the island. When we told Mr Anderson our true intentions, he did not believe us. The idea that we civil servants were spending taxpayers’ money investigating the common cold was too absurd, an insult to his intelligence. ‘So come clean, Doctor, what are you doing here?’ There was no use in my saying, ‘But we really are studying the common cold here on this remote place. We expect to find a decline of the immunity to common colds of our volunteers as time goes by and we will test it at the end of the season by exposing them to a cold virus.’ Nothing I said like this, however true it was, would be believed; truth is so much less credible than fiction. Without conscious intention, I turned to Mr Anderson, after I’d stepped onto the quay, and said, ‘We are searching for uranium in the rocks here.’ His eyes lit up and a smile came across his face. ‘Of course, Doctor, I understand your reluctance to speak of it, but do not be concerned, I will tell no one what you’ve told me.’ As I looked down at the clear sea sparkling in the sunlight with the rich growth of Fucus and Laminaria, an anemone opened its swaying fronds and seemed to wink at me. I wondered how long it would be before my fable reached Inverness.