Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  In London, before the voyage, I had foolishly volunteered for a dangerous experiment on the ship. I was so keen to go and to make myself acceptable to the Navy that I ignored common sense and my survival instinct. The Navy wanted to know if it would be possible to warm up the piston engine aircraft in the hangars inside the ship. Warming the engines by running them on the icy open decks would waste time and fuel and under battle conditions such a time waste could be fatal, but the hangars were large and full of planes, and to let them start and warm up their engines inside the ship raised the worrying possibility of fire and pollution of the ship with dangerous amounts of exhaust fumes. There was particular concern that carbon monoxide would build up to a toxic level inside the hangar—even to a level where lives were in danger. The Navy needed a volunteer to measure the carbon monoxide in the hangar as the planes warmed up and this is what I volunteered to do.

  On a relatively quiet day as we sailed between Spitzbergen and Jan Mayen Island the Captain decided to do the warm-up experiment. It was scheduled for 10.00 am and at 9.45 I went to the stern end of the hangar, just below the great open doors of the ship’s lift that carries planes up to the flight deck. The only protection I had, apart from my Arctic gear, was earmuffs, for the sound level with all of the engines running would be deafening. By 10.00 I had my meter running and checked. I raised my flag as a sign and the first of the engines started up. There were clouds of smoke and a fair amount of fuel from the priming splashed on to the floor of the hangar. As they started more and more engines, the smoke grew thicker and so did the wind. With all the engines running, I had to kneel down and hold a ringbolt on the deck to keep position. To my relief, the carbon monoxide level barely rose above zero on the meter. There was so much fresh air drawn in by the planes’ propellers, acting like giant fans, that the fumes were swept away almost as fast as they were produced. Pollution was no hazard at all. Fire was another thing, and several of the flying crew came to me afterwards and said that the venting of fuel during the start-up made the experiment foolhardy and hazardous. This, coming from men who served in perhaps the most dangerous of peacetime naval tasks, made me feel glad that they spoke after the experiment and not before. As an experiment, it worked well. I did not have to lift my flag the second time to warn that the carbon monoxide had reached danger level. They stopped their engines when they were warm. We had gained some useful information and it helped me personally. Courage is the quality most valued instinctively in groups of men and, although to me it had seemed no more than a very uncomfortable and slightly risky experience, to the ship’s crew I had passed some kind of test. From then on, I no longer felt myself an invisible civilian boffin who intruded on their lives at sea.

  The most frightening period of the voyage began mildly with some conversation in the wardroom after dinner and while we were playing poker with dice instead of cards. The winner of each game bought the other players a round of drinks, an interesting negative feedback on the rate of play and the amount of drink consumed. Among the players were two naval architects from Bath, who proceeded to tell us about the inevitable fate of welded ships: how once a crack occurs in a welded plate it spreads across the plate and through the weld to the next plate. In this way a crack propagates right around the ship and severs it into two pieces as if sliced by a giant knife. They told us how the welded Liberty ships built in the Second World War often sank suddenly and without warning and the Vengeance, they said, was a welded ship built during the war. This good bedtime story stirred us but did not cause any loss of sleep.

  A few days later, we at last encountered cold weather and the ice pack. It was also calm, and the low Arctic sun shone brightly. I had expected, wrongly, when we set sail, that at 70 – 80° N there would be no daylight in February. In fact, there was no day even at 75° N without light between 10 and 2 during the day. In the farthest north, the sun rested level with the sea rim all of the day, a kind of frozen dawn merging into sunset without full daylight in between. Never was it wholly dark.

  After the week of storms, the bright sun drew us on to the deck to bask in its apparent warmth, and to enjoy the Arctic scene. Peculiarly, in the wet and mild weather of the previous days we had felt cold enough to need our anoraks and Arctic gear. Today, with the sun shining, many went out with just the clothes they wore in the warmth of the ship. The air temperature was now near 15° F, some 25° F colder than on the previous day, but perversely it felt warmer. The ship then began to move into the pack ice. All went well until there was a sudden noise and a jerk in the ship’s motion. We had hit a larger floe and the bows of the ship were damaged enough to let some sea in. It was nothing serious—not a re-run of the Titanic disaster—just a minor mishap like a shunt collision in a car park. It was a result of a scheduled test of the ship’s abilities, not an accident. The ship moved back into open sea and hove to and the engineers repaired the damage by filling the small leaking compartment with concrete. It seemed to us that it was not serious for the ship but we had forgotten our friends, the naval constructors. In the wardroom that evening, the Jeremiah of them told us that the collision with the large ice floe had cracked one side of the flight deck just ahead of the bridge. He seemed to relish telling us that this was the strength deck that held the ship together and that in the cold the steel was much more brittle and liable to further cracking. We went to bed that night less easy in our minds.

  A few days later, the storms were back fiercer than ever. We had travelled up and down in a short circular path on the northern and leeward side of the volcano, Jan Mayen Island. This small island, a Norwegian possession, formed a large natural breakwater in the stormy northern seas. We were not alone. Two frigates accompanied the Vengeance, the Loch Archaig and the St Kitts. We could see that they were having a much harder time in the rough seas than we were and on the evening of 25 February the Captain announced that we would leave the lee of the island and sail south to give the men on the frigates, as he put it, a good night’s rest. As we left the island shelter and turned into the wind, the ship’s motion became wild enough to be disturbing. The wind must by then have been blowing with hurricane force from the south. We stayed much of the day in our sickbay laboratory near the ship’s metacentre where the movement was mostly a rotation, not up and down. In the wardroom near the stern, the pitching was so great that it was like being in an express lift forever going up and down at the whim of a hyperactive child in charge of the buttons. A few of us were seasick but eating was in any case an ordeal and our chairs would topple over mid-meal.

  The Vengeance’s own peculiarity was the longitudinal flutter of the whole ship as if it were a long and thin metal bar. This flutter was rapid and gave the feel, as the seaman said, of sliding down a flight of stairs. This uneasy motion superimposed upon the pitching and tossing made useful work all but impossible. The crack on the deck became more than just a doom story in the naval constructor’s mind. It started spreading across the deck and soon we heard that seamen were drilling holes ahead of the crack. This is sound engineering practice: a hole imposes less stress on the metal than the sharp growing point of the crack itself. Other seamen, we heard, were welding strips of metal behind the crack to hold it together. Everyone on deck was roped as climbers are, so great was the wind and the danger of slipping off into the icy sea.

  The ship continued on its southerly course into the storm for two days. Then the north coast of Iceland came into sight and there was no choice other than to turn back north again. This meant the ship would have to turn across the wind and the bridge warned us of the dangers of the manœuvre in such seas, with the ship in the state it was. The turn was an awful minute during which our cabin cupboards crashed over, ripped from their mountings by the motion of the ship. We sailed north and the storm continued; the motion more uncomfortable still by the following sea. That evening in the wardroom I overheard the Captain say to the Chief Engineer, ‘Well, Chief, which end drops off first?’ It was not good bedtime news. Frank Smith was, as usual, his cal
m and wonderful self. When I said, ‘Shouldn’t we stay in the wardroom for the night?’, thinking that our cabins in the stern were a trap should the ship, in fact, break in half, he said, ‘Nonsense, we’ll sleep there as usual,’ and we did. Next day the storm had lessened and we were able to resume our researches.

  One evening, back behind the shelter of Jan Mayen Island, the Captain invited Frank Smith and me to dinner in his spacious cabin. He made us welcome and at home so that we felt that what we were doing was important for the ship. He was keen to know what we had found out so far in our tests. Because of the ship’s size and spaciousness, our news was good: our measurements showed a low level of airborne bacteria, and confirmed the sailors’ opinion that their quarters were comfortable. The Vengeance seemed to be a healthy ship to be on, except of course for the crack. Here Captain Terry was reassuring and we left for our quarters with a sense of warmth and security. Perhaps the knowledge that they may someday be responsible for starting a major war is what gives senior diplomats and service officers that quality of calm authority.

  Five weeks had passed and the weather was warmer and calmer, and the trials were completed. We set sail south for Scotland, this time heading for Rossyth, the main naval port and dockyard. As we approached the north of Scotland, most of the planes took off for airfields there. The wardroom then was half empty, with the flying crew gone, but it reminded us of the dual nature of the ship that we were sailing on. Frank Smith and I spent the last day of our sailing, as we travelled down the east coast of Scotland, preparing the draft of our report on the voyage. It was later polished on shore but it was good to have what was then for me the hardest part of the whole voyage, writing the report, done before we reached port. We arrived early next morning at the dock in Rossyth and disembarked. We carried with us a generous allowance of dutiable items like liquor and cigarettes. News of our ordeal must have gone ahead for when the customs officer asked which ship we came from, and we replied the Vengeance, he just smiled and waved us on our way.

  Back at Harvard Hospital my own particular task in the common cold project was to try to find the paths along which colds spread between people. Together with Edward Lowbury and Keith Dumbell, we had made experiments to show that colds spread mainly by direct contact. Contact such as shaking hands could cause the transfer of substantial quantities—milligrams—of nasal secretion from person to person. We doubted that colds were spread, as previously thought, by the fine airborne droplets of a sneeze, and our main effort was to try to quantify the transfer of infectious secretion from one person to another. I used fluorescent substances to label the nasal secretion of volunteers with colds and followed the spread of the secretion by illuminating their surroundings with long wavelength UV. In this way we showed that airborne fine particles conveyed, to those that breathed them in, only fractions of a microgram of secretion. Direct contact from shaking hands or large droplets from a cough in the face conveyed over a thousand times as much. We also made field observations on the London Underground, watching how often travellers touched their mouths and noses. We concluded that most respiratory infections occurred either by imbibing the large droplets of a close encounter with a sneeze or by touching some previously infected surface and then transferring the infection to the mouth. Infection by breathing fine airborne droplets could occur but would require a highly infectious organism. Measles or tuberculosis could spread this way, especially in the confines of a passenger aircraft, but even here, the opportunities for contact transfer are much greater.

  A direct experiment supported these views. We took a small room and divided it in the middle by means of a large blanket suspended between the walls of the room. On one side of the blanket was a group of five children who had streaming colds, and on the other side of the room were ten volunteers who came to the hospital and offered their services as human guinea pigs. A large fan stirred the air of the room so that fine airborne particles sneezed, coughed, or talked out by the children would be transferred rapidly round to the side of the room where the volunteers were. We also had sampling apparatus to sample the bacteria and virus particles in the air. In this experiment, colds were not transferred from the children to the volunteers. In another experiment, we took the blanket down and let the children play card games with the volunteers. The contact of the volunteers’ hands with the nasal secretion deposited on the cards by the children effectively transferred the infection. We concluded that we catch colds from others by direct contact. Something useful, I suppose, but I do not think that in practice our discovery has helped to stop the spread of the disease to any extent.

  In the last years of my time at Harvard Hospital I grew curious about the role of calcium in blood clotting. I had the idea that calcium was not so much an active essential part of clotting but acted to bring in contact negatively charged blood components that would otherwise be repelled by their negative polarity. I started collaboration with Betty Burch and with James Porterfield. It turned out that the idea was sound and we published our research in the Biochemical Journal. James Porterfield and I went on to pioneer the production of plastic surfaces that would keep blood from coagulating almost indefinitely. This work we published in Nature but we were about ten years premature; the need for such an invention did not come until DeBakey and others first made artery replacements in the 1960s. A happy consequence of the collaboration was the romance that developed between James Porterfield and Betty Burch that led to Harvard Hospital’s first marriage.

  Frank Raymond, a wartime colleague in Robert Bourdillon’s department, now worked for the Agricultural Research Council but we kept in touch. He asked me if I could help by designing an instrument that would monitor the movements of cattle as they grazed. I was ready for a break from biochemistry and willingly agreed, but it led me to participate in the removal of hedgerows—one of the most destructive changes that happened to the English countryside after the Second World War. Hedgerows are linear forests that act as fences between farmers’ fields and serve to provide a habitat for birds and for numerous species of plants and insects. They are the refuge and reservoir of bygone ecosystems, but since 1946 we have lost 150,000 miles of hedgerow, and I regret to say I played a small part in this act of national ecocide.

  We had nearly starved in the Second World War and we knew that our farmland could not produce enough to feed us, so it was inevitable that the improvement of farming efficiency should be high on our list of national priorities. What we would lose in the way of scenic beauty and a country way of life never occurred to us. As a nation, we behaved just like those in charge of a famous national museum during a time of recession when the only way to survive is by selling its treasures. I loved the English country scene passionately, yet I was as thoughtlessly responsible for its destruction as was a greedy shareholder of an agribusiness firm, or a landowner out to maximize the return from his broad hectares. This is how it happened with me.

  The Grassland Research Institute was at Stratford-upon-Avon, about 120 miles from Salisbury. In 1947 the Medical Research Council had provided Owen Lidwell and me with a car, a Morris ten, registration JMM 540, and it was for our travels to sites where we did air hygiene experiments. Owen, as the senior partner of the pair of us, had charge of it. He also needed it for travelling from Salisbury to London, where his home still was. Generously, he allowed me to use it for journeys such as this one to the Grassland Institute. The problem was that there were coupons only for two gallons of fuel and only about one gallon in the tank. At thirty miles per gallon, I was short by thirty miles of my destination, Stratford-upon-Avon. However, at twenty-seven I was still under the influence of abundant testosterone and a risk-taker and was sure that I could drive to Stratford-upon-Avon and back with the limited fuel available. There were competitions where the winner was the one who travelled furthest on a fixed quantity of fuel and they left in my mind the possibility that I could also drive as efficiently. The journey had been planned with my friend, Tom Thompson, Harvard Hospital’s capab
le manager and he thought that I could do it. We agreed that the best plan would be to keep an average speed of forty miles an hour, and to do so by accelerating to fifty and then coasting back to thirty, then repeating this saw-tooth pattern of driving throughout the journey. Nowadays such a plan would be impossible to put into practice; then, even the main roads were all but empty of traffic.

  I set out from Harvard Hospital on a clear, bright sunlit May morning. The blackbirds advertised the excellence of their genes to potential mates and the scent of hawthorn blossoms filled the air. I should have spent the day walking in the countryside to enjoy it while it was still there but I was in the honeymoon stages of driving. The meadows were full of wild flowers, there was even pheasant’s eye, the scarlet buttercup, in the field below the hospital and the hedgerows were full of birds’ nests. Ten years later, it would be well on its way to a desert full of weed-free grain, bounded by barbed-wire fences.

  The journey took me up the Avon valley through Amesbury, just missing Stonehenge and on through the Savernake Forest, with its fresh new leaves, to Marlborough. I then drove on over the downs to Swindon and to Burford in the Cotswolds, and from there I was soon at the Grassland Research Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon. The fuel gauge registered that I had used less than half the fuel allocation, so the return journey would be less exacting. My friend, Frank Raymond, was then a young scientist working diligently to improve the ‘backward’ farming practices of Old England. Even bread was rationed. In theory we could grow all of the food we needed; in practice, English farming seemed to use the land inefficiently and we were able during the war and immediately afterwards, to grow no more than sixty per cent of our needs.