Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  I could have used a dialysis machine of the kind that extends the life of those whose kidneys have failed. This machine would have removed the glycerol without otherwise affecting the blood, but it was too slow, too cumbersome, and expensive. I was trying a crude and simple quick fix. Add some strong sugar solution to the blood and it squeezes the red cells free of most of their fluids, including the glycerol, and they can then be resuspended in saline or plasma and used for transfusion. It worked, and I was able to publish a short paper on it in the Lancet. I do not think it was ever used in practice. There is still no satisfactory and practical way for the long-term storage of blood cells for transfusion.

  To the annoyance of my biologist colleagues, I chose to use red blood cells for all my experiments to discover the harm done by freezing. They chided me, saying that I was wasting my time and theirs. Red cells, they said, are not alive and therefore any conclusions drawn using them are not valid for living cells generally. This was my first quarrel with biologists over the meaning of life. They asserted that reproduction was the essential criterion of life. Red cells, they said, have no nucleus or DNA and certainly do not reproduce; therefore they are dead, no more than floating tiny bags filled with haemoglobin. I agreed with them that reproduction is an essential property for the evolution of life, but I thought that such other properties as metabolism and the active maintenance of homeostasis were also things that distinguished living things from dead matter. Red cells certainly metabolized and they kept their internal composition in homeostasis.

  My preference for the red cell as a model cell for freezing experiments did not come from mere perversity—a wish to be different for its own sake. I saw red cells as a simple and elegant model of living cells generally. Freezing is specifically damaging to cell membranes, and red-cell membranes are just like those of other living cells. The balance tipped in their favour for me because damage to red cells could be measured quantitatively by observing with a spectrophotometer the amount of red pigment that leaked out. I could do hundreds of experiments with red cells in the time it would take to do one where the ability to reproduce was the measure.

  The absurdity of the objection to my use of red cells as a model revealed itself when I moved on to work with Chris Polge on spermatozoa. These, the biologists said, were alive. ‘You can watch them swim,’ they added. To me this was nonsense. Spermatozoa may be a key part of reproduction but as cells, they never reproduce. What if red cells had possessed cilia that allowed them to move? Would that make them more alive?

  Of course, reproduction followed by the natural selection of the progeny is an essential part of the evolution of living organisms but the insistence by biologists that reproduction is the only criterion for life has plagued me throughout the years. It was the argument they used to reject all of Gaia theory. The Earth cannot reproduce, therefore it is in no way like a living organism; moreover, because it cannot reproduce it can never evolve by natural selection. Their argument is as flawed as it would be for me to argue that grandmothers, Lombardy poplar trees, and anyone, like me, who has had his prostate gland removed are not alive. More seriously, is it sensible for biologists to exclude metabolism and homeostasis as attributes of life?

  Perhaps I am too hard on biologists. In the six years I spent—from 1951 to 1956—doing cryobiology, I learned to understand and respect my biologist friends. Their approach to their science was not so different from mine. We both did science by intuition and then spent ages testing and rationalizing what we had done. A widespread foolishness among scientists and their administrators pretends we know what we are going to do before we start, that we can plan the details of our research. It may be commonplace with the i-dotting and t-crossing research, which is the great bulk of science done these days, but it rarely ever happens in pioneering research. Perhaps the wish of fund-holders to know exactly what the recipients intended to do with their money has played a part in bringing science down to today’s pedestrian levels.

  The experimental biology division at Mill Hill was, even in the 1950s, media conscious. Parkes was always good for a quote on some aspect of reproductive physiology or, as the media had it, sex. It could be on the possibilities of a contraceptive pill, or if the sex-ratio at birth could be changed, and the ethics of it all. With his striking features and wonderful silver hair, Parkes was a well-known television personality. In spite of it all he had a prudish side to his character. Once he asked for my support when two senior managers of the London Rubber Company—makers of condoms—came to visit. They were concerned that the Pill would severely affect their business unless they could have control of its marketing. Parkes bothered about the thought that these private talks with the condom makers might become public and he would be the subject of sniggering comment. ‘Have you heard Parkes is the adviser to a firm that makes “French letters”?’ It is difficult now to imagine how repressed the older generation was in those days about anything to do with sex. On another occasion, I was working on the freeze preservation of human spermatozoa. I complained that it was a waste of time for me to travel daily across London to the fertility clinic to work with aged sperm from used condoms. Would it not be better, I suggested, to use my own—at least they would be fresh. I had never seen him so shocked. ‘I’ll not have a wanker in my division,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t even think of it, Lovelock.’ I was surprised that Parkes, the sex guru, should be so touchy over the manual acquisition of a sample of semen for research.

  Media interest intensified when we moved on from freezing blood and spermatozoa to freezing whole animals. Audrey Smith reduced to practice a technique pioneered by the Yugoslav biologist, Andjus. She cooled and froze hamsters and then reanimated them from the frozen state. The animals were truly frozen and all their organs transfixed with ice crystals, yet once we had perfected the re-warming technique, they returned to normal unharmed.

  The method Andjus first used to reanimate small animals from just above the freezing point was to apply a piece of hot metal to the animal’s chest above its heart. This procedure warmed the heart and started it beating while the rest of the animal was still cold. If cold or frozen animals are warmed from the outside by placing them in a warm bath they never recover. Andjus and Audrey Smith both thought that this was because the skin, when warmed, consumed the oxygen remaining in the blood, and when later the heart started it drew in anoxic blood and so failed. Audrey drew on Andjus’s experience and warmed her frozen hamsters by applying a teaspoon heated in the flame of a Bunsen burner to their chests. This technique worked with some of the frozen animals, but at the cost of badly burned chests. The experimental biologists at Mill Hill were tough and unsentimental about animal suffering. They were not consciously cruel and did try to avoid suffering so long as it did not interfere with the scientific objective of their experiments. This was, I think, the usual attitude of almost all scientists who used animals in the 1950s. I had to be there to monitor the physics and chemistry of the animal as it went through the freezing and re-warming. I soon found that I was made of softer stuff and was repelled by what I thought were cruel experiments.

  It was not long before I decided to make a radio frequency diathermy apparatus with which to warm the animals’ hearts from the inside without burning the skin of their chests. I took an afternoon off and went by tube train from Mill Hill to Leicester Square in the centre of London. Just outside the Tube station at Leicester Square is Lisle Street. In those days, it was the market place of two ancient industries, prostitution and the sale of used military hardware. The girls who paraded the street in search of customers had an uncanny ability to distinguish those consumed by lust from those, like me, who were seeking surplus radar equipment. They never accosted me on these expeditions. Lisle Street was a cornucopia of equipment. I was soon able to find an aircraft radio transmitter complete with its 807 vacuum tubes. It cost about ten shillings. I took it home, dismantled it, and from the parts made a simple fifty-watt diathermy apparatus on my kitchen table. It was no more th
an an evening’s work, but with it, Audrey could reanimate her hamsters decently. When I gave it to her the next day she accepted it with enthusiasm and used it from then on in her experiments. It made life difficult for me because the measurement of temperature using thermocouples was near impossible when the diathermy was on and radio frequency currents were flowing in all the nearby wires. We compromised by turning off the diathermy briefly for temperature measurements.

  The main proponent of the ice-crystal damage theory—the rival theory to my own view that it was salt damage that harmed the cells—was an American scientist who was also a Jesuit priest, Father Luyet. He came to visit the Mill Hill labs in 1954. I found him a courteous and engaging fellow and we differed without rancour. A much deeper exchange occurred when we showed him two frozen hamsters. One was intact and was shortly to be reanimated by diathermy; the other was sliced with a sharp knife through the heart and through the head. In theory, a skilled surgeon could have repaired the sliced animal. The slicing was to demonstrate that the animal had ice crystals transfixing all organs including the brain. We asked Father Luyet his opinion on the state of these two frozen hamsters. Were they both dead? If the sliced animal was not yet dead, how much more slicing would be needed to kill it? He thought for a while and then replied: ‘The questions are meaningless because animals do not have immortal souls and therefore cannot experience death as we do.’ Death, like life it seems, describes several different states. This brief encounter with a man of faith stayed with me. I was sharply reminded of it in the 1980s when the neo-Darwinist biologists were so insistent that the Earth could not be compared to a living organism. Both the priest and the biologists seemed to argue from the certainty of faith.

  At the beginning of 1954 the United States National Academy of Sciences invited me to a meeting in Washington on freeze preservation. This was my first invitation to another country and my first trip abroad. I flew to Washington by US military air transport, travelling with Pat Mollison, a distinguished haematologist then working at the Hammersmith Hospital. We stayed at the home of the haematologist Hugh Chaplin, who had worked with Pat Mollison. It was a delightful suburban house in Chevy Chase. Coming from London, still then unkempt and with rationing still in place, America was a fairyland of plenty. I marvelled at the supermarkets, to which Mrs Chaplin took me, and at the beauty of Washington as a city. Pat and I were the stars of the meeting and afterwards they deluged me with job offers. I was attracted by two offers of a year’s visit—something I knew would be possible as part of my Mill Hill job. One was to Duke University at Durham in North Carolina and the other to Harvard Medical School in Boston. Pat advised me to have a look at both places. I had hopes of receiving the award of a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship in Medicine and later that year I did receive it.

  The airport at Durham was a wooden hut set literally in a field of grass. Dr Ivan Brown met me and took me to the hospital guest quarters. I soon found him to be an unusual medical scientist. He had pioneered a method of freezing blood products for haemophiliacs. The medical bills of their unavoidable accidents could quickly ruin families who had the misfortune of a haemophiliac child. Brown arranged for them to keep a store of Factor VIII in their deep freezes and then instructed them how to prepare and inject it when an emergency happened. It was good to see a decent kindly physician at work in this way. I was sure in my mind that Durham was where I would like to spend the year with my family but it was not to be because my employers, the MRC, insisted that Harvard was the right place for me to spend my Rockefeller Fellowship.

  When one first visits a new country, everything is magical. Euphoria brings a sensory enhancement almost like falling in love. I marvelled over the small differences. The green mail boxes that opened to receive a letter—how different from the red pillar-boxes of home; the layout of the railway stations—cathedral-like buildings of elegance but no platforms. I returned to Washington by air and then took the train to New York. I took a day off as a tourist to see the sights. It was a good time to do it, for New York was relaxed and easy then to enjoy. I even saw horse-drawn wagons taking beer kegs to the bars. I took the Staten Island Ferry and called on some of Helen’s Scots relatives. Next morning I made my way to Penn Station and the train for Boston. What a slow and bumpy ride it was, and looking out at the New England scene I was surprised to see how brown and grey it was. There were no green trees or grass anywhere. I stayed in Boston at the home of Dr Alan Richardson Jones and his wife. The department at Harvard Medical School, where I was to spend my Rockefeller Fellowship, were affable and offered a $2,000 supplement to the Rockefeller stipend. Bill Jones asked me if they had put it in writing and when I said no, warned that I should not expect them to honour their verbal offer. But I could not believe that a reputable university like Harvard would renege. I returned overnight to Washington on a sleeper and took the Military Air Transportation Service (MATS) flight back to London. There was plenty to do on my return, completing the experiments on the freezing and thawing of live hamsters. We had a film taken of the procedure and, when in America again for my year at Harvard, this film was a passport for travel around the USA.

  The Year in Boston

  The cost of travel by ship across the Atlantic for the whole family was about £300 one way. The only way we could raise the fare was by selling our house. All through the summer of 1954, a succession of would-be buyers came, attracted by the £3,000 we were asking for our house in Finchley. But one after another their surveyors gave them damning reports on its condition. The would-be purchasers turned it down, often reluctantly, saying it was just the house they wanted. The surveyors all found subsidence and warned that it might not be cured and could lead to expensive structural repairs. I was just about to cancel our American trip when a young couple made an offer: ‘We’ll take it on, warts and all, but for £200 less than you’re asking.’ With the return of our deposit to the building society this left us with just enough money for the fares to New York but not to return, and we arranged then to travel on the Queen Mary.

  Our first glimpse of the formidable bureaucracy of the United States was at their embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. To get an exchange visitor’s visa for a year’s stay at Harvard involved many visits. To make matters worse, in 1954 that grim and unusual man, Senator McCarthy, had undue influence over the politics of the United States. There was more stringent and difficult questioning than was usual at that embassy: questions like, did we intend to overthrow the government of the United States of America by force? It was difficult not to laugh at such absurdities, but we had been warned beforehand that laughing at them was the last thing we should do if we wanted to get a visa. Even odder and more insulting was the question, ‘Is the purpose of your journey solely to set up a house of ill repute and exploit women in prostitution?’ We even had blood taken for the Wassermann test so that they could know whether we were syphilitic. In dear old failing England with its socialist tendencies, we had never encountered anything so demeaning, so crass, as this inquisition from an erstwhile ally. Eventually it was done and we had our visas and tickets. Our home was gone and we were staying in Salisbury for the night before we travelled with Tom Thompson in the Harvard Hospital station wagon with our luggage to Southampton and the Queen Mary.

  On the morning that we left it was all excitement and we were full of wonder at the thought of our coming journey. Compared with an airport today, the ocean terminal at Southampton was not impressive. It had the appearance of a railway station trying to put on airs. The ship’s crew took our luggage and we were on the gangway to the ship within minutes of arriving. The only time spent on land was in saying goodbyes. On the ship they took us to our cabin, large enough and with bunks for all five of us. Our youngest, Andrew, was now almost four years old, Christine ten, and Jane eight. We then walked to the tourist-class dining room for lunch. It seemed to take us an age to reach it, passing along the vast old passageways of the ship. We were soon well aware that she was the largest vessel afloat, so
great was the distance to walk around her. In 1954 the UK was still rationed and we were used to short supplies of food, for there had been fourteen years of privation during and after the war. Our stomachs and our tastes were unprepared for that first meal on the Queen Mary. It was truly gorgeous, and we gorged. Even in tourist class, the cheapest way to travel at £60 a head to New York, the food was plentiful and of good quality, and delivered by waiters who provided an excellent service with several courses to the meal.

  Walking around that floating ants’ nest of a ship we encountered frequent barriers saying, ‘Cabin class only’ and, more rarely, ‘First class only’. But the space available in tourist class was sufficient and included an area on most of the ship’s decks, even at the top. The top deck was near the ship’s funnels and when the ship sailed from Southampton to Cherbourg, her first port of call, we were up there to watch. We forgot that ships always announce their departure by a blast from their hooters, and those of the Queen Mary were claimed to be so loud as to be audible ten miles away. To Helen, Andrew, and me it was the most terrifying sound. A low deep throbbing that seemed to be measured in bels not mere decibels, it shook our bodies as well as our ears. Andrew screamed in terror and we staggered to the shelter of the stairway. We did not return to that deck again for the whole of the trip, but it was a pleasant journey. The five days to New York, even in tourist class, were more comfortable and relaxed than anything the airlines can offer. The shift in time of one hour daily is much easier to cope with than the sudden jerk of five hours. Eating in comfort at dining tables was a joy after so much privation. The ship’s library and cinema had much to offer and there was no difficulty finding space in the ample recreation areas.

  Typically, as young socialists, we resented our exclusion from the first-class territory. What justification was there for these bloated plutocrats and faded gentry to travel so extravagantly? Typically also, we were determined that as soon as we could afford it we would not travel classified amongst the poor but would be amongst first-class also. Such is the contradiction of socialism. To citizens of sensible nations, I must explain that in those days the English were so class-oriented that questions of status were ubiquitous, but it was not all bad. We knew instantly from the class system, from dress, voice, and deportment, just where anybody belonged on the pyramid of our nation. Many, if not most, were contented to know this place and lead their lives at its level. This was true to some extent of us also, but the segregation of classes on a ship somehow seemed to ignite the politics of envy. All this must seem odd, if not mad, to wealthy Americans who choose to travel economy on the flight from America to Europe or even farther. They do so as part of their puritan ethic. I knew American millionaires, at a time when a millionaire was seriously rich, who would never waste money on the greater comfort of business or first-class travel.