Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  The journey to the United States in early October was pleasantly enhanced for us by rough weather. This kept many in their cabins sea sick and there were few in the dining rooms and recreation areas. There were gales blowing most of the journey, and the Atlantic swell made the bows of the ship rise and fall through sixty feet or more. The tourist class lounges and bars were in this part of the ship. This we didn’t mind in the least; indeed, we enjoyed it.

  Looking out from a ship on a transatlantic voyage there are three great sights: the green countryside of England as the ship passes down Southampton water into the Solent; the sea in all its moods; and the splendid arrival at New York past the Statue of Liberty and to the white cliffs of the skyscrapers. The airlines can never offer so magnificent a prospect. As the ship berths on the East Side, its large, functional, but seemly bulk is a true match for the architecture of New York. The stopping of the ship’s engines punctuates the journey’s end. Then comes the anticlimax. On the Queen Mary this involved for us a long and wearying wait in queues in the ship’s lounges for the attentions of the immigration officers.

  My experiences of public servants like police officers and tax inspectors came from my growing up in London. This was a time when policemen, even in the rough area of Brixton, were friendly men who walked the streets and who seemed to spend as much time holding up traffic to let children like me, or the elderly, cross the road, as in deterring crime. I never saw in all my childhood, especially with the poorer children of Brixton, anything that would fit the academic Marxist image of an oppressive force that kept the poor in their place. Indeed the police were mostly working-class themselves. If the Marxists were right and the function of the police was oppression, then they did their job with such tact and sensitivity that no one on the ground, except criminals, was aware of it. But London in those times, in spite of profound racial differences, was only stratified by class, and it was otherwise a homogeneous society. It was so different from the mix of cultures that London is now and New York was then. An Austrian living in Boston in those days said to me, ‘I would never live in America if the police were unarmed or in Britain if they were armed.’ Waiting in the vast dockside customs sheds for our luggage to be checked, we saw the armed police around and immediately were made aware how different from our own was the society in which we would spend the next year. Two officials from the Rockefeller Foundation met us in the customs shed and eased our way through customs and into a taxi. They took us to the Abbey Hotel in Manhattan. It was not far from the Penn Station from where we would be travelling to Boston the next day. Travelling with my family gave a wholly different perspective from my solo journey earlier that year. Everything we saw in New York during our brief stay was strange, fascinating, yet slightly threatening. How odd that the hotel had no public rooms at all, just a small entrance hall with a reception desk and a row of lifts. Meals were in restaurants somewhere in the streets around. In the evening we chose an automat to eat in; we were too insecure to want to interact with these strange and inscrutable New Yorkers. They were so unlike the men we had known in the American Forces during the war. To add to our feeling that we were indeed alien, Andrew had a nosebleed during the night and bloodstained his bed. We left in the morning in a hurry and embarrassed, imagining that shortly afterwards there would be an encounter with the police and the problem of convincing them that the blood had come from nothing more serious than a nosebleed.

  Soon we were in the magnificent Penn Station and ready for our journey. We had our tickets and we boarded the Boston train for the 250-mile journey from New York to Boston, about the same distance as from London to Newcastle. In England, a fast steam train in those days did the journey in about three hours. We were surprised to find that our 9 am train did not arrive in Boston until 3.30 that afternoon. It was a dismal journey, creeping past dry, barren-looking countryside and numerous small industrial towns. If this was New England, presumably therefore most like old England, whatever must the rest of the United States be like? Later we found that in many ways New England—in landscape, culture, and peoples—is the least English of all the regions. It was different from the countryside and small towns of Texas, which later we found was much more familiar and pleasant to live in.

  We eventually arrived in Boston hungry and thirsty, for there was no restaurant car on the train, just a vendor selling peanuts and Hershey bars. We took a taxi to Harvard Medical School and went with our entire luggage to the Department of Biophysical Chemistry, in which I was due to work for the next year. They seemed quite unprepared for our arrival, although I had written on several occasions telling them exactly when and on what date we would arrive. After a while someone managed to find another Englishman, Kenneth Walton, who was also spending a year in the department but had arrived earlier, and he took us to the Peter Bent Brigham Hotel just nearby. It was an ancient faded wooden structure with miserable rooms, more like a doss house than a hotel but, as he said, it was cheap. We were rapidly discovering that the $3,000 a year fellowship that Rockefeller Foundation was providing was wholly inadequate to support Helen, the three children, and me.

  We had to find somewhere to live quite soon, and the next day we spent visiting a round of realtors. All were unable to offer anything that we could afford until the last one—a Jewish realtor—mistook me for a Jew, not just a quarter of one. He offered us a flat in Brookline, conveniently near the university and in the Jewish quarter of Boston. The rent was $140 a month, which was more than half our stipend. But since the department at Harvard University had promised to add $2,000 a year, our difficulties would merely be temporary. We discovered later that the size of our family had prevented easy access to rented accommodation. Our three children were seen as a threat and no one wanted to rent their property to us. The Jewish realtor who finally did said afterwards that it was because we were English that we got the flat. I think that this was because at that time English children were seen as well behaved. After visiting the nearby supermarket and settling in, life seemed less stark.

  The next morning I went to the lab to start my year’s work. I found it was oddly disorganized. The labs were poorly equipped compared with those at Mill Hill and money seemed to be in short supply. I went to see the staff member who had invited me to Harvard. High on my agenda was the $2,000 a year that Harvard, through him, had offered to supplement my Rockefeller stipend. To my dismay, he said that Senator McCarthy had introduced new regulations concerning the employment of aliens, which made it impossible for the university to help me. I had no way to check his statement and the first few days in the United States, with hotel bills and purchases to equip our flat, had reduced the tiny sum of two weeks’ salary, $114, to almost nothing and there were two weeks remaining. We found near complete inflexibility. When I asked how we were to live, the reply was ‘Well, give up smoking, you’ll survive.’ The Rockefeller Foundation was equally unhelpful. When I pointed out that the two weeks’ stipend given me in New York was not enough to live on, their response was to say, ‘You should not have come with three children and a wife. Why have you not left them in England?’ They refused to give an advance to tide us over. We began to realize how cosseted a society socialist Britain was and that America was a world of harsh reality for which we were wholly unprepared. I mentioned my plight to an English colleague, Bill Jones, who I had met in Washington in January and who worked in the blood-grouping laboratory just down Longwood Avenue from Harvard Medical School. He snorted and said, ‘I warned you about that bunch.’ He suggested that I sell a pint of my blood. The rate then paid was $10 a pint. I had given many pints in England for experimental purposes so I thought why not sell my blood to feed the family until our next pay cheque comes in two weeks. Bill had the technicians check my blood group while I chatted with him about his invention, a blood-cell counter, which he called an ‘arithmometer’. When he saw their report he said, ‘You are in luck. Your group is so rare that we will pay $50 a pint.’ I was delighted to give my pint of blood, for they w
ere paying me almost a week’s stipend and in cash. Bill explained that my blood group was common among Baffin Land Inuits but extremely rare elsewhere. It was no use for transfusion but valuable for typing other bloods. We celebrated that night in our Brookline flat on Beacon Street with a good meal, our first since we had arrived.

  At Harvard Medical School, I learnt how to separate the lipoproteins of the blood and then I examined their response to freezing and thawing. The Department of Biophysical Chemistry, where I was to spend my year’s fellowship, had recently lost the man who founded it, Professor EJ Cohn. He pioneered the separation of the proteins of the blood by a technique he called cold ethanol fractionation. He was a good scientist but with a difficult personality, caused perhaps by the disease that caused his death, a pheochromocytoma. This is a tumour of the adrenal gland and it causes an excessive secretion of adrenal hormones, which kept him permanently switched on. To perform the separations of the proteins he had built a large cold room kept at —20° C. His graduate students were obliged to spend their time in this arctic environment. Because of his disease, he slept little and would telephone the cold room at any hour during the night seeking news of the progress of the latest separation technique. Surviving students told me that their progress towards a doctorate depended on their prompt answering of the cold-room telephone whenever it rang. They seemed to live in terror of their professor and I was concerned at how little had been done since his death to improve working conditions.

  I was not keen to work in the cold room and managed to persuade the department to buy two top-opening deep freezers from Sears Roebuck. We could then keep our solutions in the cold while we were in the warmth of the lab. I began to realize as the fall of 1954 moved towards winter that it would take time for the department to recover its poise. The new professor, Dr Oncley was personally kind but offered no practical help with funding. An odd episode took place at Christmas. A letter came in the post to the department from a distinguished physician, Dr Henry Forbes, known for his strong stand in favour of birth control. It was a personal letter to me and it enclosed a cheque for $50. He had heard from his friends in England that we were having a hard time and had enclosed something so that we could at least enjoy a good Christmas. There was also an invitation to bring the family to his home in the Blue Hills near Boston. The effects of this gift and letter astonished me. Suddenly we became persons of consequence. The Forbeses were one of the old Harvard families and such condescension (in Jane Austen’s parlance) greatly elevated our social standing. I had always thought of the United States as a place free of snobbery. Yet, here was a piece of almost 19th-century class distinction. Michael Crichton’s semi-autobiographical book of his days at Harvard Medical School, A Case of Need, confirms our experience as far from singular.

  By Christmas 1954, things were looking up for us in Boston. We had found it impossible to survive in Brookline with so much of our income going on rent and we moved to a twenty-roomed Charles Addams style house for rent at $90 a month in the suburb of Auburndale. The owner, a true Old New England lady named Pockwince, let it to us on the basis that we would allow prospective buyers to see round. The capacious basement was full of old furniture. She said, ‘Go to the hardware store, buy yourself a cross-cut saw and you will have all the fuel you need for the winter by burning these old pieces here.’ This I did, which was as well, for it was a truly cold winter with temperatures down to –20° C.

  Through Bill Jones, the Jarrell family befriended us. Dick Jarrell, still a friend who writes yearly, was President of an instrument company, Jarrell Ash, that made spectrometers and other scientific instruments. He and Kiffy, his wife, were unstintedly generous and invited all the Lovelocks to spend Christmas with them at their home in Waban, a Boston suburb. They also had four children, so it was a noisy but delightful Christmas. As our year in Boston passed the Jarrells became close friends, and we spent a two-week holiday with them at their beach house at Surfside in Nantucket. I think that I was able to repay Dick in part by the advice I gave him on instrument science.

  The research I did at the Department of Biophysical Chemistry was mostly on the effects of freezing and thawing on lipoproteins. My earlier work had led me to believe that the damage suffered by living cells when they froze was mostly to the structures of their membranes and these were made of lipoprotein—a combination of fatty substances like lecithin with protein. Using a technique developed by another Rockefeller Fellow, Dr Kenneth Walton, I was able to harvest beta-lipoprotein from blood. I did this work in collaboration with an American postdoctoral student, Dr Al Keltz. We found that beta-lipoprotein was only slightly damaged by freezing and were able to devise practical methods for its preservation in the frozen state. We tried without success to publish the work and eventually a summary of it appeared in a paper I gave before a Royal Society discussion meeting in 1956.

  As we moved into 19551 began to fret about how we would be able to pay the fare back home. The least expensive way was on the Newfoundland, a 5,000-ton cargo liner that sailed from Boston via Halifax, Nova Scotia and St Johns, Newfoundland to Liverpool. It would cost £250. There seemed no chance of saving this much from our meagre stipend. Then I saw in a copy of Nature an advertisement from the CIBA foundation about a prize for an essay on Research in Ageing. The prize was £250, just what we needed, and I bought with the cash for my next bleed a second-hand typewriter and wrote the essay sitting in bed at our Auburndale home. Helen transcribed it on the typewriter and we sent it off to CIBA in February. In July we heard that I had won: soon the cheque came and we were able to confirm our bookings on the ship. It was a joyful return in September 1955 on a delightful small ship and the journey gave us the opportunity to see those rarely visited places, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

  I have mixed memories of Boston. On the bad side are my experiences at Harvard Medical School. For the first three months I was there in 1954, they treated us as American universities in those days treated their graduate students. They expected us to survive on $3,000 a year, not easy for foreigners with three children to support. The department needed me badly to bring to them the know-how of blood freezing. I did this so well that the department, or one member of it, won the Glycerol Prize for their work. What I did not know, and no one had explained to me, was that at an American university you often have to bargain for your salary. When it came to the end of our year in Boston, and we were longing to return home, the Harvard department suddenly realized that they still needed me and offered $6,000 a year if I would stay on. I was incensed. We had suffered privation but had survived, in part, by selling my blood, and through the kindness of our friends and I now realized that the story about Senator McCarthy preventing the department from keeping their promise of extra salary was fiction. After that, I had no confidence in them and no intention of staying on. Not understanding, they raised the offer to $10,000. Uplifted by our righteous indignation, perversely, we returned to the poorer but gentler welfare-oriented socialism of the United Kingdom, where salaries could not be negotiated, at least not at the MRC.

  The other side of Boston was the personal kindness of our neighbours, who sensed our difficulties and remembered their own hard times in the Great Depression. Because we were poor, we met many ordinary Americans who had the same problems as we did. Class divisions there are as large as they are in the UK, but the segregation is by income, not status, and the separation of the classes is geographic. Where you live depends on what you earn and to some extent on your race.

  My Last Years at the Mill Hill Institute

  When I returned to Mill Hill from America in 1955 I found that Parkes’s department was still deeply involved with whole-animal freezing and reanimation. Audrey Smith had carried the technique, still using my homemade diathermy, to the point where it was almost routine to freeze and reanimate hamsters. She presented her work in three papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and I think that Parkes submitted them for her because, generously, he wanted to reward Audrey for h
er success and the status that it gave to his department by promoting her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. My own contributions to this success, through the diathermy equipment and the physical measurements during freezing were recognized by my appearance as a second author on the third paper. To be fair on Parkes and Audrey, they did not understand the amount of hard science involved in the physical-chemistry of cryobiology. Also, I think that they both felt about me in the same way that a car driver regards a police car that keeps station behind him. I was a representative of the law sent by the stern figure of the Institute’s director. My presence was a constraint on their freedom to act like happy biologists and ignore physics and chemistry, or so they seemed to think. In practice, Sir Charles Harington only asked me if I was happy working for them, never about what they did. I was content, for they were kind enough personally and the work that I did was fulfilling.