Homage to Gaia

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Homage to Gaia Page 21

by James Lovelock


  The practice of science in the 1950s was much different from the way it is done now. As I have often mentioned, most noticeable was the absence of what I see as an excessive public concern over health and safety. We were qualified scientists and expected to plan our research to be no danger to anyone, including us, and during the time I worked for the MRC there were a few accidents but nothing that made a public scandal. We used radioactive isotopes in profusion, but I would be surprised to learn if anyone working at Mill Hill suffered adverse consequences. During 1956–7, I was using radioactive iodine-131 and chromium-55 to label red blood cells. These isotopes would arrive at the Institute usually as solutions in small glass bottles with rubber seals of the kind used for injectable medicines. The bottles were enclosed in small lead pots to be safe to handle. I would calculate the thickness of glass needed to shield me from the radiation and the time that I could allow my hands to be safely exposed as I drew up the solution into a syringe. I much preferred to do this myself than rely on some appointed health physics officer to take charge. On one occasion, when making the preliminary measurements with a counter, I was surprised to find that the laboratory background was high. My first thought was that I had spilt some of the iodine-131 onto the laboratory bench. I checked with a portable monitor borrowed from biophysics and found that the isotope was not just on the bench but also everywhere in my lab. The levels were not an immediate health hazard, just worrying. Had I somehow been careless?

  Next day the counts were somewhat less but I decided to report the event anyway. However, before I could do so, I was called to the director’s office. Two other scientists, one from the biochemistry division and the other from chemistry, were also there and apparently, they had had the same experience. Their laboratory backgrounds had risen mysteriously the previous day. Further checks showed that iodine-131 contaminated the whole Institute. Sir Charles was naturally perturbed. He wanted to know if any of us had done anything that could have resulted in such a contamination. A few simple calculations suggested that the quantity of isotope we possessed was much too small to label the whole of the lab uniformly. The fact that iodine-131 has a half-life of seven days meant that our concern rapidly went away by itself. I heard nothing more of this event until about fourteen years later when, in 1971, I was visiting Harwell, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Research Laboratory. Alan Eggleton, a senior staff member, told me how he had followed the spread of iodine-131 from the reactor fire at Windscale in Cumbria. A graphite-moderated reactor caught fire and spread some of its accumulated radioactivity over the countryside. It was the world’s first serious reactor accident, and in a way, a warning of the Chernobyl incident yet to happen. I wonder if the mysterious background increase of radioactive iodine at Mill Hill came from the drifting radioactive cloud from Windscale, 250 miles away. This incident exposed the people of England to what some would now consider a dangerous level of radioactive contamination. I wonder why we have heard nothing of an epidemic of thyroid and other cancers in the years that followed?

  The only deaths or serious laboratory accidents at Mill Hill were among the virologists. As I described earlier, several of them were seriously ill with typhus caught in the laboratory during the Second World War, and two died of it. Chemists like me led a charmed life. On our shelves were chemicals that would terrify present-day health and safety officials. Exotic materials such as Clostridium perfringens toxin, perfluoroisobutene, nitrogen mustard, beryllium sulphate, and uranium nitrate, all sat in their bottles, or small cylinders, sedately around the walls of my lab. Common poisons like cyanide were everywhere. I would find it impossible to do science under the nanny-like restrictions today. Science, even as we practised it in the old days, is nowhere near so dangerous an occupation as riding a motorcycle or climbing mountains. Those of us who choose science as our life’s vocation should plan our own protection and be personally responsible for our environment and that of our colleagues. Recently, I purchased a minute quantity of thorium-232 for some experiments. The amount of the isotope I purchased was less than that of the same isotope on a luminous wristwatch I wore for ten years day and night from 1958 to 1968. In spite of this, the expense and the paperwork now mandatory were so great that it nearly deterred me from starting the work at all. Had the same restrictions operated in the 1950s, I would never have invented the electron capture detector or other ionization detectors. Then Rachel Carson might never have written her seminal book, Silent Spring, and it might have taken ten years longer before we became aware of the environment and its problems. I wish that Green politicians who introduce legislation to protect the public from toxic or radiation hazards would exempt qualified scientists working in their laboratories from the restrictions of their laws.

  Notice that my time as a journeyman was ending came in March 1961, in the form of an ordinary airmail envelope, which lay on my desk at Mill Hill when I arrived one morning for work. It was from what seemed to be a senior officer of the US Government, the director of Space Flight Operations for the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, NASA. The acronym NASA is now a commonplace and everyone knows what it is. In those days, a mere three years after the first Russian satellite had bleeped its simple manic message, beep-beep-beep, around the world, not many of us were aware of the name NASA. The letter itself was even more intriguing. It was an invitation to join a party of scientists who were about to explore the Moon. I was enthralled. Here was a serious person asking me to join with others in what a few years back would have been science fiction. It was for me like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if, at the peak of passion, I had received a yes from my loved one. To be asked, a mere three years after Sputnik, to join in a lunar exploration was such a thrill. More than this, I began to realize that this letter was deliverance. The past year I had spent somewhat miserably trying to screw up the courage to tell my director and the kindly people who ran Mill Hill that I wanted to leave. How could I tell them I wanted to work alone as an independent scientist? How could I say that their comfortable, tenured, secure existence, where I was free to do almost anything I wished, was not enough? But they knew my love for the physical sciences and astronomy and this letter gave me the way in which to formulate an honourable explanation for my departure.

  At that time, to make matters more difficult, the United Kingdom was suffering from a brain drain, the haemorrhage of talented people from western European countries to America. Large incomes, generous conditions of work and the ability to spend freely on equipment attracted them. It seemed so much more than was available in our comparatively poor and declining state. Talent will always go where the working conditions are best and this is the way of the free world. Our government knew this and was wise enough not to put up any kind of Berlin Wall, even of the mind, or in any way to discourage the free movement of its subjects. But most of us felt outrage when a colleague, newly elected to the Royal Society, or otherwise honoured, would immediately use the prestige of his newly acquired honour to bargain for the maximum income in the USA. They were, I suppose, the early yuppies, and just as annoying. It was not easy for me to say that I wanted to leave for America, but Sir Charles Harington accepted my desire to join the moon expedition as reasonable. He well understood my thinking, and knew that I was not merely seeking greener pastures. He saw it as an unparalleled opportunity for one of his scientists.

  The letter from NASA set me free to become an independent scientist, but there were to be two years and four months of transition. I moved from work as a tenured civil servant to a limbo-like state. When the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which was a NASA laboratory, invited me to join with them as an experimenter on the first lunar mission, Surveyor, I could have gone to work there full time, but that would have merely changed work at one good institute for less secure employment at another. My first step was to seek a temporary post as a visiting professor at the University of Houston, where a colleague, Albert Zlatkis, was Professor in the Department of Chemistry. He
re I would fund myself by applying for a NASA grant to do detector development, the kind of work that JPL required of me. This was my plan of action. Then, wholly unexpectedly, I had a visit from Marjorie and Evan Horning, two American lipid biochemists I had met at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, near Washington, in the previous year. They told me they were setting up a lipid research centre in Baylor University College of Medicine, also in Houston. Would I join them as a research professor? It was a most generous offer, with a dream salary of $20,000 per annum. Since the detector development I would be doing for NASA was also what the lipid researchers wanted, I thought, why not?

  During the summer of 1961 I prepared for our move as a family from Bowerchalke to Houston. The job offered was also tenured, but my long-term plan was to save enough spare cash from my generous American salary to set up an independent laboratory in Bowerchalke. There was sadness about my last month at Mill Hill; now that the stress of commuting would soon be over, I began to see how fine an institute it was. What a wonderful community of scientists they were, but I had no serious doubts about my decision and somehow sensed that before many years passed Mill Hill would cease to be the whirlpool of excellence that I had swum in. We sold our house in Bowerchalke to a retired Canon of the church. He told me later that its efficient central heating gave warmth, which was a joy to him and his wife after the long years spent in cold and draughty rectories.

  5

  The First Steps to Independence at Houston, Texas

  We travelled to New York on the old Mauritania. It was almost her last voyage and we were able to savour the grandeur of this impermanent monument of a once great and powerful nation. We stayed one night in New York and then took an early version of a passenger jet, a Boeing 707, to Houston. Ab Zlatkis met us and took us to a motel near the university in downtown Houston. Ab was a lean dark tallish man who looked and moved like Groucho Marx. The Zlatkis family was kind and hospitable to us during our stay in Houston and we were especially fond of Esther, Ab’s wife, who freely gave her friendship and practical help. I soon found that the lipid research centre at Baylor was not yet built, so there was plenty of time for house hunting, and it did not take long to find a delightful five-bedroom house being built by a craftsman builder on Stony Creek Drive. This was a quiet road in the wooded Memorial district of west Houston and by far its most pleasing suburb. It would be completed in November, two months ahead; meanwhile, we rented an apartment close to the University of Houston. It was a tough two months for Helen and the family, living in an apartment whose air-conditioning system consisted of buzzing boxes built into a wall below the windows, and with Houston in October and November tropical in its heat. The knowledge that soon we would live in a fully air-conditioned house with a pleasant garden made our stay in the apartment tolerable, and there was much to keep us busy. We had arrived in the United States illegally on a visitor’s visa. A helpful United States Consul who operated from Southampton in southern England advised us to do this. He told us that the United States Embassy in London was full of career civil servants forever dreaming up new jobs for themselves, and that the long and tedious process of visa application was partly to justify their existence. ‘Have nothing to do with them,’ he said. ‘I will give you visitors’ visas, then when in Houston go to the Immigration and Naturalization Service there and ask to be admitted as resident aliens. There’s no hurry to do it; get yourselves settled in and then go.’ This we did, and to our joy, instead of having long waits and endless crazy questions at the London Embassy, a kindly official welcomed us and said how glad he was ‘that you nice folk want to live in Houston’. The paperwork was over in an hour and we received our green cards shortly afterwards. This, if it still works, is by far the best way for prospective immigrants to enter the United States.

  We had furniture to buy for our new house. At first we were surprised to find that the local stores would not take payment by cheque, ‘where are your credit cards?’ was their cry. In England in the early 1960s credit cards barely existed, and even if they had, the Houston shops would not have accepted them. Zlatkis came to our rescue. He had a relative who was part of the Nieman Marcus organization. Nieman Marcus is a department store with branches in the large cities of Texas, very upmarket and somewhat like Harrods once was. Soon we had a Nieman Marcus credit card and suddenly financial doors were open to us.

  Before Christmas 1961 we settled in at Stony Creek Drive. Our plot of land had recently been wild wood and our garden terminated at a creek leading to Buffalo Bayou. It was rather like living in a tropical forest without the inconveniences. Armadillos would wander up to the door at night and the most amazing varieties of insect life buzzed and flitted before our eyes. There were over twenty species of snake in our garden, including coral snakes, water moccasins, copperheads, and several kinds of rattlesnake. None of these seemed to mind our presence and they were a source of endless fascination. On Christmas Day we sat in the newly planted garden, enjoying warm sunshine and a temperature of 84° F. I had invited my Mill Hill technician, Peter Simmonds, who had just graduated, to join me at Baylor and use the time there to take a PhD degree. He and his wife Tina stayed with us for the Christmas period whilst they house hunted. The Lipid Research Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine was now open and we set up working in one of the most lavish laboratory environments of the 20th century. So generous were the funds available that we were able to buy any equipment we thought might be needed. Strangely, the two and a half years in the Houston laboratory were among the least scientifically productive of my lifetime. There were many reasons for this, not least, the frequent visits to JPL and the long summers back in England, but I do believe that a surfeit of equipment is a handicap, not a benefit, to a scientist like me. It stifles invention and instead of devising new instruments with which to ask questions of Nature I was playing with the instruments we had bought.

  I greatly enjoyed the time in Houston. I thrive in hot weather and like the ant seem to move faster and work harder when warm—and it could be very warm in Houston. However, my family, in spite of the air-conditioned comfort of our home, rapidly grew to dislike it. Helen did not drive and so was trapped in the house, and although the neighbourhood was quiet and there were sidewalks and an easy walk of a mile to the shops, it was too much for her when the temperature exceeded 85° F and was humid as well. She loved gardening in an environment where lemons and bananas grew outdoors but there is more to life than gardening. My daughters enrolled at the University of Houston. They allowed Christine to enrol in the English Department but Jane, lacking a High School Diploma was only allowed to audit, that is, attend lectures but receive no credits for having done so. This was a cruel blow for Jane who was seriously studious and given a chance would have proceeded to a degree. Christine, who could have graduated, had other ambitions. They seemed to spend most of their time in the Cougar Den of the student’s union, where they met and consorted with a fine group of Arab students. One of them was Wallid Sharib, with whom Christine became engaged to be married. Wallid wanted her to return with him at the end of his studies to the Gaza Strip where his family owned and farmed orange groves. They were both in love but in the end sadly chose to part. The cultural differences and the lot of a woman in traditional Arab society, they both realized, made a life together too difficult to undertake.

  One consequence of the girls’ love of Arabs was that we met few of the local Texan boys or their families. I made up for this by forming a close friendship with Haskell Lilley, a salesman for the engineering firm Barber–Coleman. He was a true Texan, with an accent that was delightful to hear. He, like many Texans I met, was well read and familiar with European history, and our conversations were often political. I noticed that Haskell and other Texans put on a country bumpkin persona when faced by smart but less intelligent Americans from the North. It could be achingly funny when these Northerners were unaware of what was happening. By the end of our stay in Houston I found myself doing it, and on one occasion
it nearly led to my undoing. I was having a sandwich and a coke in a bar at La Guardia Airport in New York, while waiting for a plane to Washington. When I opened my wallet to pay, I found that I had nothing smaller than a $100 bill that I kept as emergency credit. The barman, when I gave it to him, sniffed and said, ‘Don’t you carry anything smaller than this?’ Without thought, I replied, ‘We don’t use anything smaller in Texas.’ Almost instantly, the other customers and the barman became threatening, and it was only my English accent that saved me from a beating or worse.

 

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