Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  Then came a long period, I’ve forgotten just how long, while they checked to see if I was a safe person to let know more about the potential uses of my inventions. In 1966 many of us were still deeply affected by the political theories of socialism and since this at times more or less merged into Marxism, which was of course the Soviet culture, there was a need for care. Many regarded the Cold War as bogus, even wrong. My mother was a highly intelligent woman and a Quaker, not a communist, but she was sure that all the accounts of the gulags in Russia and the cruelty of that truly evil man, Stalin, were capitalist propaganda and had no truth to them. Now, after the Thatcher years and the collapse of the Soviet State, it is difficult to imagine the moral certainty in the socialism of that time. I do not even now know whose opinions they sought about my character and history. I was glad that as a student I had rebelled by joining the Catholic Society at Manchester University and toyed with moral theology instead of Marxism. In any event, I was too much of a simple scientist to swallow the certainty of those with faith, whether Marxist or Christian. Their views on life, the universe, and human behaviour I always found unconvincing. Marxism and Catholic moral theology seemed to have more similarity than difference. One person I know they asked about my character was Chris Gulliver, the landlady of The Bell Inn at Bowerchalke. They told me she was an ideal character reference and one far more likely to know important details of my life than were the professionals of the village such as the vicar or the schoolmistress, who apparently most give as their preferred reference. Rothschild told me several months later that I had passed their tests well. From his smile, I suspect they discovered more about my private life as well as my security rating.

  Then Hugh called, asking me to come to London again. This time my journey was to Leconsfield House in Curzon Street. The cab driver gave me an odd look when I gave him my destination. He knew at that time just what agency Leconsfield House housed, but in the peculiar secrecy of those days, I did not know and neither did the public generally. Here, after signing in again, I met Hugh, who took me to a small room in which sat, to my delight, the good critic of my meeting at Century House. He was David Pengrew and, as the years went by, became a real friend. The discussion now was much more practical. We need, they said, a base for you to establish your work and it will have to be at one of the Ministry of Defence establishments. I immediately thought of the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment (CDEE) at Porton, which is conveniently near to Bowerchalke, being on the other side of Salisbury and about the same distance away. ‘No,’ said Hugh, ‘You would not like it there. We think a better place would be the Admiralty Materials Research Establishment at Holton Heath in Dorset, and that is almost as close to you.’

  Hugh and David came down and stayed the night with us at Bowerchalke. The next day we travelled to Holton Heath to see the director there and prepare a site to work on tracers. The establishment at Holton Heath was in the delightful heathland of Dorset. Here, the sandy soil favours conifers and heather, and it is where most of the United Kingdom’s reptiles are found, including the rare smooth snake. In the First World War it was a munitions factory and later it became a research station for the Navy. The Director, Dr Morris, took us to an area surrounded by a close-knit high steel fence and entered by a single guarded roadway with a small brick office for the guard. Inside were a series of brick buildings that were chemical laboratories. We met the senior chemist, Dr Lithgrove, and went on to a temporary wooden building, converted into a small laboratory. ‘This will do for a start,’ they said. Up until then they had paid my travel and subsistence costs and consulting fees by cheques drawn on Coutts Bank. When I started to work at the laboratory at Holton Heath there was a generous supply of funds available and they provided a graduate scientist, Tony Vizard, and a senior technician, John Brophy, to help me. They then paid what was, in effect, a salary. From the beginning, I sensed that the administration at Holton Heath regarded our laboratory as an abscess in the body of an otherwise healthy civil service establishment. Because of the high classification of our work, no one was allowed to know what we were doing and there was a wonderful freedom from paperwork, form-filling, and administrative meetings. It was an almost ideal way to do research. We soon built samplers that were more sensitive and synthesized or had made better tracer chemicals.

  While work at Holton Heath was progressing, Lester Machta approached me. He was head of the NOAA air resources laboratory at Silver Springs in Maryland, just outside Washington, and he had a grand experiment in mind. He wanted to label the air mass over the West Coast of the United States and follow its motion across the whole continent. His interest was meteorological. His sponsors were keen to know how toxic or radioactive products of a disaster spread across whole regions. He was anticipating the real disaster that came much later at Chernobyl. He knew of my electron capture detector and needed advice on how to use it for such an experiment. Collaboration with NOAA scientists on tracer technology would bring benefits for our work at Holton Heath. At the same time, it was potentially a conflict of interest and a breach of security. Here, David gave a decision that helped immensely—I do not know whether it was his decision or from the service itself. It was that uses by the security services of the tracer technology were wholly secret, but that the technology itself was open. Thus, collaboration with NOAA on a technological basis was fine and could do nothing but benefit us, so long as we kept them in ignorance about our uses of the technology. It was a wise decision and one that was inevitable, for Rothschild had been keen to use the technology in the interest of Shell. Shell went as far as labelling gases passing along pipelines and arranging systems that would automatically switch from one pipeline to another when the tracer material heralded the approach of a different product.

  It was also an excellent technique for leak detection. This use was potentially hazardous and I was once able to stop what might have been a disaster of considerable magnitude. Hearing of my technique from Shell, the Gas Board, without telling me, decided to label one of their major gas pipes on the eastern side of England with sulphur hexafluoride to detect leaks along the pipeline. The technique would have worked well; unfortunately, they did not know that SF6, unlike the perfluorocarbons, is active chemically. If mixed with a flammable gas like methane or hydrogen, it will explode on a spark almost as violently as the same mixture of hydrocarbon and oxygen. And here they were, about to let in two whole cylinders of liquid SF6 into the natural gas pipeline to label it. A single spark at the point of introduction could have produced a disastrous explosion, but fortunately we were able to warn them in time. Leak detection, air mass, and water labelling proceeded scientifically alongside the more secure work that the security services were doing, and this parallel development has continued for over twenty years.

  The potential for chemical tracing was considerable, and soon the security services decided to build a proper new laboratory at Holton Heath specifically for this need. At that time Hugh Jones, a scientist working for the Admiralty and cleared to know about the work we were doing, was appointed to take charge of the laboratory. He and I spent some happy times planning the layout of a pleasant and efficient purpose-built laboratory in a comfortable setting. I was then able to drop back to my preferred role of adviser rather than active worker on the scene. In the new lab, work was much easier and soon the staff increased. I persuaded Peter Simmonds, who had been with me at Mill Hill, Houston, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to come back to England and work part time at Holton Heath whilst continuing his external connection with the JPL. The San Fernando Valley earthquake in 1971, I think, helped to disentangle him from his home in Tajunga near the Jet Propulsion Lab. He and his wife Tina had a tough time in that earthquake and were quite glad to come back to the more stable environment of England. In the same year, Brian Foulger took over the administration from Hugh Jones. With the increased staff, the Holton Heath lab began to prove itself.

  Throughout history, we have regarded our custodians warily. We
are wise to worry about their accountability: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’. Fiction, lurid journalism, the old Left, Soviet disinformation, and Irish republicans—I doubt if these conspire to denigrate the security services. But without conspiring, they certainly had left me, as part of the public, with a strong impression that these services were too powerful and unaccountable and could even commit arbitrarily violent deeds. We often ignore the extent of Soviet disinformation that once went on. I used to listen occasionally to the broadcasts on the short waves from Moscow. I well remember the frequent insistence during the 1980s that the AIDS virus was a deliberate product of United States laboratories. I knew that this was a scientific impossibility, but did the other listeners? It is so easy to sow rumour and I’m sure that many of our views of the security services come from the flood of disinformation that journalists, who were much too uncritical, all too readily spread. I do not know what goes on at the sharp end, but from meetings to discuss the deployment of surveillance devices I have been struck by their friendly humour. The kind of exchange I encountered is, ‘You don’t expect me to believe, do you Doc, that that thing you’re holding in your hand can detect which burrow the rabbit is in from a hundred yards?’ They were to me mostly like a refined version of the policeman on the beat I had so often encountered as a child in Brixton. It was not so surprising to find that some of them were Labour supporters, some of them quite devoutly religious, and one was even a Quaker. They surely did not seem at all like their detractors would have us believe.

  On the negative side, the one thing that bothered me about my work with civil service agencies was their failure to appreciate the value of the ideas and inventions that they generate and apply. In America, there is always a constant watch to see if any idea that comes up constitutes a patentable invention, from which the inventor or the organization can profit. In addition, of course, society itself profits. Wonderful ideas would spin off in Britain, and I have seen this happen throughout my scientific life, but no one would ever bother to patent them. We complain bitterly when others patent and profit from our ideas and we complain even more when we have to pay them royalties for our own intellectual property—penicillin being the most outrageous example of this. It’s not anybody’s fault really; it is just that there is no feedback. There is little direct benefit to a civil servant in patenting an idea, since he will gain nothing from it. It will also mean a lot of work dealing with lawyers and I do not underestimate just how much work is required to patent something. For this, the country or the organization may have a reward but not the individual civil servant. So it is small wonder that there were always more urgent things than the patenting of bright ideas, but we have all lost because of this. I do believe that things are now better, but the fact that they are legally better and rewards are available, does not immediately produce results. It will take time for the culture of reward to move in, and as things are now, I think we have no option but to take it on.

  Our tribal nature affects science as much as any other human activity. I soon found that our work at Holton Heath was strictly limited to chemistry; I suppose we were fortunate enough to have so large a field to roam in. I knew, though, that there were better ways of achieving our practical aims by using other scientific methods, for example, those in the disciplines of physics or biology. For many years, the internal tribal barriers between the sciences successfully prevented us from using our brains and our skills to answer urgent practical problems in the best way, not just a chemical way. Reasons such as the ‘need to know’ and the avoidance of departmental friction were used to frustrate our efforts. All of this was to the disadvantage of the service itself. I cannot too strongly stress my belief that the best results do not come from setting physicists, chemists, and biologists in isolated competition. They come from allowing the best group to emerge from a free association of all of them. The organization of the civil and military services is such that there is little hope of achieving this scientific nirvana. We need to keep it in mind, though, as a counsel to perfection.

  The belief that the employment of a hundred qualified scientists will always do a hundred times as much as the employment of one of them is foolish but persistent. Generals know that they can train and inspire a group of fit young men to become fine soldiers. Their success in war will depend on good leadership, plenty of ammunition, and preponderant numbers. It does not work like this in science. Most universities have become like the fast-food industry. They package products that are safe, consistent in taste, but rarely surprisingly good. One or two scientists with a true vocation, aided by some skilled and dedicated technicians, are worth hundreds of lumpen graduates or PhDs and they are far less expensive. There is not enough natural selection at work. The incompetent who would not have survived in the commercial world suffer no more than a lack of promotion, or sometimes even tactical promotion to a position where they are merely a nuisance and cannot do damage. On the other hand, the service showed an impressive concern that no device we proposed would adversely affect the health of those under surveillance. Cynics might say that this was from a fear of lawsuits, but whatever the reason, the message given by the press that they were violent and unaccountable just did not wash. Fortunately for all of us, our civil service is a benign institution. It is accountable, although indirectly. My strong impression is that security services as part of it are also accountable, but in a different way. The security services share with the health service a degree of professional dedication that to some extent offsets the indirect accountability of state-run enterprises. Perhaps a life spent close to the sharp end brings out the best in physicians and security agents. My work for the security services has rewarded me with some real friends and the wonderful consolation that at least I have done something to counter acts of terrorism, not just ground my teeth in frustration.

  During my years with the Security Services I developed an instinct for discretion. This was invaluable in my work with multinational companies and other government agencies, where I discovered much more about their workings than I needed to know. Fiction and political activists usually portray these large and powerful entities as malign and acting against the public good in a conspiratorial way. In all my years as an independent scientist, I never encountered a conspiracy, but cover-ups were ubiquitous. The most enduring human trait seems to me to be cronyism; as Benjamin Franklin said, ‘We must all hang together or assuredly we shall hang separately.’

  Hewlett Packard

  Avondale in Pennsylvania is not far from the huge chemical industrial activity of Wilmington, the home city of Dupont. In 1962 the air of that region often carried a smell of chemistry, and the water tasted of things in addition to the chlorine used to disinfect it, but Avondale also had a rural air; there were fields and woods and many mushroom farms that used a great deal of fresh dung. This agricultural smell mingling with that of organic chemicals from Wilmington gave the region an unforgettable and evocative aroma, and the first time I smelt it was on a visit from Houston one morning in February 1962. I was there to discuss with F and M Scientific the use of the electron capture detector. F and M was a small but vigorous firm started a few years previously by three Dupont scientists with an entrepreneurial inkling, and they manufactured gas chromatographs. This is something that happens often in the United States and plays an important part in its economic success. Young men with ambition will leave the safe career status of a large organization like Dupont and seek their fortunes by starting their own business. Sadly, this is something that only rarely happens in the United Kingdom.

  Jim Peters, who worked for F and M, met me at Philadelphia Airport. He was a tall young man with a strange accent, which soon resolved into a mixture of South Africa and Liverpool. To hear it made me feel homesick and from that visit on, we became firm friends. Jim was my technical contact for the visit that lasted two days and for many years afterwards. I often stayed with him and his wife, Chris, and he visited me in England. The efficiency and professionalism of F a
nd M in 1962 impressed me. They understood and used my detector well. Al Zlatkis and I had formed a small firm called Ionics Research and we made a know-how agreement with F and M Scientific. Few outside industry seem to understand how important ‘know-how’ is. Possessing the patent of an invention is like having the seed of a fruit tree. You cannot harvest the fruit until the seed is planted, tended while growing, and unless there is the wisdom to wait until the fruit is ripe and ready to be picked. Know-how covers all these details and is just as valuable as the patent itself. Part of the agreement was that I should visit the firm twice a year to discuss problems and further developments. The owners of the firm took me to lunch at the Brown Derby restaurant in a nearby village. The restaurant was one of those dark wooden buildings so common in New England; and the food, which included their speciality, crab cakes, was edible and sufficient. This visit was to start a routine of visits there that was to last, for me, thirty-two years. To meet with a group of friends and enjoy a pleasant memorable routine in between mornings and afternoons of challenging practical problems is one of the delights of doing science independently.