Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  Other experiments in my list included one where instead of looking for life-characteristic substances in the soil of Mars, we should look for ordered sequence amongst the substances that we found. If we picked up a trace of a hydrocarbon mixture on Mars and it was of inorganic origin, perhaps from a meteorite, the length or size of the molecules it contained would be randomly distributed. If, on the other hand, it had come from a biological source, the hydrocarbon mixture might show an ordered sequence of the numbers of carbon atoms in each hydrocarbon molecule. For example, the hydrocarbons made by living organisms contain evenly spaced numbers of carbon atoms. This is quite characteristic, and the presence of biogenic hydrocarbons can be distinguished even when diluted ten thousand times by inorganic hydrocarbons. Then there were other intriguing possibilities on a lively planet like the Earth. We could listen for ordered sequences of sounds. Bird song, even rock music, is quite different from mere noise. A fish swimming upstream against the flow of a river shows off the fact it is alive. These experiments would work even with life based on some other element than carbon, and they all were inspired by a Gaian view of the planets, which at the time was little more than a nebulosity of intuition deep within my mind.

  These ideas excited that serious man, Meghreblian, especially the atmospheric analysis experiment. He was much more receptive than the biologist experimenters had been and he was prescient, for now NASA rates highly atmospheric analysis as a way to recognize life on extra solar planets. He knew that I was returning to England the next day and asked me to write a report on my ideas as soon as I got home. ‘When you come back we’ll take it further.’ I was also excited and could think of little else on the long journey home. Even then, it was my extravagant custom always to travel first class. As a frequent traveller, I could not afford the days lost by the stress of economy travel over such a distance. I found that the long journey, up to fourteen hours by air from Los Angeles to London, was so debilitating in economy seats that concentrated thought was impossible for two or three days afterwards. Travelling in the comfort of first class, and sleeping for much of the journey, was for me worth the cost, and our kindly government did allow me to deduct the fares from my company’s tax bill.

  Soon after returning home, I walked over the Downs to Cranborne Chase Woods—a good ten miles around. I was then able to think about a paper on the entropy reduction method of life detection. I wrote it within about ten days and gave it the title ‘A physical basis for life-detection experiments’ and I submitted it to JPL and to Nature. Now this was my first submission to that famous journal since becoming an independent. To my chagrin, the paper came straight back to me with a rather curt note from the editor saying, ‘We don’t take papers from private addresses.’ I heard afterwards that he had said to someone, ‘They usually come from cranks.’ This was a valuable experience. During the twenty years I worked at Mill Hill, Nature had always published my papers without any criticism other than mild editorial correction. The Lancet and other well-known journals also took anything I wrote without demur. It was a shock, and a necessary one, for me to discover that they published my papers not because of my bright ideas, or my reputation, but because of the quality of the Institute from which they came. The editors knew that nothing shoddy would come from a place like Mill Hill, run by a man like Harington. It was quite true; he did read every paper published from the Institute. I knew this from the pencilled editorial comments that were always upon them after they had passed through his office. When I explained to the editor of Nature that I was more than a science-fiction addict writing from a country cottage, that I was a scientist who had paid his dues by many years of work, they published the paper. Indeed, it was a lot easier to get a paper published in those days than now.

  On my next visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about two months later, George Hobby met me as usual in the lobby of the Huntingdon Sheraton Hotel, but he was excited and warned me that things had changed at JPL. Two inspectors had arrived from NASA headquarters to look at, and to report on the quality of the experiments proposed for the Mars Mission. JPL felt like a bank under scrutiny by auditors. There was apprehension in the air. Some hostility had always seemed to exist between the Jet Propulsion Lab and NASA. This is a common experience for those working in institutions that are government supported. There is always a need to check accountability and I think civil servants do tend to be curious about what is going on in their out-stations. I first met these inspectors in the JPL cafeteria and we lunched together. At first sight, they did not seem to be that formidable or frightening. There was Dian Hitchcock, young and attractive but with a no-nonsense air, and her companion Gordon Thomas, a brisk and down-to-earth man who I liked immediately. To my pleasure, they both warmed to my idea of the top-down entropy reduction experiment. Interestingly enough, neither of them was a scientist. Dian was a philosopher who had graduated with singular honours from that good university, Stanford, and Gordon was a highly qualified statistician, but despite their lack of science, they made a powerful team. Dian was amongst the most intelligent of people I had met, and she had that formidable power of philosophers—the power to make me watch carefully my words and their meanings, even in casual conversation. They did not seem handicapped by their lack of a scientific background and were able to analyse, dissect, and judge well the type of experiments that JPL were sending to Mars.

  Dian Hitchcock and Gordon Thomas sent their report on the JPL experiments to NASA headquarters, and soon I received a letter from a senior NASA scientist, the physiologist Orr Reynolds, inviting me to Washington. I checked in at the reception desk of the NASA Washington office, and Dian came to meet me. We went straight away to Reynolds’s office where I found he shared our view that the proposed reductionist life-detection experiments, such as those that sought specific bacteria on the Martian surface, were unlikely to succeed and that a top-down approach had a better chance. He told us that after lunch there was a meeting on life-detection experiments in the conference room. Here scientists and administrators would be able to discuss the general problem of planetary life detection. He hoped that we would both be there to say our piece. On arrival, I was surprised to find copies of the draft of my Nature paper, ‘The physical basis for life-detection experiments’, at everyone’s place. After the meeting began, one scientist, or administrator, I’ve forgotten which, asked, ‘Who wrote this?’ I admitted authorship and prepared myself for the same kind of destructive criticisms that I had encountered from the JPL biologists. To my delight, they treated Dian and me like explorers who had returned with news of a new and more promising land just over the horizon. From then on, life was heady and exciting, and I found myself taken seriously by senior administrators and scientists. I would not have missed it for anything. It was so different from the backseat advisory role that I had had until then. Looking back, I recognize now how much I owed to Dian Hitchcock. Her powerful intellect illuminated my intuition and not too well constructed arguments. She was also an American and knew instinctively, which I did not, how to frame a proposal so that it convinced the listeners. We all know Oscar Wilde’s famous saying about the two cultures divided by a common language. Few of us, especially scientists, realize how different are the meanings of words used by the British and the Americans, and how easily a misunderstanding can arise.

  Within a short time, I was astonished to find myself in the position of acting chief scientist for the physical life-detection experiments of the next Mars mission, then named Voyager. Dian and Gordon were part of the management of this project. Shortly after this meeting in Washington, I returned home to England. This was late in March of that year. Looking back, I realize that I must have been a great trial to my wife, Helen. Excitement over my promotion by NASA and the work of preparing proposals so filled my mind, that there was little time to be concerned with the pressing family matters that were coming fast upon us at that time. We did not know it then, but Helen was already well into the disease multiple sclerosis that was to bl
ight her and all the family’s lives for the next twenty-four years. The physicians in our part of Wiltshire, which was then deep in the English countryside, were not very experienced. Obvious signs, such as episodes of walking with one foot dragging, or partial one-sided blindness, were passed off as something that would get better by itself. Of course, in the nature of that miserable disease, MS, there are remissions, which tended to confirm the physician’s diagnosis. To add to her problems, she was also in the midst of an early menopause. Then, as now, medicine was unduly influenced by an obsessive fear of cancer, and the slight possibility that treatment might cause cancer prevented physicians from using oestrogens, or oestrogen-progesterone mixes, now called hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for those suffering the miseries of the menopause. Many years passed before it became generally recognized that even if the gloomy prognostications of cancer were true, the general misery caused by denying those who suffered badly from the menopause the benefits of treatment were not worth it. Medicine in those days was still too concerned with diagnosis, and treatment was rarely the prime objective. To be fair, medicine before the 1940s had developed a relationship with patients which was little different from that of the alternative practitioners of today. Lewis Thomas describes it so well in his book, The Youngest Profession. Lewis tells of travelling with his father, a physician, on his rounds and discovering there were really only three medicines that worked at all: morphine, quinine, and insulin.

  In late March 1965 I returned to California for a period of six weeks and travelled the whole continent. There were meetings with subcontractors, like Perkin Elmer, chosen by NASA to submit proposals for building the apparatus for the Voyager mission. We drafted a proposal to build an infrared telescope on top of White Mountain in California, specifically designed and built for planetary atmospheric analysis. At this time scientists still seemed to think that life flourished on Mars. I recall Carl Sagan enthusing over the wave of darkness that crosses Mars when winter ends. He and many others saw this phenomenon as indicative of the growth of vegetation, something similar to the springtime greening of the northern hemisphere of the Earth. This image of Mars sustained their belief in biological life-detection techniques.

  There were visits to my friends, Sandy Lipsky at Yale University, who had first introduced me to NASA, and to Ab Zlatkis and Juan Oro in Houston. These university scientists saw my apparent preferment in NASA as a great opportunity for them and for their departments. Much of the time between these trips I spent as the guest of Dian Hitchcock at her home in Farmington, Connecticut. She, Gordon Thomas, and I worked daily putting everything into the design of our physical and chemical methods for detecting life on Mars. I had never before worked from immediately after breakfast right through until nearly midnight, but the pressure was on. In addition to this, we were also preparing a longer and more explicit scientific paper on life detection by atmospheric analysis. Dian helped me turn my partly digested intuitions into a firm and clear statement of why the analysis of the Martian atmosphere was the best way to look for life on the surface. On Bastille Day 1965 the Mariner spacecraft orbiting Mars sent back clear, high definition images of the Martian surface and showed it was all rock or desert. Far from causing the biologists to lose enthusiasm, this dismal news of a dead planet seemed to intensify their wish to seek life there.

  This work for NASA so occupied my time that I had none left to continue working for my customers in England, who provided the bulk of my income. These were Shell, where I worked as an adviser to Victor Rothschild who was then science co-ordinator for the company, and to Pye Unicam in Cambridge, where I also offered advice on designs for laboratory gas chromatographs. Both companies were astonishingly generous. Pye offered to keep me on at half the £3,000-a-year retainer they had previously paid until the NASA work was completed. I did not expect it to continue indefinitely. Shell was even more generous, and Victor Rothschild said that as far as he was concerned I could work for NASA as long as I liked: it was a valuable service, and they would continue to pay my retainer in full. My formal connections with NASA were very vague; all I had was a yearly consultancy with JPL, and Dian paid my travelling expenses and hotel bills during the trips around America from her contract with NASA. If all of the contracts were added together, the proposals were seeking many millions of dollars of funds. In spite of the responsibility, I had no formal agreement with or payment from NASA headquarters itself. It did not seem to matter somehow.

  Dian and I found time to write a paper on our proposed atmospheric life-detection experiment. Although neither of us realized it, the paper was a necessary step on the road to Gaia. Our paper so excited Victor Rothschild that he offered to edit it and then submit it to the Royal Society for publication in their Proceedings, and he duly did this. Predictably, the abominable no-men of the peer-review system rejected Lord Rothschild’s submission just as disdainfully as they have most papers on Gaian topics. Those who rejected our paper took no trouble to read or understand it. They merely gave their own narrow views with that discourtesy typical of academics allowed to write as anonymous critics. Victor Rothschild swore, literally, and said that he would never submit another paper to the Royal Society. It was strangely comforting to me that Carl Sagan, who at that time shared an office with me at JPL, and who disagreed with almost everything in our paper, nevertheless offered to publish it in his journal Icarus, and this is where it appeared.

  Looking back I can understand that the very idea of detecting life on a planet by atmospheric analysis must have seemed outrageous to the conventional astronomers and biologists who reviewed our paper. Conventional biology and planetary science held the false assumption that organisms merely adapt to their environment. My ideas for life detection acknowledged that organisms change their environment—this is an important part of Gaia theory but I did not think of it in that way then. Neither my critics nor I were aware of this fundamental difference of viewpoint. We argued from instinct, both feeling sure that the other was wrong. Peer review normally works well, but in these circumstances it was bound to fail.

  In September 1965 these exciting but terrifying days as a space entrepreneur ended. Orr Reynolds asked me to meet him and Dian in New York. Over dinner that evening, he broke the news that Congress had withdrawn its support for the Voyager Mission. Dian and Reynolds were obviously disappointed, but it was not easy for me to hide my feeling of relief when I realized that I was no longer a manager and could go back to science. There was to be a Mars mission called Viking, using the life-detection experiments designed by the biologists. I guessed that some lobbying on behalf of conventional biology had taken place. Looking back, it was foolish to expect to overcome the opposition of the whole tribe of biologists; as in real war, having the right cause matters less than the size and equipment of your army.

  I fully expected to hear from JPL that they no longer required my advice on instrument design, but they still welcomed my visits. My battles with the biologists and my fall from high managerial responsibility were of no consequence to the space engineers who needed me. They offered me contracts to develop breadboard instruments, and I willingly accepted. It vexed me a little to see the excellence of the engineers and instrument scientists wasted on what I thought were the wrong experiments—the search for living organisms or their products in the Martian regolith. I could not complain that not a single experiment on the Viking landers in 1975 incorporated any of my holistic life-detection ideas; it was not my personal spacecraft and I could have been wrong. A more serious complaint about the Viking Mission was that the scientific community lost a wonderful opportunity to find out more about Mars. Instead of looking pointlessly for ‘life-characteristic substances’ in the soil, they could have made an unbiased analysis of the Martian soil and atmosphere. In particular, the mass spectrometer that sat in the desert could have done much more than merely look for organic chemicals. It is true that some atmospheric analyses were made during the lander’s descent, but these were not enough to answer im
portant questions about the physics and chemistry of Mars’s atmosphere. In science, as in warfare, strategy tends to conform to the national legend and consequently, the power and intelligence of the two Viking spacecraft were squandered on the search for life on a dead planet. Even today, NASA and its equivalent, the European Space Agency (ESA), seem to place the discovery of life in the solar system above the proper understanding of the system itself. Odder still, NASA scientists now propose using my holistic atmospheric life-detection method as the basis of their search for life on planets elsewhere in the galaxy, even though they reject its conclusions about the solar system.

  The idea of using atmospheric analysis as a way to detect life on planets of the solar system is even more appropriate for detecting life on extra solar planets orbiting other stars. Indeed, apart from the rare event of life revealing itself by the emission of coherent radiation, there is no other practical way of detecting life on planets beyond the reach of landing spacecraft. A long-base interferometer mounted in space could, in principle, resolve a planet like the Earth from its star and provide a spectroscopic analysis of the planet’s atmosphere. If we saw on some distant world abundant oxygen and water vapour, this would be good but not conclusive evidence of life. However, if we saw an incompatible gas mixture such as methane and oxygen it would be strong evidence of life. This would also be true if methane were the dominant gas, for it would suggest a planet with life at a stage like the Archean on the Earth when oxygen was only a minor constituent.