Homage to Gaia (13 page)
Authors: James Lovelock
It is good to have a short spell as a student, but I found my eighteen months at Manchester enough. The thought of the seven-year stints to a medical degree or a PhD, which are now the lot of the average student, appals me. For those aiming towards an expert profession like medicine or law, I suppose it is not so much of a problem, and better than employment in a factory or an office, but for the creative, it is a cruelty. It is, from the nation’s point of view, a near criminal loss of their skills. For me the mix of daytime employment as an apprentice and evening class study was ideal. Full-time study at a university certainly supplied my social needs but, apart from the job
recommendation
, added little to my capacity as a scientist.
Near the end of my time at Manchester University, local firms invited students to apply for jobs. This nearly always meant a free lunch, so of course we went willingly. Professor Todd, as ever
solicitous
of his students’ welfare, insisted that we take no employment offering less than £300 per year. Inflation adjusted, I think this corresponds to something approaching £20,000 to £25,000 a year now. Among the firms offering jobs were ICI, Thomas Hedley—a branch of Proctor & Gamble—and British Celanese. I took the tram to the factory of Thomas Hedley in West Manchester to arrive there at
9.30 am, and along with other students we went to a room full of desks. They gave us the thick books of a psychological profile test with multiple-choice questions. Compared with the university
examination
in those days it was an easy task with which to earn a lunch. The questions took an hour to complete, and then we toured the plant in groups of one or two and were quizzed about our interests and why we wanted to work for the firm. It was so different from the casual interview that one had with a British firm; at these a small panel, rarely more than three people, judged the applicants by their accent, demeanour, vitality and so on. Two weeks later, they invited me back to the plant and told me that the tests confirmed their personal decision to offer me a job. I was amazed. It was not what I had been expecting. As a young idealist and socialist, I was full of the dogmas that work for an industrial firm was a form of slavery: a bondage where I would be obliged to sell my talents for a pittance while they made profits from them. In truth, they were offering a well-paid industrial job doing a skilled necessary task. My disdain, though, was increased by the thought that it was also unexciting science. As a southern Englishman, I was by culture polite, whatever were my inner thoughts, much as the Japanese are now. Before I could say diplomatically that I had prospects elsewhere to consider, they added that their tests showed that I was an ideal choice for
employment
in marketing. They also said to me that the same test showed that I was quite unsuited to scientific research. This incredible news gave me an honourable exit, for I truly wished to do nothing but science. I had certainly not come this far to be diverted into a purely capitalist occupation: marketing. Many years later, in 1959, the
American
Company, Proctor & Gamble, that owned Thomas Hedley, invited me to their headquarters in Cincinnati to give a lecture on lipid biochemistry. It was in their Distinguished Scientists series of lectures. The story of my encounter in Manchester gave me just the opening I needed. It received a good and cheery laugh from the audience, who had their own experiences of psychological profile testing. I still sometimes wonder, though, if Proctor & Gamble were right. Maybe I have wasted my life in the wrong job. Perhaps if I had become a marketeer, Proctor & Gamble might now rule over more than the world of soaps and detergents.
The second stage of my apprenticeship began one morning in June 1941, when they called me to the student office and asked if I would be interested in a job working for the Medical Research Council in London. This seemed much more to my liking. It was research and it was medicine, something needed but posed no conflict for me as a conscientious objector. In a few days, I received a letter from Robert Bourdillon of the National Institute for Medical Research at
Hampstead
(NIMR) in North London, an Institute established by the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the 1920s. The MRC was an unusual governmental body in that it was responsible directly to the Crown through the Privy Council. This gave it an independence from political meddling and, more importantly, from the Treasury.
I travelled down to London for the strangest interview yet. The National Institute was at that time housed in a disused hospital on the top of Holly Hill in Hampstead. It was a pleasant, warm, red-brick edifice with the Victorian embellishments of towers and turrets and sited in its own spacious, shrubby grounds. It even had a croquet lawn where we played in the summer after lunch, and tennis courts. I went in at the sandbagged front entrance and announced myself. Helen Hyslop, who was then receptionist, telephoned Dr Bourdillon and asked me to wait. While I waited the few minutes before entering the Institute, I had no thoughts for the girl there, yet in less than two years we were to be married. Robert Bourdillon appeared: a tall lean man in his late forties, with an angular face and a warm smile. ‘Come
along with me,’ he said, and we went to his office in one of the Gothic turrets at the south end of the building. He started by saying that Professor Todd, the Institute director’s son-in-law, had
recommended
me for the job. He then told me about the work that he was doing to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. He and the authorities were much concerned that under wartime conditions, an influenza epidemic like the one in 1918 could occur again. It could be devastating if it happened in the packed conditions of the air-raid shelters. He and his colleague, Owen Lidwell, were trying to combat this threat by devising barriers to the spread of airborne infections. Did I think I could contribute to this work? I replied, ‘I’d love to try’ Then he started to ask questions about me. He was obviously worried about my conscientious objection. He had himself fought in the First World War as a pilot and was decorated for his bravery. He tried the usual impossible-to-answer questions such as ‘What would you do if a German soldier entered your house and tried to rape your mother?’ The standard pacifist reply to this one was ‘anything I could do to stop it happening’. As always this line of questioning reveals little and he went on to ask me what were my hobbies. When I said
mountaineering
, his face, which was marvellously expressive, lost its look of
concerned
irritation and expanded into reminiscent delight. ‘Where do you climb?’ he asked. ‘Wales and the Lake District, and sometimes Derbyshire.’ ‘Have you climbed the Idwal Slabs?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I never got far up the Holly Tree Wall.’ He knew that those are moderate and difficult climbs respectively. He quizzed me about the details of them and when I had satisfied him, it was clear that the test was over. He had, I think, been worried that conscientious objectors were cowardly people, rather than those with awkward principles. You could not be a coward and a rock climber, not for long that is.
We then went to the lab where I met Owen Lidwell, and found him to be an Oxford physical chemist with a DPhil. He looked like a young farmer, but I came to know him as a talented scientist and
mathematician
. He showed me the equipment they were using, nearly all of it made in their workshop on the same floor. There was an ingenious device for collecting and counting the number of bacteria in the air. They called it a slit sampler because it drew air rapidly through a slit, which impinged the bacteria onto an agar culture plate that rotated slowly under the slit. It recorded the bacterial abundance of the air as it varied with time just as does a CD writer, or a tape recorder, record sounds. In another part of the room there was a giant photographic
flash tube several feet long, which when discharged could illuminate the droplets of a sneeze. Owen Lidwell told me that he was having problems with the accurate measurement of air pressures. The rate of flow of air in their slit sampler depended on the pressure difference across the slit. He used a water manometer to indicate the air pressure, and the column of water was in a narrow glass tube, about twelve inches long. The water tended to stick to the walls of the glass tube making accurate measurements difficult. I remember suggesting to him that he try adding a little of the surfactant, Aerosol OT, to the water, something I had learnt in my apprenticeship but which is almost never taught at a university. It worked, of course, and made my welcome that much warmer.
Robert Bourdillon then took me to see Christopher Andrewes, head of the Virus Division, for whom I should have to work as well, and we then went to the Director of the Institute, Sir Henry Dale. Dale was a Churchillian character, bluff and direct. He challenged me straight away about my conscientious objection saying, ‘This is a government institute and you may be directed to do work that
conflicts
with your conscientious objection. What would you do about that?’ I remember replying that I recognized that life in wartime involved everyone and that I had to make fine distinctions about behaviour at the time and on its merits. I saw no reason, I said, from talking with Dr Bourdillon to expect any conflict over what he expected of me. Having, like Bourdillon, applied what he considered a test of integrity, he then moved on to tell me about the Institute and its structure. It was, for its time, a wonderfully democratic place, in the Greek sense, that is. If you were a member of the scientific staff, which is what I would shortly be, there was a great deal of freedom to do whatever seemed right scientifically. Technicians and office staff, on the other hand, were treated like other ranks and were there to do what they were told. We were the officer class and expected to show initiative. I realized that the job was mine when Sir Henry Dale asked abruptly, ‘Can you start on Monday?’ And so began the final twenty years of my apprenticeship as a scientist.
‘Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, trap the germs in your
handkerchiefs
.’ These words were on posters everywhere in the UK and their message showed the flash photograph of a cloud of fine particles coming from a sneeze. The photographs were taken in the Hampstead lab, and they illustrated the nature of our work. We wanted to know what organisms were floating in the air that Londoners breathed.
Using Bourdillon and Lidwell’s slit sampler, I was soon collecting airborne micro-organisms in the London air. I remember using the sampler in a hospital ward and recording the effects of bedmaking and the shaking of blankets. It was scary sometimes to find that the blanket shaking had released billions of such pathogenic organisms as
haemolytic
streptococci into the air, the air that I, as an experimenter, had been breathing. One of the many places I took the slit sampler to do measurements was a deep underground shelter. It was an old disused tube tunnel near London Bridge and on the south side of the River Thames. It was about half a mile long and had been fitted with lights and two-tier bunks, and housed tens of thousands during the
bombing
. The air in the shelter was foul to breathe but, as with all bad smells, after a few minutes’ exposure, the nose adjusted and it became at least bearable. They told me that during the height of the Blitz in 1941, the air in this tunnel was so bad that a cigarette would not burn. A match would strike but the wooden shank of the match went out. I now know that this meant that the oxygen in the air was lower than thirteen to fifteen per cent, although more than ten per cent, otherwise some of the inhabitants would have died. It is odd that combustion is more sensitive to oxygen deprivation than we are. The shelter seemed to be just the place where epidemics could start and spread.
There was reason behind the fear among my medical colleagues of an influenza epidemic. The one in 1918 killed over seven million people, more than the number of casualties of the First World War. I would spend nights in this mephitic place sampling the air. The inhabitants, working-class Londoners, tolerated me and even drew me into their strange lives. Here was my first experience of birth. A young pregnant woman went into labour one night and the
well-qualified
nurse from the first-aid rooms built into the tunnel came to her assistance. When someone asked, ‘Where’s the father?’, the young woman replied, ‘I don’t know anything about a father; it was just a come and go in the shelter.’ I cannot remember whether this event was the stimulant but soon I found myself coming and going, in between sampling, with a warm and passionate nurse from Guy’s Hospital. We made love behind the locked doors of the first-aid room. It was an exciting but exhausting life. I rarely ever seemed to find time to sleep. I counted and recorded the samples from the night’s work after twenty-four hours’ incubation in the Institute’s hot rooms. These were large rooms kept at 37°C, with shelves on which were spread the culture plates. There always seemed to be
plates that needed counting immediately. Fortunately, it soon became apparent that, bad though the air in the shelter was, the inhabitants were incredibly healthy.
My bleary-eyed appearance at the Institute was noticed by my friend David Evans. He was a dark Welshman and a distinguished bacteriologist who later became famous through the development of a vaccine for whooping cough. He was one of a family of scientist brothers that included the able physical chemist AG Evans. David, along with the physiologist Hank McIntosh, decided that I needed taking in hand. Unwisely, although with good intentions, they arranged a match between the Institute’s receptionist, Helen Hyslop, and me. As they put it to me, ‘If you want to become a scientist you will have to stop behaving like a tom cat and then sleeping all day. You will have to settle down with a nice girl.’ At the time, it seemed to me that they were right and Helen and I began a low-key courtship that ended in our marriage on 23 December 1942. Looking back it seems that our marriage was in some sense arranged. We were both so encouraged by the Institute staff that it just happened. We were not really in love, we were just fond of each other, and we both believed that love would come in its time. We spent our honeymoon at a small hotel in Keswick in the Lake District. It was a wartime marriage solemnized at a Registry Office in London’s Euston Road. David Evans was the best man and the Institute’s chef, Madeline Scott, the maid of honour. The wedding reception was stark and held in the buffet at Euston Station.
Travel by train in wartime was unrestricted but made so
uncomfortable
that only those who needed to travel did. The train to Keswick took nearly twelve hours to reach its destination. It was packed with troops as far as Crewe, midway through the journey, but from then on almost empty of other passengers. When at last we arrived at our hotel in Keswick, we found it far better than we had expected. We were welcomed warmly and, although by now it was past midnight, the hotel provided hot cocoa and a fine choice of food. We retired to a warm and comfortable bed at about 1.30 am. In spite of Helen’s virginity we started our marriage well and spent a pleasant and
fulfilling
honeymoon walking the Lakeland mountains.
On returning to London in January 1943, Basil and Mary Large, friends of David Evans, invited us to stay with them while we hunted for a flat. Basil was then editor of the communist paper the
Daily
Worker
and Mary his wife was a trade union organizer. They were both
wonderfully kind and unstinting with their help and advice in finding a home. We soon settled in a flat in Willow Road, on the edge of Hampstead Heath and only a short walk from the Institute.
As the German bombing of London lessened during 1942, the population of the shelters also diminished. I spent my time testing aerial bactericidal substances designed to destroy the bacteria in the air without harming or irritating people. This was my first encounter with dogma in science. The conventional wisdom among my
colleagues
was that aerial collisions with the fine particles of disinfectant floating in the air killed the bacteria. My upbringing led me always to question certainties. Partly, I doubted my father’s dead cert of a horse bound to win the race. He was a hopeless gambler, even though his bets were always modest and did not adversely affect the family income. Partly, it was the endless political arguments and the religious dogma of those times that inoculated me against belief in the certainty of anything. My scepticism led me to calculate the probability of a collision between an airborne bacterium and a droplet of the
disinfectant
we sprayed in the air to kill it. The calculation suggested that even with the densest disinfectant aerosol we could sustain, collisions would be so infrequent that the bacteria would survive for as long as a day. We knew that the sprays did work and killed bacteria in seconds, not days. The agent most used in the experiments was a solution of hypochlorite. I began to wonder if the bactericide worked, not by collisions between bacteria and bactericide, but by the condensation of gas or vapour in the air on the airborne particles. To test this idea I sprayed some strong disinfectant, a cationic detergent that was not volatile, into the air. At the same time, I sprayed a suspension of mouth bacteria,
Streptococcus
viridans.
The spray of non-volatile
disinfectant
had no effect whatever on the organisms. Next, I tried volatilizing some lactic acid, a harmless acid that is part of our normal metabolism but which, when it condenses on a bacterium, will make it so acid as to kill it. This did kill the bacteria, and far more effectively than anything else we had tried. This and some other experiments confirmed that it was the vapour, not the aerosol that acted as a disinfectant. Lidwell was a much more accomplished mathematician than I was at that time and he analysed the conditions under which the bactericide condensed on the particles. With this model, we established the vapour condensation theory of aerial disinfection.