Homage to Gaia (29 page)

Rothschild had the reputation of a tough and difficult man. I arrived at Shell Centre one day to find Miss Page, his secretary, in tears and Rothschild in a black mood. Because I could easily be the next victim of his hangover, I marched straight in to the urgent problem then facing Shell. In the previous week, a large tanker had been lost in the southern oceans as it was returning empty to the Middle East for its next cargo. It was the second such incident and we faced a problem very much like that of the TWA 747 that exploded in 1997 over the Atlantic as it climbed from New York to its cruising altitude. In both events, at the time little was known of the cause of their destruction. Everyone had guesses ranging from sabotage to a coherent wave pattern in the sea that flexed the ships until they broke, but guesses without evidence are not worth much. My contribution was to be sceptical about wilder hypotheses, such as that the
spontaneously
inflammable phosphine gas was produced from dead fish trapped in the tanks.

The correct explanation came weeks later. I do not recall who was the wise one who thought of it, but it was bizarre and as follows. A standard practice during the return journey of supertankers is to clean the tanks with high-pressure water sprays. This is done automatically with the tank sealed and the crude oil washed from the tank walls; the
small amount of oil washed off is collected and stored in a separate small tank. There are nearly always volatile hydrocarbons present, such as propane, butane, and the pentanes in the crude oil, so that the gas mixture in the near-empty tanks is often potentially explosive. We all knew this, but where were the sparks to ignite the mixture? There were no faulty electrical currents to blame. How could a spark develop in the highly conducting spray of seawater? The answer was simple; just like in a thunderstorm. The huge volume of the empty tank, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 cubic metres, was enough for a process of static electrification like that in a lightning storm to take place in the seawater spray and so ignite the mixture. The explosion of a 100,000-cubic metre tank of air and hydrocarbon vapours is the equivalent of forty tons of high explosive—more than enough to destroy the tanker. It was easy enough to prevent further accidents by inerting the gas atmosphere of these empty tanks, and this was done using the cooled exhaust gases from the ship’s engines. The oxygen had been taken out in the course of the burning of the fuel that drove the engines. But no one had imagined such a need
beforehand
. This, and the result of the recent 747 accident, should warn us that it is not a good idea to have large tanks filled with explosive mixtures of gas and air anywhere. Because no one can imagine them exploding does not mean that they are safe. The investigation of the 747 accident showed that a spark with energy of only a few millijoules was enough—not more than would be caused by walking across a carpeted room on a dry winter day.

The tactic of getting straight down to the problem seemed to work and Rothschild recovered his composure. It is only fair to say that I never was a victim of his temper; he was always, to me, considerate and helpful. He would often ask if I were succeeding as an
independent
and approved when he discovered that my gross income was somewhat more than that of the Shell directors. He had the
aristocrat’s
disdain for employees. Maurice Sugden, Director of the Shell Research Centre and a most distinguished scientist from Cambridge, told me that Rothschild once turned up at his Cambridge home,
mid-morning
on Christmas, to discuss a non-urgent work problem. He would call his employees at unsociable hours, but never did he do any of this to me. Perhaps he sensed that our relationship would have ended had he done so. After one session at Shell Centre Rothschild turned to me and said, ‘Lovelock, do you pay income tax?’ ‘Yes, of course I do,’ I replied. ‘Why do you ask?’ His answer was, ‘How
unfortunate for you. You know, I have never paid tax. It is quite simple. You see, I have no income.’ I wish I had seen the value of this priceless piece of financial wisdom from a rich man. At the time, I was just surprised and did not use it as he had intended, as a guide for my own affairs. Sometime towards the end of our association he grumbled one morning and said, ‘I have Margaret Thatcher coming to see me next week.’ She was then Minister for Education, and he did not seem to look forward to the visit. A month later, however, he told me enthusiastically of his talk with our future Prime Minister and said he considered her one of the most intelligent people he had met. Coming from a misogynist this was praise indeed.

I lost touch with Rothschild in the 1970s when he left Shell to run a governmental advisory service, a so-called ‘think tank’. My last encounter with him was a longish letter, for him, on my book,
Gaia:
A
New
Look
at
Life
on
Earth,
after its publication in 1979. In it he said how much he enjoyed reading it and how it had reminded him of the days we spent together talking about environmental affairs during the Shell period. I owe a debt to Shell, and to Lord Rothschild in particular, for having been the only agency I associated with that actively supported my scientific work on Gaia. I owe a special debt to Sidney Epton of Shell, who did so much to help me with the early writing of articles on the subject. Sidney became a close friend and I’m proud that he joined with me in the first presentation of Gaia in the journal
New
Seientist.
Anyone foolish enough to say of Shell in this respect, ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Gaia was there to clean up the mess for them,’ should read the article in
New
Seientist
of ‘The Quest for Gaia’ that we then wrote. There is nothing in it that would justify such a statement. When I think of Shell I remember with affection my friends, Ted Adlard, Colin Quinn, and the others, who did so much to make my visits to Thornton memorable. Towards the end of his life, Rothschild suffered scurrilous allegations that he had been one of the Cambridge traitors that included Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt. It was a cruel injustice and no way to treat a man who had proved himself brave and a patriot. The King awarded him a George Medal during the Second World War for courageously
dismantling
a bomb. Allegations of treachery are easy to make but most difficult to refute. I know from my own contacts with him on security affairs that had he been as alleged, a Soviet mole, then events would have moved differently from what they did. To me he was a brave man, and one of our treasured eccentrics.

In early 1965 Sandy Lipsky, a friend and professor in the department of internal medicine at Yale University, rang one evening. ‘I’ve just been asked,’ he said, ‘if there is any way to find people hiding in dense tropical forests.’ Did I think people emitted some characteristic odour detectable by sensitive instruments at a distance? I had some ideas but did not want to iterate them across the transatlantic telephone. They were too ill defined and needed some careful thought, so I just said, ‘I’ll think about it and let you know.’ The next day I did my sums. In those days there was not even a hand calculator to assist, it was all done by mental or pen-and-paper arithmetic, or by using the slide rule. How quickly we forget that scientists of the early space and nuclear ages did nearly all their work without the convenient
computer
at their fingertips. There were a few vast machines whose memories were made of magnetic beads strung out along the
interstices
of a web of wires, almost like the embodiment of a miniature abacus; or other clever but cumbersome devices. Their total capacity was no more than that of the better pocket calculators of today, and their cost and the number of acolytes needed to keep them working were far beyond my finances, or indeed those of most universities and institutes. It is eerie to think that even a digital watch would have amazed Buzz Aldrin and the astronauts who first walked on the moon. The computer that landed their lunar module had no more capacity than that of the tiny chip that now oversees the operation of your washing machine. So I did my sums by hand and concluded that no existing device could detect at a distance of, say, a hundred yards the specific odours of people living in a jungle. But, it occurred to me, if the people in the jungle were covertly labelled with something detectable by electron capture then it would be easily possible to detect them at 100 yards or more away. By now, I was familiar enough with American science where, unlike England, money was the main arbiter and I knew the importance of putting my ideas down as a provisional patent proposal.

I was due to visit JPL in a few days, and while there I took the precaution of having my proposal notarized by a notary public, who was on the JPL staff. On this visit I first met Dian Hitchcock and Gordon Thomas, inspectors sent by NASA to assess the space
experiments
, and I discussed my remote-sensing idea with them. They both saw the military potential of the idea and urged me, when I went to
Washington with them the following week, to get in touch with the CIA. Spy thrillers were amongst my bedtime light reading and the thought of meeting agents of the CIA personally intrigued me. I think it was Dian, through one of her many contacts in Washington, who arranged for me to meet representatives of the CIA. I recall taking a taxi to a part of Washington I did not know, walking down a street about two blocks, and finding a shop that sold antiques. I went in through a perfectly ordinary door and was met and taken to a room behind the shop. I was a little disappointed after the build-up, good enough for any of the thrillers I’d read, that the representatives of the CIA seemed so ordinary, just run-of-the-mill scientists like me. One, indeed, was bespectacled, but they were both courteous and polite and we went through the details of my proposal. Looking back, I suspect that they, like civil servants anywhere, were concerned that the strange foreigner might be trying to operate a scam using a
completely
bogus piece of science. After all, few at that time had used an electron capture detector and they were unaware how sensitive it was. My story must have sounded far-fetched. I, of course, was doing my best to stress its exquisite sensitivity and this made matters worse. It was so far beyond that of any rival instruments, ten thousand times more sensitive than the mass spectrometer or the flame
ionization
detectors of those days, as to be unbelievable. They continued to be polite but I heard nothing more from them. I now know that the CIA and other American agencies did not make use of my idea until many years later.

Dian was furious at the lack of response and urged me to see other agencies, one of which involved a visit to the Pentagon to see a General there. I expected the Pentagon to be a difficult place to enter. The Jet Propulsion Laboratories, which I knew well, were never easy to enter: so obsessive was their concern about security that I was once ushered from the JPL library by an armed guard because I did not have the necessary clearance to read the textbooks on the shelves. To my surprise, the Pentagon seemed wide open and insecure. I took a taxi, which entered through the underpass into the open centre of that vast building, and the cab drew up beside a curb. I walked along what seemed like a shopping mall and tried to find an entrance to the building. Eventually I came to an office labelled ‘Information’, entered, and explained that I had an appointment with General X. After a telephone call, they told me where to go. It was a complex set of instructions, which I wrote down in my diary. I
was to report to another office where they would take me to the general’s room. The way through the corridors was long and tedious, so long that the inhabitants of the Pentagon often used golf-carts for their inter-office journeys. The endless stream of humming vehicles reminded me of a mass raid by Daleks. No one asked me what I was doing there, and eventually I found my destination. Here again a quiet, middle-aged man took me along another corridor to the
General’s
room. It was a decent-sized, comfortable den with bookshelves on the walls, their contents more academic than military. This time the cross-purpose was even more marked. I talked of sensitivities and feasibilities; he talked of their inability to give me a contract to develop the device. Plaintively, I remember saying, ‘But aren’t you interested in its possibilities?’ Again, he misunderstood and suggested that I should go back and put in my proposal for a contract through proper channels. Here was a classic example of British–American
misunderstanding
. Here was I, brought up in the middle-class tradition of public service, where personal reward was not expected, in conflict with the General, raised in a different—capitalist—society, that of America, where getting ahead and getting rich were the things that really counted.

My last attempt was with the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA. Here in a skyscraper building I met three very pleasant
academics
. They listened to me, half believed what I had to say, but clearly had a whole pile of ideas to sift through and this was another one of them. Not surprisingly, I heard nothing more from them. After three attempts to interest the American authorities in my idea, I returned home. A week later, I was due to visit Lord Rothschild at the Shell Centre in London. After talking about Shell problems with him in his top-floor office, I told him of my experiences in
Washington
. I was concerned that, as a British subject, I should have raised the issue first here in the United Kingdom and not tried to pass on what might be useful military information to what was, in fact, a foreign government. I sought Rothschild’s advice, both as a friend and because it was rumoured that he had worked with the security services during the Second World War. He just said, ‘Leave it to me.’ A few days later, one of Rothschild’s brief letters arrived. It simply gave a telephone number and a name to call. His letters were a joy to receive, so different from the prolixity of my scientist colleagues. I remember one that said merely, ‘Lovelock, you have deserted me. R’; this was enough to remind me that a visit abroad had prevented our monthly
meeting and Rothschild had missed it. I telephoned the number in the letter and spoke to Dr Walters, who asked if he and two colleagues could visit my Bowerchalke laboratory the following week.