James Lovelock, the maverick British ecologist who captured the scientific imagination with his Gaia theory, which portrayed the Earth as a living organism, whose work is essential to our understanding of man-made pollutants and their impact on the climate today. died Tuesday at the age of 103. He celebrated his birthday at his home in Dorset, South West England.
his family confirmed the death in a statement Up until six months ago, he “was able to walk along the beach near his home in Dorset and attend interviews, but a bad fall earlier this year left his health in jeopardy,” he said on Twitter.
Dr. Lovelock’s extensive knowledge spanned from astronomy to zoology. In his later years, he became a prominent proponent of nuclear energy as a solution to global climate change and a pessimist about humanity’s ability to survive a rapidly warming planet.
However, his worldwide fame is based on three major contributions he made during a decade of scientific inquiry and curiosity in the late 1950s and late 1960s.
One was his invention of the electron capture detector. It is an inexpensive, portable and highly sensitive device that helps measure the diffusion of toxic man-made compounds in the environment. This device provided the scientific basis for Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, and became the catalyst for the environmental movement.
The detector also laid the groundwork for regulations in the United States and other countries that have banned hazardous chemicals such as DDT and PCBs and significantly reduced the use of, and public exposure to, hundreds of other compounds. It also helped to provide
A hole in the ozone layer was later discovered by discovering measurable concentrations in the atmosphere of chlorofluorocarbons, compounds that fueled aerosol cans and were used to cool refrigerators and air conditioners. (Chlorofluorocarbons are now banned in most countries under a 1987 international convention.)
However, Dr. Lovelock may be most widely known for his Gaia theory. As he puts it, the Earth functioned as a “living organism” that could “regulate temperature and chemistry in a comfortable steady state.”
The seed of the idea was planted in 1965 when he was a member of a space exploration team recruited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and placed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Dr. Lovelock, an expert in the chemical composition of Earth’s and Mars’ atmospheres, wondered why Earth’s atmosphere is stable. He theorized that something must be regulating heat, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements.
“Life on the surface must be regulating,” he later wrote.
He presented the theory at the 1967 meeting of the Astrophysical Society of America in Lansing, Michigan, and at the 1968 scientific meeting at Princeton University.
That summer, a friend and novelist, William Golding, suggested the name Gaia, after the Greek goddess of the Earth. Mr. Golding, author of such books as “Lord of the Flies,” lived near Mr. Lovelock in the South West of England.
Some scientists have hailed this hypothesis as a thoughtful way to explain how biological systems have affected the Earth. However, many others called it New Age Publum.
This hypothesis might not have gained credence and made its way into mainstream science had it not been for the contribution of the eminent American microbiologist Lynne Margulis. In the early 1970s and in the decades that followed, she collaborated with Dr. Lovelock on certain studies in support of this concept.
Since then, many scientific conferences on Gaia theory have been held, including one at George Mason University in 2006, and hundreds of papers have been published on aspects of it. Lovelock’s theory of global autoregulation has been considered central to understanding the causes and consequences of global warming.
His electron capture detector was created in 1957 while he was a staff scientist at the National Institute of Medicine in Millhill, north London. In 1958 he was published in the Journal of Chromotography.
Combined with a gas chromatograph that separates mixtures of chemicals, the detector was able to measure trace concentrations of chlorinated compounds in the air. It ushered in a new era of scientific understanding of compound diffusion, helping scientists identify the presence of trace levels of toxic chemicals in soil, food, water, human and animal tissues, and the atmosphere. .
In 1969, Dr. Lovelock used an electron capture device to identify man-made pollutants as the cause of smog. He also discovered that a family of persistent man-made compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons are measurably present in clean air over the Atlantic Ocean. He confirmed the global spread of his CFCs during his Antarctic expeditions in the early 1970s, and in 1973 he published a paper on his findings in Nature.
Dr. Lovelock was proud to be independent from universities, governments and corporations, but made a living out of them all. He delighted in being candid, outspoken, deliberately provocative and nonchalant. And perhaps not coincidentally, he was less successful in leveraging his work for financial gain and prestige in the scientific community. Arguably the most important development of the 20th century One such analytical instrument, the electron capture detector, was redesigned and commercialized by Hewlett-Packard without royalty or license agreement with Dr. Lovelock.
Dr. Lovelock confirmed the presence of CFCs in the atmosphere, but reasoned that at concentrations of parts per billion, there is “no conceivable danger” to Earth. He later called the conclusion an “unprovoked fiasco”.
A year after the Nature paper, Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and F. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California, Irvine published a paper in the same journal detailing how sensitive the Earth’s ozone layer is to CFCs. Announced. In 1995, they and Dr. Paul Krutzen of the Max Planck Institute in Germany nobel prize in chemistry For his work in warning the world about the thinning of the ozone layer.
“He had a great spirit and a will to be independent,” said Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and a researcher at Middlebury College in Vermont. “He must have played a key role in literally saving the planet by helping figure out that the ozone layer is disappearing. The Gaia theory is his most interesting contribution. Global warming. emerged as the greatest problem of our time, the Gaia theory helped us understand how small changes can alter systems as large as the Earth’s atmosphere.”
James Ephraim Lovelock was born on July 26, 1919, at his maternal grandmother’s house in Letchworth Garden City, about 30 miles north of London. His parents, Tom and Nell Lovelock, were shopkeepers in Brixton Hill, South London. James lived with his grandparents during his first years, but after his grandfather died in 1925 he joined his parents in Brixton Hill.
A poor student in London, he was an avid reader of Jules Verne and science and history books borrowed from the local library.
Dr. Lovelock often credited his staunch independence to his mother, who was an amateur actress, secretary, entrepreneur, and considered an early feminist. His interest in the natural world came from his father, an outdoorsman. He took his son on long walks in the country and taught him the common names of plants, animals and insects.
In 1939 James entered the University of Manchester and graduated in 1941, having been granted conscientious objector status to avoid military service at the start of World War II. He was soon hired as a junior scientist at the Medical Research Council, a government agency. At his agency, he specialized in hygiene and transmission of infectious agents.
One of the young people who joined the Institute was the receptionist, Helen Hythrop. The two married on December 23, 1942, and in 1944 the first of her four children, Christine, was born. Later another girl, Jane, and her two boys, Andrew and John, were born. In 1949, Dr. Lovelock received his Ph.D. He earned his MD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Helen Lovelock, who had multiple sclerosis, died in 1989. He later married American Sandra Orchard. They met when she asked him to speak at a conference, he told the British magazine. new statesman 2019.
Dr. Lovelock’s survivors include his wife. his daughters, Christine Lovelock and Jane Flynn; his sons, Andrew and John; and grandchildren.
Dr. Lovelock is the author of Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) and others. Another, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009), claimed that the Earth is rushing to a permanent high temperature sooner than scientists believe. In 2000 he published his autobiography Home of Gaia: A Life of an Independent Scientist.
Among his many awards were two of the most prestigious awards in the environmental community. The Amsterdam Environment Prize, awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Blue Planet Prize, awarded in 1997 and widely considered the equivalent of the environment. Nobel Prize.
Dr. Lovelock declared in 2004 that nuclear energy was the only viable alternative to fossil fuels capable of meeting mankind’s massive energy needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. caused a sensation.
Later in life, he expressed pessimism about global climate change and the human ability to prevent environmental disasters that would kill billions of people.
“The reason is that we won’t find enough food unless we synthesize it,” he told New Scientist in 2009. The remaining population at the end of the century will probably be less than 1 billion. It has happened before. During the Ice Age there was a bottleneck with only 2,000 people left. it’s happening again. “