Lovelock collected samples in the tunnels (‘the air was simply mephitic’) and found oxygen levels as low as 13%, insufficient even to support combustion. Lovelock got the job.Ī key wartime preoccupation for the NIMR was the spread of infections, both among air crew flying over Europe and among the civilians sheltering from air raids in London’s underground tunnels. What hobbies did Lovelock have? When Lovelock mentioned climbing and reeled off a list of cliffs and crags he had climbed in North Wales, Bourdillon, a keen mountaineer, was hooked. Richard Bourdillon, the head of research, was unimpressed by the nervous young man, and was eventually forced to make small talk. Lovelock remembers the interview for the position as a disaster. Infectious enthusiasmĪware that Lovelock was a Quaker, and therefore a conscientious objector, in 1941 Todd recommended him for a job at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in north London. When the University of London colleges closed down at the start of the second world war in 1939, he applied for a place in Manchester, where his outstanding abilities in the lab caught the attention of Alexander Todd, the future Nobelist. He struggled with the rigid programme of school and, too poor to attend university, began working for a photographic supplies firm while attending night school at Birkbeck College. Lovelock was born in Letchworth, just outside London, UK, but his Quaker family moved to Brixton near the capital’s centre when he was a child. However, one piece of kit has acted as a reality check on romantic ideas of our own insignificance by proving our role in changing the chemistry of our planet: James Lovelock’s exquisitely sensitive electron capture detector. That sensation is perhaps an extension of the Copernican and Galilean idea that we no longer sit at the centre of a revolving universe. The snail ‘with an itchy foot’ hitches a ride on a humpback whale and, as a world of fathomless oceans and vast peaks unfolds before her, exclaims: ‘I feel so small!’ She encapsulates the enraptured sense of the sublime that drew travellers, painters and poets in the 18th and 19th centuries to the wilder places of Europe. Just before Christmas last year, I watched the comedian Rufus Hound read Julia Donaldson’s children’s book The snail and the whale before a rapt audience at the Apollo Theatre in London, UK. Invented the electron capture detector, explored the Antarctic James Lovelock (1919–) British scientist, inventor and environmentalist.
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