This attitude was shaped by his experience in World War II, as a government scientist and conscientious objector, and by the struggles of his early life.
He was born in Brixton, south London, in 1919, to working-class parents determined their son should better himself. They ran an art gallery on Brixton Hill in their spare time, an enterprise somewhat before its time. The young Lovelock found refuge in the basement of the Brixton library, where the science books were kept.
Going out on a limb
From the age of eight, he would "find great fat tomes of chemistry and take them home to read." He still has the Merck Index, a boxy, well-bound reference book, with thumb holes down the side, describing the history and qualities of almost all the chemicals so far discovered or made.
"You can get it on CD now, of course: a sign that [the index in book form] is coming to the end," he said.
After serving an apprenticeship in a chemical supplies firm in Kensington, he went to Manchester University and from there to the Medical Research Council, where he worked on everything from the prevention of colds to the freezing of sperm. He may have been the first man to use microwaves deliberately for heating frozen things, in his case hamsters. Lovelock's team froze whole live hamsters slowly, then used the microwaves to restore them to life by thawing their hearts before the rest of the animal. This proved, among other things, that memory is preserved in the way that brain cells grow together, since a hamster that had learned to run in a maze would retain the knowledge even after being frozen and resuscitated.
But in the early 1960s he left this well-paid, pensionable post to become a freelance or independent scientist, even though he had four children, the youngest suffering from brain-damage, and a wife with multiple sclerosis. But Lovelock had been working in America, on the space program and told himself he lived next to a huge waterfall of money and all he had to do was to catch a little of the spray.
It worked. By a mixture of inventions and consultancies, he was able to do the work he loved while still supporting his family.
His inventions kept him solvent. Gaia made him famous, and brought him his second wife, Sandy, a much younger American whom he met in a coup de foudre at a conference for "Global leaders" in Oxford, England, while his first wife was dying, and who had read his first book on Gaia. The two seem constantly aware of each other, turning together like birds in a flock.
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