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James Lovelock
James Lovelock is an independent scientist, inventor and author. He lives in West Devon, where he has planted thousands of trees on his land. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and in 1990 he was awarded the first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of his inventions is the electron capture detector. It revealed for the first time the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues. Some of his investions were adopted by NASA in their program of planetary exploration.
Lovelock is the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis and has written three books on the subject:
- The Ages of Gaia
- Gaia: A New Look on Life on Earth
- Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine
In The Ages of Gaia, Lovelock explains the effect of his working situation on his work:
"The description of the place where this book was written is relevant to its understanding. I work here and it is my home. There is no other way to work on an unconventional topic such as Gaia. The researches and expeditions to discover Gaia have occupied twenty-five years--and have been paid for from the income I receive for the invention and development of scientific instruments.
"Science, unlike other intellectual activities, is almost never done at home. Modern science has become as professional as the advertising industry. And, like that industry, it relies on an expensive and exquisitely refined technique. There is no place for the amateur in modern science, yet, as is often the way with professions, science more often applies its expertise to the trivial than to the numinous. Where science differs from the media is in its lack of a partnership with independent individuals. . . . [N]early all scientists are employed by some large organization, such as a governmental department, a university, or a multinational company. Only rarely are they free to express their science as a personal view. They may think that they are free, but in reality they are, nearly all of them, employees; they have traded freedom of thought for good working conditions, a steady income, tenure, and a pension. . . . Scientists are also constrained by the tribal rules of the discipline to which they belong. A physicist would find it hard to do chemistry and a biologist would find physics well-nigh impossible to do. To cap it all, in recent years the 'purity' of science is ever more closely guarded by a self-imposed inquisition called the peer review. This well-meaning but narrow-minded nanny of an institution ensures that scientists work according to conventional wisdom and not as curiosity or inspiration moves them. Lacking freedom they are in danger of succumbing to a finicky gentility or of becoming, like medieval theologians, the creatures of dogma.
"As a university scientist I would have found it nearly impossible to do full-time research on the Earth as a living planet. To start with, there would be no funds approved for so speculative a research. If I had persisted and worked in my lunch hour or spare time, it would not have been long before I received a summons from the lab director. In his office I would have been warned of the dangers to my career of persisting in so unfashionable a research topic. If this did not work and obstinately I persisted, I would have been summoned a second time and warned that my work endangered the reputation of the department, and the director's own career."
"Now perhaps you see why I work at home supporting myself and my family
by whatever means come to hand. It is no penance, rather a delightful
way of life that painters and novelists have always know. Fellow scientists
join me, you have nothing to lose but your grants."