| James Lovelock (UK)
James Lovelock is that rarest of rarities in the scientific world, a freelance scientist. Most scientists spend their careers inside institutions – universities, governments, research centres, corporate laboratories. James Lovelock has spent plenty of time inside institutions too – but as a migrant worker, not a settler. His independence, he says, derives from his work as “an instrument maker,” designing and building instruments mainly for use in chemical analysis. One of his inventions, the electron capture detector, confirmed the worldwide spread of pesticide residues described by Rachel Carson's famous book, Silent Spring, which represented the dawn of the modern environmental movement. The electron capture detector later allowed the detection of PCB contamination, and also confirmed the global distribution of nitrous oxide and of the chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals primarily responsible for ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Lovelock began as a chemist, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in medicine in 1948. A decade later he attained a D.Sc. in biophysics from the University of London. He spent 20 years at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research in London, during which he also held fellowships at both Harvard and Yale. During 1961-64 he was professor of chemistry at Baylor University in Houston, Texas, and also did lunar and planetary research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Since 1964 he has been an independent scientist, with honorary appointments as visiting professor at the University of Houston and the University of Reading. From 1986 to 1990 he was president of the Marine Biological Association. He has applied for more than 40 patents, and his scientific papers – more than 200 of them – are distributed almost evenly among the disciplines of medicine, biology, instrumentation, atmospheric science, and geophysiology. Lovelock's eclecticism and independence allowed him to follow the logic of his own thinking no matter how original and unorthodox its conclusions. In 1979 he published Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth in 1979, which rattled the scientific world and electrified the rest of us by arguing that the earth behaves like a single living organism that creates and maintains a viable environment for life. The Gaia hypothesis offered a coherent vision of the whole living world that echoed all our wisdom traditions. Scientific American called the book “the exciting and personal argument of an original thinker caught up in wonder.” Its central insights became the foundations of “earth system science,” the study of systems like the circulation of the oceans, the maintenance of the atmosphere and the relationships among the earth's biological and geological processes. James Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, and has been awarded numerous major prizes and awards, including seven honorary doctorates. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1990, and a Companion of Honour in 2003. His books include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Ages of Gaia (1988) and Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (1991). His autobiography, Homage to Gaia, appeared in 2000. His most recent books are The Revenge of Gaia (2006) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). New Scientist describes Lovelock as “one of the great thinkers of our time,” and he has been listed among the world's top 100 public intellectuals. He has been described as “the most important figure in both the life sciences and the climate sciences for the past half-century,” and his stature has been compared to Darwin's.
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