Lovelock was brought up a Quaker and indoctrinated with the notion that "God is a still, small voice within rather than some mysterious old gentleman way out in the universe", which he thought was a helpful way of thinking for inventors, but would eventually end up as being non-religious. His father, Tom, was born in Fawley, Berkshire, had served six months' hard labour for poaching in his teens, and was illiterate until attending technical college, later running a bookshop. She was described by Lovelock as a socialist and suffragist, who was also anti-vaccine, and did not allow Lovelock to receive his smallpox inoculation as a child. Nell, his mother, was born in Bermondsey and won a scholarship to a grammar school but was unable to take it up, and started work at 13 in a pickle factory. James Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City to Tom Arthur Lovelock and his second wife Nellie.
Bryan Appleyard, writing in The Sunday Times, described him as "basically Q in the James Bond films".
He authored several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s.įor decades he also worked for MI5, the British security service. He was an outspoken member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, asserting that fossil fuel interests have been behind opposition to nuclear energy, citing the effects of carbon dioxide as being harmful to the environment, and warning of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. In the 2000s, he proposed a method of climate engineering to restore carbon dioxide–consuming algae. While designing scientific instruments for NASA, he developed the Gaia hypothesis. He invented the electron capture detector, and using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. His methods were influential in the theories of cryonics (the cryopreservation of humans). With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system. James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS (26 July 1919 – 26 July 2022) was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. The properties and use of aliphatic and hydroxy carboxylic acids in aerial disinfection (1947)
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