46 Facts About James Lovelock

James Ephraim Lovelock was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist.

James Lovelock is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.

James Lovelock's methods were influential in the theories of cryonics.

James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector and, using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere.

James Lovelock 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.

James Lovelock wrote several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s.

James Lovelock worked for MI5, the British security service, for decades.

James Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City to Tom Arthur Lovelock and his second wife Nellie.

James Lovelock was described by Lovelock as a socialist and suffragist, who was anti-vaccine, and did not allow Lovelock to receive his smallpox inoculation as a child.

James Lovelock's 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.

James Lovelock was brought up a Quaker and imbued 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 he would eventually end up as being non-religious.

James Lovelock worked at a Quaker farm before a recommendation from his professor led to him taking up a Medical Research Council post, working on ways of shielding soldiers from burns.

James Lovelock refused to use the shaved and anaesthetised rabbits that were used as burn victims, and exposed his skin to heat radiation instead, an experience he describes as "exquisitely painful".

James Lovelock later abandoned his conscientious objection in the light of Nazi atrocities and tried to enlist in the armed forces but was told that his medical research was too valuable for the enlistment to be approved.

In 1948, James Lovelock received a PhD degree at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

James Lovelock spent the next two decades working at London's National Institute for Medical Research.

In early 1961, James Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces.

James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of chlorofluorocarbons and their role in stratospheric ozone depletion.

James Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.

James Lovelock served as the president of the Marine Biological Association from 1986 to 1990 and was an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford from 1994.

James Lovelock said how he had a claim for inventing the microwave oven.

James Lovelock later explained this claim in an interview with The Manchester Magazine.

James Lovelock said that he did create an instrument during his time studying causes of damage to living cells and tissue, which had, according to him, "almost everything you would expect in an ordinary microwave oven".

James Lovelock invented the instrument to heat frozen hamsters in a way that caused less suffering to the animals, as opposed to the traditional way, which involved putting red-hot spoons on the animals' chests to heat them.

James Lovelock believed that, at the time, nobody had gone that far and made an embodiment of an actual microwave oven.

James Lovelock found the gas in each of the 50 air samples that he collected but, not realising that the breakdown of CFCs in the stratosphere would release chlorine that posed a threat to the ozone layer, concluded that the level of CFCs constituted "no conceivable hazard".

James Lovelock later stated that he meant "no conceivable toxic hazard".

James Lovelock argued that Daisyworld, although a parable, illustrates how conventional natural selection operating on individual organisms can still produce planetary-scale homeostasis.

In 2012, James Lovelock distanced himself from these conclusions, saying he had "gone too far" in describing the consequences of climate change over the next century in this book.

James Lovelock became concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect.

James Lovelock was an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.

Statements from 2012 portrayed James Lovelock as continuing his concern over global warming while at the same time criticising extremism and suggesting alternatives to oil, coal and the green solutions he did not support.

James Lovelock criticised environmentalists for treating global warming like a religion.

James Lovelock opposed the concept of "sustainable development", where modern economies might be powered by wind turbines, calling it meaningless drivel.

James Lovelock kept a poster of a wind turbine to remind himself how much he detested them.

James Lovelock subsequently said that his proposal was intended to stimulate interest and that research would be the next step, and several research studies were published in the wake of the original proposal.

Sustainable retreat is a concept developed by James Lovelock to define the necessary changes to human settlement and dwelling at the global scale to adapt to global warming and prevent its expected negative consequences on humans.

James Lovelock thought the time was past for sustainable development and that we had come to a time when development is no longer sustainable.

James Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.

James Lovelock has invented a family of ionisation detectors for gas chromatography.

James Lovelock has many inventions, including a gas chromatograph, which will be used to investigate planetary atmospheres.

James Lovelock has made a study of detecting life on other planets by analysis of their atmosphere and extended this to world pollution problems.

James Lovelock was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the study of the Science and Atmosphere in the 1990 New Year Honours and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to Global Environmental Science in the 2003 New Year Honours.

James Lovelock agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Devon during 2007, as part of the Environment Triptych along with heads of Mary Midgley and Richard Mabey.

James Lovelock first met his second wife, Sandy, at the age of 69.

James Lovelock died at his home in Abbotsbury, Dorset, on his 103rd birthday in 2022, of complications related to a fall.