James Lovelock, in full James Ephraim Lovelock, (born July 26, 1919, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, England), English chemist, medical physician, scientific instrument developer, and creator greatest identified for the creation and promulgation of the Gaia speculation, an thought rooted within the notion that every one life on Earth is a part of an entity that regulates Earth’s surficial and atmospheric processes. Lovelock was additionally the inventor of a number of chemical-detecting gadgets, together with the electron-capture detector (ECD).
Lovelock was the son of Thomas Arthur Lovelock, an artwork vendor, and Nellie Ann Elizabeth March, a city councilwoman. As a baby he grew to become excited about science and exploration by the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. In 1941 he graduated from the University of Manchester with a B.S. diploma in chemistry and joined the Medical Research Council on the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), London, the place he spent many of the subsequent 20 years of his profession. During that point Lovelock additionally labored (1946–51) on the Common Cold Research Unit at Harvard Hospital, Salisbury, Wiltshire, and acquired a Ph.D. (1948) in medication from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After he acquired a Rockefeller touring fellowship in medication, he labored (1954–55) on cryopreservation at Harvard University, and he labored (1958–59) on gasoline chromatography at Yale University.
In 1957, whereas working with British biochemist A.J.P. Martin at NIMR, Lovelock invented the ECD, a tool utilized in gasoline chromatography that pulls upon the ionization properties of argon to detect hint atoms and molecules in a gasoline pattern. The ECD has been used to find out the concentrations of halogen compounds in meals and within the environment, together with compounds related to residues of the pesticide DDT and with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). In 1959 Lovelock acquired a D.Sc. from the University of London, the place he studied biophysics.
Between 1961 and 1964 Lovelock served as a professor on the Baylor University College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. During that interval he additionally labored with colleagues on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to develop scientific devices for NASA’s house probes, together with the Viking spacecraft. In addition, he developed monitoring tools for the British counterintelligence company MI5.
Following his work at Baylor, Lovelock accepted visiting professorships on the University of Houston (1964–74) and the University of Reading (1964–89), England. It was throughout that point that he developed the Gaia speculation (later, Gaia idea), with Gaia being
After refining the concept throughout the late Sixties and the ’70s with American biologist Lynn Margulis, he revealed Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), which emphasised the concept of Earth as a superorganism. Scientists have been sluggish to just accept the work, as a result of the e book was written for a basic viewers, they usually believed that Gaia was portrayed as a purposeful, godlike being able to planning for its personal survival. Since the publication of Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia (1988) and Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (1991), nevertheless, scientific acceptance has grown. In these works Lovelock portrayed Gaia extra clearly as a metaphorical being that embodied Earth as a broad self-organizing system, and lots of scientists noticed the idea’s usefulness in encapsulating the complicated interactions between organisms and the way they may reply to human actions. Lovelock’s autobiography, Homage to Gaia, was revealed in 2000. His work The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009) warned that billions of individuals would die throughout the twenty first century as the consequences of international warming and local weather change emerged. In 2012, nevertheless, Lovelock pulled again from that place, stating that local weather change had not unfolded as quick as local weather fashions had predicted.
Lovelock filed greater than 50 patents for his innovations. He acquired quite a few awards and prizes, together with the M.S. Tswett Chromatography Medal (1975) and the Blue Planet Prize (1997). In 1980 Lovelock acquired the American Chemical Society’s Award in Chromatography. He grew to become a fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and was made Commander of the British Empire in 1990 and Companion of Honour in 2003 by Queen Elizabeth II.