With a PhD in the chemistry of disinfection, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing and reviving frozen specimens.

[3] 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 thirteen in a pickle factory.

[4] 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.

[8] After leaving school Lovelock worked at a photography firm, attending Birkbeck College during the evenings, before being accepted to study chemistry at the University of Manchester, where he was a student of the Nobel Prize laureate professor Alexander R.

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".

During work on a precursor of this program, Lovelock became interested in the composition of the Martian atmosphere, reasoning that many life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it (and, thus, alter it).

However, the atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, with very little oxygen, methane, or hydrogen, but with an overwhelming abundance of carbon dioxide.

To Lovelock, the stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically dynamic mixture of the Earth's biosphere was strongly indicative of the absence of life on Mars.

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

[25] As an independent scientist, inventor and author, Lovelock worked out of a barn-turned-laboratory he called his "experimental station" located in a wooded valley on the Devon–Cornwall border in South West England.

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".

[32] Lovelock was sceptical of the CFC–ozone depletion hypothesis for several years, calling the US ban of CFCs as aerosol propellants in the late 1970s arbitrary overkill.

[34] The hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.

[35][36] Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding,[37] the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life.

Among its most prominent critics were the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle and Stephen Jay Gould, a convergence of opinion among a trio whose views on other scientific matters often diverged.

[39][page needed] In response to this, Lovelock, together with Andrew Watson, published the computer model Daisyworld in 1983, which postulated a hypothetical planet orbiting a star whose radiant energy is slowly increasing or decreasing.

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

As phytoplankton and forests are the main ways in which Gaia draws down greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, taking it out of the atmosphere, the elimination of this environmental buffering will see, according to Lovelock, most of the Earth becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of this century, with a massive extension of tropical deserts.

Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves.

[48] In The Revenge of Gaia (2006), where he put forward the concept of sustainable retreat, Lovelock wrote: A television interviewer once asked me, "But what about nuclear waste?

I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world ... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife.

This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War.

Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets ...

[50] Writing in The Independent in 2006, Lovelock argued that, as a result of global warming, "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century.

[51] The same year he suggested that "we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can.

It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.Statements from 2012 portrayed 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.

In a 2012 interview aired on MSNBC, Lovelock stated that he had been "alarmist", using the words "All right, I made a mistake," about the timing of climate change and noted the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the book The Weather Makers as examples of the same kind of alarmism.

[61] Other researchers claimed that "this scheme would bring water with high natural pCO2 levels (associated with the nutrients) back to the surface, potentially causing exhalation of CO2".

Most of all, he says, it's about everybody "absolutely doing their utmost to sustain civilization, so that it doesn't degenerate into Dark Ages, with warlords running things, which is a real danger.

[79] Lovelock agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Devon during 2007, as part of the Environment Triptych (2008)[80][page needed] along with heads of Mary Midgley and Richard Mabey.