The New Celebrity Scientists by Declan Fahy

Author:Declan Fahy [Fahy, Declan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

The Reluctant Fame of James Lovelock

Silent Spring haunted the 1960s public imagination. The book’s vision of a spring without birdsong symbolized the ominous future that the embryonic global environmental movement fought to prevent. Rachel Carson grounded her arguments in scientific data collected by a machine invented in 1957 by one of the modern era’s most unorthodox scientists. James Lovelock’s electron capture detector measured with acute sensitivity traces of chemicals, such as the pesticide DDT, Carson’s chief chemical villain, in air and water. Lovelock later wrote that his palm-sized invention was “without doubt the midwife to the infant environment movement.”1

Yet Lovelock, one of the world’s few independent scientists, who worked for decades out of his own laboratories in two rural British farmhouses, did not become a public figure because of his world-changing invention. He imprinted himself on the public mind instead as the creator of Gaia, the idea of the Earth as a single superorganism, an idea the Independent called “the most radical way of looking at life on Earth since Darwin.”2

The idea made Lovelock “one of the most famous scientists on the planet,”3 the “godfather of modern environmentalism,”4 and the “godhead of the ecology movement.”5 Rolling Stone labeled him “one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists.” A climate scientist once predicted Lovelock’s ideas would culminate in a reworking of science in a manner similar to Copernicus.6

Lovelock’s public career shows how an unconventional idea once ridiculed as a form of “pseudo-scientific myth-making” can be spread through popular media, sustained in odd ways in popular culture, and eventually embraced by the scientific community and the wider public as a clear and powerful way of understanding our climate crisis. While Susan Greenfield embraced fame and its power to enhance scientific reputations, Lovelock only sought out popular media when his ideas were effectively shut out of mainstream science. His fame was a reluctant fame. But nevertheless, his fame dramatically shows how the workings of science can be affected by the power of celebrity.

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