LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN AWARD A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK
OF THE WEEK 'Splendid' GUARDIAN 'Utterly fascinating' ROBERT MACFARLANE 'A scientific life
as dissonant as it was remarkable' FINANCIAL TIMES Based on over eighty hours of interviews
with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive Jonathan
Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating sometimes
contradictory man. James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory the idea that
life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments
to maintain a habitable ecosystem. Lovelock's life was a chronicle of twentieth-century
science and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he
worked at the National Medical Research Institute where his life-long interest in chemical
tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War.
He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil
fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the
hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory - a theory that could not have been
developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life. Drawing together the
many influences which shaped his life and thinking The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a
unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.
