James Lovelock

James Ephraim Lovelock was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist, born on 26 July 1919 and dead on 26 July 2022, his 103rd birthday, at his home in Abbotsbury, Dorset. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system, an idea he developed while designing scientific instruments for NASA. He held a PhD in the chemistry of disinfection, began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, invented the electron capture detector and with it was the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. He wrote several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s and also worked for MI5, the British security service, for decades.