Homage to Gaia (49 page)

Apart from a brief spell in the 1970s as a member of the Ad Hoc selection committee, the Royal Society has not asked me to participate in its administration. My dislike of committees and the society’s preference for specialists ensured that we kept our distance but I think that we are consequently both losers.

Lord Rothschild had warned me early in my independence never to become a member of a committee, unless I wanted to run it and could. For most of my working years, I have followed his advice, but I ignored it in 1981 when I joined the Council of the Marine Biological Association (MBA). My love for ocean research, my many friends at the Plymouth laboratory of the MBA, and the kind persuasion of the lab’s director, Eric Denton, made me accept the invitation to join this old and most distinguished association. I had come to know the MBA lab through a friendship with Michael Whitfield who lives only a few miles from Coombe Mill. Mike is a tallish, fair-haired man from Merseyside, and he is one of the most saintly men I have met. His researches on the distribution of the elements in the ocean led to his seminal paper ‘Ocean chemistry, mechanism or machination?’ (now
reissued as a monograph). It was the stuff of Gaia and we have worked on Gaian topics ever since. Shortly after this, I persuaded Andrew Watson, recently returned from a postdoctoral visit to the USA, to take up a post at the MBA. Andrew is among the best of our scientists and I was lucky that he came to me as a postgraduate student in 1976. I remained a council member from 1981 until 1990, and during that time made voyages on the research ships
Challenger
and
Sir
F
rederick
Russell.
Peter Liss, from the UEA at Norwich, and my son Andrew were with me on the first voyage, and Andrew Watson on the second.

In 1986 the telephone rang at about 6.30 in the evening and the caller was Eric Denton. He came straight to the point and said, ‘Jim, we would like you to be President of the MBA when JZ Young retires next month.’ I was so surprised that all I could say was ‘Why me?’ It was not that I did not appreciate the honour of the invitation but surely, I thought, there was someone better known and therefore more attractive to fund providers, someone who could drive the Council like a team of trained horses. Eric insisted that I was the best choice. He suggested that I call JZ Young and find out from him what the job involved. JZ persuaded me that the job was almost a sinecure and all that I needed to do was to chair the council meetings four times a year and sign the occasional document. Looking back, I think they chose me because I was the only one they knew who had no axe to grind, either on my own behalf or for some other organization. They knew, as I did not, that the MBA was due for a period of turbulence that could threaten its existence. This was the recommendation from the House of Lords scientific committee that the MBA be merged with another Plymouth laboratory, the Institute for Marine Environmental Research (IMER), which the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) ran as a civil service institute. It was a short walk across Plymouth Hoe from the MBA lab, and the MBA council feared, justifiably, that their lab would lose its identity and be absorbed with IMER into a governmental conglomerate.

Decades spent working solo made me ill-equipped to handle the politics of the MBA takeover. Again, I wondered why they had chosen me as their President, but then I wondered how political parties choose their leaders, for they rarely choose wisely. I was sure that I would never take on such a task again but that, until the battle was over, I had to give of my best. It was easy for me to take sides with the MBA. It was a noble and distinguished English institution. Among its members had been several Presidents of the Royal Society, and even
Emperor Hirohito of Japan, in his role of marine biologist, had occupied a table at the Plymouth Laboratory. To make the problem worse, NERC management at that time seemed to see the taming of the MBA as a small but necessary part of their agenda. On the MBA side, we had a strong and single-minded team; Sir Eric Denton, who had just received a knighthood, and Sir John Gray, who had been chief executive of the Medical Research Council. The third member was the distinguished marine scientist, Eric Corner, and soon Professor Ann Warner, an eminent biologist from University College London, joined us. Pure as were our hearts and however strong the team, we had a lousy hand of cards to play.

The first battle was, I think, a pseudo battle. It was over the appointment of Mike Whitfield to succeed Eric Denton, due to retire as Director of the laboratory. I now think the NERC team had no quarrel with Michael Whitfield; they just wanted to show who was in charge. We spent too much time, I think, anticipating the objections they never made. We knew that Mike was a whole-hearted supporter of the lab and a first-rate scientist. We thought, wrongly, that his partisanship would be enough to make the NERC trio try to block the appointment. Early in my presidency, I confirmed my long suspicion about committees; namely that highly motivated small groups ran them. The MBA Council meetings were uncannily like a game of cards. There were the aces and the deuces, the kings and the queens sitting around the table, and some even dressed for their parts. We had to play them to win, or at least to make our opponents lose the war, even if not the present battle.

We were unable to prevent or put off the merger with the Institute for Marine Environmental Research, even though it was a crazy scheme that only liberal-minded peers could have thought of. We had one small triumph, thanks to Ann Warner’s shrewd insistence; we renewed the lease of the laboratory on conditions that made it impossible for NERC to take it over. We also managed to establish a small independent nucleus within the MBA lab, which could carry on its old functions with a guaranteed support from the NERC. We all hoped that this could gradually grow until the lab restored itself to full independence again. In different times, this would have soon happened, but the ineluctable decline of England as a power in the world steadily eroded interest in science. Scientists, like other creative people, gravitate to the centre of power, which was the United States of America. The Plymouth lab was part of the Citadel, an army fort
built in the 18
^th
century at Plymouth and in the 19
^th
century it was near the heart of power and benefited greatly from it.

The crucial meeting with the NERC was in November 1987. I had just travelled around the world, calling in at Hawaii to meet Lynn Margulis for a discussion. Whilst there I had caught a respiratory infection, and now that the meeting was due, it was at its height and I was feverish. I had to travel to Swindon, where the NERC headquarters are. It was too long a car journey, over 300 miles there and back, and there was no direct train service. NERC therefore provided a limousine to meet me at Westbury Station on the mainline and take me from there to Swindon and back. I arrived at the Lego-style architecture of the NERC and SERC headquarters in the early afternoon and went straight to Sir Hugh Fish’s office. He was the Chairman of NERC and John Bowman and John Woods were his most senior staff members. With these three formidable NERC representatives to deal with, the odds were not in my favour. One unexpected asset was my fever, which let me think more rapidly than usual. My briefing before the meeting made it clear what we could give away and what we must retain, but it was a poor hand to play. Thanks to Sir Hugh’s courtesy, the bargaining was not abrasive, as I feared it might have been. We could not stop the merger but we held on to what we knew was ours, and to my delight and surprise we won support for the independent unit within the MBA lab.

Following the merger, predictably, the MBA, once a centre of excellence like Mill Hill, grew increasingly like a civil service laboratory, where administrative convenience ruled and good science and common sense came second. To the scientific administrator, it seemed better to move the chemists and physicists from the MBA laboratory to the IMER institute and put all of the biologists into the marine biology labs building. Research is benefited by one-to-one encounters between scientists of different disciplines. To break this up for administrative convenience makes great sense to a civil servant, but it was a recipe for scientific decline—the unscheduled discussions between scientists of different disciplines could no longer take place. Let me illustrate, by an example from my time at Mill Hill, how useful such exchanges can be.

At Mill Hill the scientists’ coffee room was the cradle of so many important steps. An eminent biochemist, soon to become a Nobel Laureate was talking with his colleagues after lunch about a problem he was having with rat liver cells. The failure of these cells to grow had
stalled their research for weeks. Being biochemists, their attempts to resolve the problem were almost all biochemical. They were discussing such questions as was the pH right? And what about the ionic strength? Was the system critically dependent on its temperature? The eminent biochemist suddenly turned to me, sitting innocently in a chair nearby, and said, ‘Jim, you have worked with all kinds of living cells. Would you have time to look at what we are doing and offer an opinion?’ I was glad to help. We walked down the stairs to the third floor where his lab was, actually next to mine. He showed me the cell suspension they were using in its temperature-controlled environment. Everything looked most professional to me, and I doubted if I could suggest anything that they had not thought of long ago. Then, by chance, I noticed a bottle of buffer solution, a mixture used to keep the pH of the cell suspension near optimal. ‘Is this the buffer you used for your cell suspension?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ replied the biochemist. TRIS is a useful compound; it is harmless to cells and does not affect the ionic strength of the suspension. I picked up the bottle and shook it. There were tiny refractile globules of some liquid present in it. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, chloroform,’ he replied. ‘We always add a few drops of chloroform to our buffer solutions to stop moulds growing.’ ‘But surely that will kill your cells as well as the mould?’ None of the biochemists, especially the one I was talking to, was stupid. It was just that the consequence of years of working with non-living systems, where chloroform-treated mould-free buffers are routine, had made them ignore the fact that the chloroform would kill their cells as well as the fungi. To add a drop of chloroform to the buffer solution was something done without thinking. This kind of error catches all of us when we move from one category to another; it has happened to me many times. Had Mill Hill been a lab where scientists worked in isolated sections and did not meet and talk to each other in the coffee room long past the hours of lunchtime, this small encounter would not have happened. The casual encounters between at most five scientists, usually one to one, are worth at least as much as the think-tanks or ‘brainstorming’ sessions so beloved of administrators.

By 1990 I felt I had done all I could for the MBA and put in my resignation as its President. It was accepted, but there was concern about who should be my successor. Happily, Sir Crispin Tickell agreed to take on the task. It was a felicitous move, for he would be in the post occupied by his ancestor, Thomas Henry Huxley, who
was the first President of the MBA. I knew also that the civil servants would be more frightened of Sir Crispin than they ever were of me. He was, during the excitement of the Gulf War, our permanent representative on the Security Council at the UN in New York. He looked the part; indeed any director choosing an actor to play the part of our most distinguished ambassador would have chosen someone like him. Mike Whitfield recently gave me the good news that the MBA lab was on its way to its target of independence. It has also fathered the new National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, an ecologically inspired museum where the visitor traces the path of moving water from an upland stream to the depths of the ocean.

It is difficult for us as inhabitants of the islands off the west coast of Europe to escape Irish politics. It was high on the agenda of family discussions when I was a child. My mother believed that the Irish were even more exploited than were the English working class, and she had sound personal reasons for this view. My grandfather’s cousin, Samuel March, was a trade-union leader and had represented Irish Dockers working in London early in this century. I was aware, even as a young child, of the infamy of the Black and Tans. My father had come from an impoverished rural background and often argued against socialism in his gentle way—he resembled the horse in Orwell’s
Animal
Farm.
He had experienced more privation and abuse from the system than had any of the city-dwelling Marches, but was still a natural Tory. Even so, he accepted the family consensus about Ireland: he knew that the Irish suffered even more than the working class in England.

Anything learnt pre-puberty seems to become a permanent memory. We do not forget the things we learn in childhood, and somehow they are part of our powerful unconscious thinking. Because of this, I have deep within me empathy for Ireland and the Irish people. The cruel and wicked acts and words of Irish terrorists, both Unionist and Republican, have not changed this. I see the Irish war as a monstrous irrelevance; it has cost these islands dearly, has sustained hatred and suffering, and all quite unnecessarily. In spite of the malevolence of the fanatics, there is little hatred between the ordinary Irish and the English. They are both by nature peoples who respect
individuals—we are polite and act to leave space for others. The truth of this is no more strongly revealed than in the statistics of traffic accidents. Ireland and England have almost the lowest death rate in the world; one-third that of continental Europe, and a similarly small fraction when compared with the United States. Only Japan, curiously, another island nation, and Norway match us. The same is true of violent crime. Belfast at the height of its tribal war in the 1980s was a far safer place, as far as violent death is concerned, than was New York or Washington, supposedly at peace. Moreover, it was safer even than most European cities.