Homage to Gaia (22 page)

At Harvard Medical School, I learnt how to separate the
lipoproteins
of the blood and then I examined their response to freezing and thawing. The Department of Biophysical Chemistry, where I was to spend my year's fellowship, had recently lost the man who founded it, Professor EJ Cohn. He pioneered the separation of the proteins of the blood by a technique he called cold ethanol fractionation. He was a good scientist but with a difficult personality, caused perhaps by the disease that caused his death, a pheochromocytoma. This is a tumour of the adrenal gland and it causes an excessive secretion of adrenal hormones, which kept him permanently switched on. To perform the separations of the proteins he had built a large cold room kept at —20° C. His graduate students were obliged to spend their time in this arctic environment. Because of his disease, he slept little and would telephone the cold room at any hour during the night seeking news of the progress of the latest separation technique. Surviving students told me that their progress towards a doctorate depended on their prompt answering of the cold-room telephone whenever it
rang. They seemed to live in terror of their professor and I was concerned at how little had been done since his death to improve working conditions.

I was not keen to work in the cold room and managed to persuade the department to buy two top-opening deep freezers from Sears Roebuck. We could then keep our solutions in the cold while we were in the warmth of the lab. I began to realize as the fall of 1954 moved towards winter that it would take time for the department to recover its poise. The new professor, Dr Oncley was personally kind but offered no practical help with funding. An odd episode took place at Christmas. A letter came in the post to the department from a distinguished physician, Dr Henry Forbes, known for his strong stand in favour of birth control. It was a personal letter to me and it enclosed a cheque for $50. He had heard from his friends in England that we were having a hard time and had enclosed something so that we could at least enjoy a good Christmas. There was also an invitation to bring the family to his home in the Blue Hills near Boston. The effects of this gift and letter astonished me. Suddenly we became persons of consequence. The Forbeses were one of the old Harvard families and such condescension (in Jane Austen's parlance) greatly elevated our social standing. I had always thought of the United States as a place free of snobbery. Yet, here was a piece of almost 19
^th
-century class distinction. Michael Crichton's
semi-autobiographical
book of his days at Harvard Medical School,
A
Case
of
Need,
confirms our experience as far from singular.

By Christmas 1954, things were looking up for us in Boston. We had found it impossible to survive in Brookline with so much of our income going on rent and we moved to a twenty-roomed Charles Addams style house for rent at $90 a month in the suburb of
Auburndale
. The owner, a true Old New England lady named Pockwince, let it to us on the basis that we would allow prospective buyers to see round. The capacious basement was full of old furniture. She said, ‘Go to the hardware store, buy yourself a cross-cut saw and you will have all the fuel you need for the winter by burning these old pieces here.' This I did, which was as well, for it was a truly cold winter with temperatures down to –20° C.

Through Bill Jones, the Jarrell family befriended us. Dick Jarrell, still a friend who writes yearly, was President of an instrument
company
, Jarrell Ash, that made spectrometers and other scientific
instruments
. He and Kiffy, his wife, were unstintedly generous and invited
all the Lovelocks to spend Christmas with them at their home in Waban, a Boston suburb. They also had four children, so it was a noisy but delightful Christmas. As our year in Boston passed the Jarrells became close friends, and we spent a two-week holiday with them at their beach house at Surfside in Nantucket. I think that I was able to repay Dick in part by the advice I gave him on instrument science.

The research I did at the Department of Biophysical Chemistry was mostly on the effects of freezing and thawing on lipoproteins. My earlier work had led me to believe that the damage suffered by living cells when they froze was mostly to the structures of their membranes and these were made of lipoprotein—a combination of fatty
substances
like lecithin with protein. Using a technique developed by another Rockefeller Fellow, Dr Kenneth Walton, I was able to harvest beta-lipoprotein from blood. I did this work in collaboration with an American postdoctoral student, Dr Al Keltz. We found that
beta-lipoprotein
was only slightly damaged by freezing and were able to devise practical methods for its preservation in the frozen state. We tried without success to publish the work and eventually a summary of it appeared in a paper I gave before a Royal Society discussion meeting in 1956.

As we moved into 19551 began to fret about how we would be able to pay the fare back home. The least expensive way was on the
New
foundland
, a 5,000-ton cargo liner that sailed from Boston via
Halifax
, Nova Scotia and St Johns, Newfoundland to Liverpool. It would cost £250. There seemed no chance of saving this much from our meagre stipend. Then I saw in a copy of
Nature
an advertisement from the CIBA foundation about a prize for an essay on Research in Ageing. The prize was £250, just what we needed, and I bought with the cash for my next bleed a second-hand typewriter and wrote the essay sitting in bed at our Auburndale home. Helen transcribed it on the typewriter and we sent it off to CIBA in February. In July we heard that I had won: soon the cheque came and we were able to confirm our bookings on the ship. It was a joyful return in
September
1955 on a delightful small ship and the journey gave us the opportunity to see those rarely visited places, Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland
.

I have mixed memories of Boston. On the bad side are my
experiences
at Harvard Medical School. For the first three months I was there in 1954, they treated us as American universities in those days
treated their graduate students. They expected us to survive on $3,000 a year, not easy for foreigners with three children to support. The department needed me badly to bring to them the know-how of blood freezing. I did this so well that the department, or one member of it, won the Glycerol Prize for their work. What I did not know, and no one had explained to me, was that at an American university you often have to bargain for your salary. When it came to the end of our year in Boston, and we were longing to return home, the Harvard department suddenly realized that they still needed me and offered $6,000 a year if I would stay on. I was incensed. We had suffered privation but had survived, in part, by selling my blood, and through the kindness of our friends and I now realized that the story about Senator McCarthy preventing the department from keeping their promise of extra salary was fiction. After that, I had no confidence in them and no intention of staying on. Not understanding, they raised the offer to $10,000. Uplifted by our righteous indignation, perversely, we returned to the poorer but gentler welfare-oriented socialism of the United Kingdom, where salaries could not be
negotiated
, at least not at the MRC.

The other side of Boston was the personal kindness of our
neighbours
, who sensed our difficulties and remembered their own hard times in the Great Depression. Because we were poor, we met many ordinary Americans who had the same problems as we did. Class divisions there are as large as they are in the UK, but the segregation is by income, not status, and the separation of the classes is
geographic
. Where you live depends on what you earn and to some extent on your race.

When I returned to Mill Hill from America in 1955 I found that Parkes's department was still deeply involved with whole-animal freezing and reanimation. Audrey Smith had carried the technique, still using my homemade diathermy, to the point where it was almost routine to freeze and reanimate hamsters. She presented her work in three papers in the
Proceedings
of
the
Royal
Society,
and I think that Parkes submitted them for her because, generously, he wanted to reward Audrey for her success and the status that it gave to his department by promoting her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. My own contributions to this success, through the diathermy
equipment and the physical measurements during freezing were recognized by my appearance as a second author on the third paper. To be fair on Parkes and Audrey, they did not understand the amount of hard science involved in the physical-chemistry of cryobiology. Also, I think that they both felt about me in the same way that a car driver regards a police car that keeps station behind him. I was a representative of the law sent by the stern figure of the Institute's director. My presence was a constraint on their freedom to act like happy biologists and ignore physics and chemistry, or so they seemed to think. In practice, Sir Charles Harington only asked me if I was happy working for them, never about what they did. I was content, for they were kind enough personally and the work that I did was fulfilling.

In February 1956 our fourth child, John, was born. Sadly, he suffered a birth defect, an oesophageal atresia, that caused anoxia soon after he was born. The defect was corrected by surgery within hours but too late to save him from brain damage. John was delightful as a baby, but after one year, he became a hyperactive and an unusually difficult child to rear. His first ten years were hard for all of us, but we coped. After this, a Rudolph Steiner school in Sussex in southern England did wonders to bring out his potential and now he manages his life at least as well as many of his contemporaries with normal brains.

Early in 1956 Parkes had arranged a discussion meeting on freezing and reanimation at the Royal Society. He asked me to present my own work as a paper. This was my chance to close my freezing research at what seemed to me to be a definitive stage and I took it willingly. I knew that there was much still to be done to unravel the physical chemistry of freezing and thawing, and soon afterwards the American scientists Peter Mazur and Henry Merryman took it on. For me the science of cryobiology had ended. I had no wish to continue filling in the details. My last paper in Parkes's department was with Marcus Bishop, a biologist. It was on the use of dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO) as a freeze-protecting chemical. Bishop and I had tried it as a
protective
agent against freezing damage for the red cells of cattle, which were impossible to freeze using glycerol. It worked perfectly and we published our work as a
Nature
Letter. I was proud of this discovery. Dimethyl sulphoxide was chosen from a number of candidate
substances
by prediction. It had all the properties needed according to my theory of freeze damage by electrolyte concentration to provide near perfect protection.

My last act in Parkes's department was to serve as science adviser to a BBC producer, George Foa. This happened because Sir Charles Harington's personal secretary, Lorna Frazer, had written a play that the BBC was about to produce. Lorna, feeling an urge to write, had attended a BBC course on playwriting and soon after resigned her job and wrote her play,
The
Critical
Point,
based on the work of Parkes's department. The Institute gave me six weeks' leave to work with George Foa and Lorna during the rehearsals. It was an exciting experience to be part of a team that included, in the two separate runs of the play such actors and actresses as Leo McKern, Lana Morris, Joan Greenwood, and Mervyn Johns. To watch the
development
of the play through its rehearsals is something I still remember with pleasure. My job was to see that the scenes presented were a faithful representation of the Mill Hill laboratory, and in this I
succeeded
far too well. The lab was indeed like that of Mill Hill but the public and the critics knew better. They had expected something like the interior of a nuclear power station or else a rerun of ‘
Frankenstein
'. A real laboratory was to the public and critics unbelievable; truth is indeed so strange as to be incredible. On the second
production
, we let the public have their way and all was well. The play was about the freezing of the actor, Eric Lander, and the consequences of failed reanimation: was it an accident or murder? I made a tape using a homemade electronic sound generator that simulated the dying breath, the death rattle, and the failing heartbeats. The BBC told me later that it inspired them to form their radiophonic workshop for artificial sound production. Proof of their approval was a cheque for £50 for the tape, something that I had neither asked for nor expected. After the play was over, Lorna, Helen, and I celebrated at an
Indonesian
restaurant near Leicester Square.

This exposure to the outside world started my slow move over the next few years to independence. In 1956 I told Parkes that I wanted to move to the biochemistry department to work on detectors. I felt also that I had reached the end of my usefulness in the freezing work. He was not pleased and he said, ‘Maybe it means little to you but if you go on like this, moving from one department to another, you will never be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.' It was difficult for me not to laugh. I did science for its own sake; the rewards at that stage seemed so distant that they were no spur for me. And, in any case, my low self-esteem had convinced me that there was no chance of my ever being elected to so distinguished a society. Sir Charles Harington, as
I expected, welcomed my wish for a change, and took me into what had been his own department, biochemistry, now run by Tommy Work. He was an entirely different man to Parkes and was an
Orkadian
, that is, someone from those northern isles, the Orkneys. I found him to be thoughtful, considerate and a thoroughly decent man.