46 | New Scientist | 27 July 2019
A British hunter-gatherer? You aren’t
that old! But did that training make you
an environmentalist?
No! That immediately makes me think of a
city-based academic type of person who has
strong views on how things ought to be. I am
a much more laid-back person who just takes
the world as it comes. I get an intense feeling
of happiness from the environment.You have come under fire for some of your
attitudes, like your pro-nuclear energy views.
Has it occurred to you that most of the large
money that circulates in this country comes
from the fossil fuel industries? And they
probably spend huge sums of money on
anti-nuclear propaganda.So you think it is a contrived argument?
Yes, the anti-nuclear argument is very much
so. It’s so safe, it’s almost ridiculous. And it’s
improving. The latest form of nuclear energy
being worked on uses thorium, rather than
uranium, and it’s almost impossible to get it
to go into a runaway chain reaction or to do
anything nasty.How did a poor south London boy become one
of the most influential scientists of our time?
An aunt married into the Leakey family and
they gave me elocution lessons to get rid of
my working class accent. I couldn’t afford to
go to university so I got an apprenticeship
and my boss sponsored my degree in the
evenings at Birkbeck [College, London].The war broke out when you were 20.
Did you fight?
No. This country called up all of its scientists
and I was involved with all manner of strange
scientific things that I still can’t talk about. It
was very interesting but there were crazy ideas.
They set fire to the sea off Studland [in Dorset,
UK], as Churchill thought this would frighten
the Germans away. They poured petrol onto
the ocean in huge quantities when it was
desperately short for fighter planes and the like.After the war, you did some pretty far-out
stuff at the National Institute for Medical
Research in Mill Hill, London.
My main line of work was freezing whole
animals and bringing them back to life to
test resuscitation techniques. I discovered
that if you wanted to find an animal that
survives for a long time in the frozen state,
you need one with a certain composition of
fatty acids in its blood, and hamsters fit this.
But we needed to check this to prove it. TwoANTH
ONY^ HOWARTH
/SCIENCE
PHOT
O^ LIBRAR
Y“ During the war I was involved
with all manner of strange things
that I still can’t talk about”
floors from where I worked, Archer Martin had
just invented the gas chromatograph, which
could analyse the fatty acids in the animal’s fat.
So I went to see him with my sample, but he
said he’d need 100 times more – it would mean
a mass slaughter of hamsters. I was crestfallen.
Then he said, “or you could invent a more
sensitive detector for us”. Within two weeks,
I had built the detector and that put the gas
chromatograph on the market and made a lot
of money for the institute.And it took you to California...
One morning in 1961, there was a letter on
my desk from the director of Space Flight
Operations at NASA asking me to come and
help them design equipment to send to Mars
and the moon, to analyse soil and see if there’s
any life there. They had a very small rocket,Pioneer 1, that didn’t use a lot of fuel, and I’d
built by far the most sensitive chemical
detector in the world. It was only a few inches
in size and used very little power: a few watts
could send a signal from Mars to Earth.What was it like at NASA in those early days?
It was marvellous. But I was disappointed
by the biologists: they didn’t have any
understanding of what they should be
looking for. I got in trouble with the boss man
for making the biologists lose their morale.
He then asked: “What would you do if you
wanted to detect life on Mars?” Without
thinking, I said I would look for an entropy
reduction. Well, that made him spurt with
laughter, but he gave me two days to come
up with a practical experiment to find life
on Mars or I was out.