Independent scientist, environmentalist, author and inventor.

Lovelock studied chemistry at Manchester University before taking up a post at the Institute for Medical Research in London. In 1948 he received a PhD in medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Within the United States he has taught at Yale, Baylor University College of Medicine and Harvard University.

Since 1964 he has operated as an independent scientist. He has authored approximately 200 scientific papers distributed almost equally among topics in medicine, biology, instrument science and geophysiology.

A lifelong inventor, Lovelock has also filed more than 50 patents, mostly for detectors for use in chemical analysis. One of these, the electron capture detector, is especially important in the diagnosis of environmental damage.

Lovelock is best known for proposing and popularising the 'Gaia hypothesis'. This postulates that Earth functions as a kind of self-regulating superorganism. He has written several books including Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Ages of Gaia ( 1988), Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (1991) and an autobiography, Homage to Gaia (2000).

Lovelock has won numerous prizes for academic and environmental research and was awarded a CBE in 1990.