Crispin: We're looking at each other wondering who should speak first after those very nice words that have been said about us.

James: You have far more practice than I have.

Crispin: On the other hand, you have much more experience in inventing things than I have.

James: We'll see how it-

Crispin: We'll see how it goes. I would argue that the work that you have done in the past has been of this lone scientist thing, and we all agree that lone scientists operate in a void. Maybe you should say something about that.

James: That's a good one to start with, yes. I suppose I ought to go back and give a bit of personal history. Lone scientists are not very usual. In America they're considered very dangerous and the people walk on the other side of the street if you come down, and they've got a label saying lone scientist up.

No, I was born in lecherous Garden City, about 30 miles north of London, which I think was one of the first Garden Cities in the world, and quite a thing in those days. I'd been dumped there by my mother, who was a feminist, and I was brought up by my grandparents. All of my childhood and onwards, I seemed to be in an environment that was caring, but that didn't notice what was going on. I had to find my own way around and it becomes a way of life after awhile.

Nothing I would complain about, or make out that I was a victim of any kind, but that's just how it was. I was very lucky in science, the first job I got, because my parents were quite poor and I had no way to go to university whatever. It wasn't a matter of not being able to afford the fees, or something like that, it was the rule that if you went to work, you had to pay so much to your parents to supply them with what they'd spent in the past on you, or it was just the custom.

So, I got a job as a lab technician to a firm of consultants. I think it was the luckiest event of my life. I learned more from them working in London than I ever could have been taught at any university. The first thing that I learned, which most scientists are not taught nowadays as students, is how important it is to do your work well and produce the right answer, and the accurate answer, and to regard everything that you did seriously.

Students nowadays, the instructor in the laboratory we'll say, "Well, it doesn't matter if you don't understand the method. That won't be necessary in the examination, it's as long as you understand what's to be done, doing it is something you'll find about later." And that is not a good way of training students, at least I think not.

So, the hands on experience I got from these consultants stood me in good stead all my life. I really regarded any fudging or cheating in science as almost a sin against the holy ghost. This is something that loners have, I think, because many come from that, or used to come from that sort of background.

Consider Faraday, for example. He was an apprentice to a book seller. He was almost innumerate and yet he became one of our greatest scientists, and was in many ways was the founder, intuitively, of electromagnetic theory, which of course led to [Clarks Maxwell], and to Einstein. And he didn't have any sort of education in modern terms. So, that's the sort of background, people like that were my heroes, and not surprisingly I finished off as a lone scientist.

But in between, in World War II, I was very lucky to be sent to the National Institute for Medical Research in London, and I remember being interviewed by the director then, who happened to be President of the Royal Society. Sir Henry Dale. He said, "My boy, dismiss from your mind all thoughts that you're going to do any science here. It's wartime now and there's nothing but ad hoc jobs. You've got to find the answer preferably yesterday."

I was a bit amused by this at first, it was not what I expected. But I rapidly found that it was far better than anything I'd dreamt of. There were endless problems on almost every subject under the sun, and quite literally, if you could find the answer by yesterday, this was better than next week. So, it went on. It was such a lovely place to work at, and I stayed with him until I reached the age of 40.

It was a peculiar form of civil service, and I'll expect you'll have some views on this Crispin. We were responsible to know administry, but only to the Monarch. So, it was a privy counsel, which meant that there was no interference with what we were doing, political or otherwise, and it set up an atmosphere which I think should be taken as an example in science. The Medical Research Council, during the years about when I joined, up until about 1940, acquired as many Nobel prizes as France did. Which is pretty impressive when you really think about it. And how many scientific government departments nowadays even vaguely approach that thing? So, I feel something went wrong somewhere. It's up to you to think about that, not me.

I could see, by the time I reached 40, you know that famous saying, life begins at 40, looking ahead at my future, there were tram lines of complete security. I could do almost anything, other than, for example, rape the director's daughter in public before BBC television on the lawn. Something like that, I've got to do something like that to be dismissed, and it seemed a rather deadly life of this certainty, of security. Even if I didn't work I'd still be paid, and I knew I'd be promoted out of harms way, but that's not the same thing as being sacked. I felt that I had to go on my own.

And then out of the blue came a letter from NASA. NASA was only three years old in those days, and they hadn't done anything, sent anything anywhere, but it was from the director of Space Flight Operations, asking me, would I like to join their lunar and planetary expeditions. Having read science fiction since a lad, who would refuse an offer like that? That set me on my course as a loner. I became a consultant for NASA and that gave me a chance to get to Gaia because it was the evidence they brought back from robot missions to the moon and Mars, telescopic observations of Mars and Venus, which made me realize just how different our own atmosphere is, and how something must be regulating it. Anyway, that's how I started as a loner, Crispin.

Crispin: Well, I think the role of the loner is really quite interesting, because a lot of scientific discoveries have been made by loners. In a way, it can later become a question of teamwork, but at the very beginning, it's often the unfamiliar, apparently heretical view which makes so much difference. If you look to the history of science over the last 150 years you can see time and time again that when someone has invented something, everyone around him says "That's nonsense." So, he has to somehow prevail. Sometimes he gives up, and sometimes he's recognized, often fairly long after the event.

So, there has to be a kind of dialogue between the individual scientist who either has a good idea, or a bee in his bonnet, and those in corporate science who often have a strong vested interest in either proving that something is right, or very often proving that something is wrong. So, you can see, very often, that corporate science is devoted to saying that things are wrong and they want to maintain the status quo. The kind of thinking which involves which goes from original thinking is not always at all welcome.

If you think of some of the great changes that have taken place in our view of the world, going from Darwin onwards, to tectonic plate movement, indeed to Gaia theory, the first expression of this idea presents resentment, sometimes frenzied resentment. Indeed, I was reading this week about the efforts that some people are making at the moment to stop science, because they think it's dangerous and very upsetting. You even have to express that resentment by blowing things up, or doing other things of that kind.

There's a rather alarming article in Nature this week on the subject, which I commend to you. So, it's not the battle between individual scientists and corporate science, but rather the inevitable cooperation that must develop between them is absolutely fundamental. Jim has been a very good example of how a very good idea originally regarded with skepticism, which I am talking about Gaia theory, has now really turned into mainstream science. Indeed, I regard it as one of the successions of really good ideas that characterize our civilization. So, there you are, I've paid you a compliment.

James: Thank you. Thank you, Crispin. In that case I have nothing to do but agree with you wholeheartedly. You're absolutely right. I'm not saying that all science should be done by loners only, that would be hopeless. We'd be quarreling like mad, even worse and more violent than the other ones. No, you need the teamwork, really. I think that we as an animal are quite hierarchical, and nothing is more idiotic than the idea that we're all equal, or born equal. It's so absurd that I'm amazed that it can have any place in society at all. You have to have a hierarchy and you have to have different arrangements.

I think that if you want to understand the way that people work, don't make a model of it. That's the favorite thing of doing nowadays. That won't help you very much. Models based on mathematics are too pure and ideal, and it doesn't have the rough edges that reality does. What you need is what it says in the bible. Go watch the ants. There is no better person for understanding and putting over that then that American scientist E. O. Wilson. He's just produced a new book. I've forgotten the title of it, it's something about cooperation. No, it's not. Anyway, don't let me make a mess of it.

Crispin: It's the latest book that's just come out. It's called "The Social Conquest of Earth," I think.

James: That's right. Absolutely.

Crispin: It's a very brilliant and interesting book, because it shows the relationship of individuals working in one respect, and the kind of corporate identity which follows, and how humans, in a way, can be compared to other superorganisms, like ants. Which of course was Ed Wilson's original specialty. In fact, it still is, I think.

James: Yes, yes. And I think he's learned from that.

Crispin: I think he has. One of the things that strikes me as very interesting is that, of course, when you think about the growth of superorganisms, you've got to think about, first of all, the human body. Each of us contains a great bit of little organs, all of which know what to do. Otherwise, we wouldn't have eyes and ears and bodies at all. And yet, we are, each of us, a kind of superorganism in a way.

What Ed Wilson's examining in his new book is how the species as a whole becomes a superorganism, and how that can be compared with ants. In the case of ants, the genes will produce somebody and he knows, what's called epigenetics, will tell him what to do and so on. And then each of the members of the hive will gradually develop into members of a kind of superorganism, and in a way, that can be compared to the human superorganism. So, it's a very interesting thesis. Ed Wilson is a remarkable man at Harvard whom I think both of us know fairly well.

James: Yes.

Crispin: I was going to raise another issue which relates to that. One of the problems that has become, or hasn't, or very recently become a kind a taboo subject, which people aren't allowed to talk about but which is very much related to what we've been talking about, is human proliferation. The population problem. In a way, the population problem underlies almost every other problem that we have at the moment. Although, most people, until very recently, were unwilling to talk about it.

I think it's fair to say that it was talked about in the 1960s, but then a kind of cloud developed, inspired partly by worries of what God might think about it, and sex is anyway a bit embarrassing for some. So, only now are people really beginning to recognize, as the first figures come out of the extraordinary way in which humans are proliferating as an animal species almost out of control. And then, where does the control come? Is it going to be built into the system or is it going to be something else? Are we going to face terrible problems of health? Are we going to face the problems other species have encountered when they too proliferate beyond a certain point and come up against the stops? But I know [Dutch] and you also have your views on this very difficult subject.

James: Well, I think this is where living a long time causes me to disagree with you.

Crispin: Good.

James: I specifically remember the 1930s. An aunt and uncle of mine were into very middle class thinking about subjects like eugenics, which, thanks to World War II, became an absolute "no no" that you could not tangle with at all. But it was openly discussed in those days, and scientific books were written by people like J.B.S. Haldane on the virtues of eugenics. He even went as far as to suggest that teenage girls who produce large numbers of children who weren't very bright should be sterilized. This was just openly discussed quite readily amongst people in those days.

I think it was the awful example set in Germany that turned people's thoughts and minds against the whole topic altogether. I would feel very strongly that that was a battle that the Nazi's won, and we shouldn't really concede them the victory on that, we should be willing to discuss that sort of topic more openly still.

Crispin: We don't actually disagree because it was very much a prime subject of discussion before the late 1960s. Of course, Paul and Ann Ehrlich produced a famous book on the subject. It was really in the '70s and the '80s that it became taboo. But I think it's now coming back in quite a successful way, not least because, as you know, last October, the calculations suggest that the seven billionth human being had been born.

When you think that in my lifetime, when I was born there were roughly two and half billion humans, now there are seven billion, and the models, maybe as you are right to say, models being wrong, but it's suggested that these will go up to nine billion by the middle of this century. That will really be a very serious thing indeed when you think about the affects that nine billion people, more than half of them living in cities, are going to have on the natural environment.

James: Didn't you think it's not so much the number of people that matters, but how they're also living?

Crispin: Yeah.

James: I think the Ehrlichs made a good point of this.

Crispin: Yeah.

James: They had it in terms of consumption, not just of food, but of all sorts of resources in the world. But, bearing that in mind, the argument is still the same. There is a limit to the number of people that the earth can carry at any moment. I think we may well be close to it or have passed it.

Crispin: We may be. As you know, the Chinese have actually taken fright at what's been going on there.

James: Yeah.

Crispin: So, they had the one child, one family policy, which works to a certain extent. Of course, it tends to produce an older generation. There are more old people, and the next problem that arises is that if people live longer as they now do, how are you going to match that with a shrinking younger population? All of these problems come up a great deal in Africa.

One of things I did in the past was to run the British Overseas Aid program, and we faced this problem very strongly in parts of Africa. And indeed, Africa is that part of the world where human multiplication is most evident. But, in many parts of the world, it is of course coming down. In Mexico, when I was first there, the population was about 35 million, now it's over 100 million, and gradually it's beginning to diminish. The magic figure is 2.1 children per family, and that I think is now- it's certainly much less than that in Britain, it's even less than that even more in Germany. But, in parts of Africa, it's still, let's say 1.6, 1.7 children per family, and this is going to have very big effects, not least because they have to suffer all the effects of climate change and other changes in the natural environment, which at the moment are taking place.

James: Isn't it generally agreed now that the empowerment of women has done more to reduce the birthrate than almost anything else.

Crispin: I think yes.

James: That is to be wholly approved. It's a much kinder way out of the problem than the Chinese one, which was only possible with a [dericious] government such as they had in China. I don't know how the empowerment of women quite came about. I don't think it was entirely peaceful, at least remembering my own childhood and my own very feminist mother, it certainly wasn't. But it's worked out, it's worked through, and it's doing its good.

Crispin: I quite agree with you. I think the role of women is absolutely critical in looking at this. Indeed, I also descend from a family of feminists. My grandmother was even a suffragist.

James: Mine was a suffragist, yes.

Crispin: Who were the kind of normal. The suffragettes were the ones who were the kind of green peace of the day, the suffragists were the ones who wanted constitutional change. I think there are four factors which are very important in the human population increase, which all relate to women. One is that when women are given the same status as men they have much more control of their own bodies, and this is not of course the case in Africa, where it doesn't always happen.

The second thing is when girls are educated in the same ways as boys. The third one is when you get contraceptive devices available and not subjective to bans and religious objections. And the fourth one, I think, is accepting that women play a major role in society right across the whole board. And on that, I think we're all agreed.

James: Yeah.

Crispin: If you get those four factors brought together, you find that population immediately begins to first of all to go down, and then to get into a kind of broad balance.

James: I absolutely agree here. The only thing I'll add is that we shouldn't worry too much if it goes below the reproductive point, because it's almost purely tribal then. We get worried that our tribe is going to be less represented than some other tribe, and in the long run that doesn't actually hold.

Crispin: It's interesting that the French President has been saying, go get multiplied. I'm not going to use the root word, but you know what I mean.

James: Yes. We don't want that, do we?

Crispin: Anyway, the role of women is absolutely critical to anything when we look at the future of our society, and I'm glad to say that it is changing very fast in this country, and we're well below the 2.1. I think it's also true to say that women are occupying more and more important places in society. I think the number of people in boardrooms isn't perhaps exactly equal, but when I was once the head of an Oxford college, I tried quite hard to raise the female proportion of the governing body. But it was quite difficult because qualified people just were just not available, they hadn't got there yet. There's nothing I think is worse or more damaging than to promote people because either they are women, or they are black, or because there's something that you think needs to be put into a balance.

I remember at Harvard, there was a particular man who had been chosen as a professor, I think largely because he was black, and he did feel that he wasn't as clever as the others, and he was therefore subjected to a kind of constant discrimination against himself. He found it very humiliating. Nowadays things are changing, the balance is becoming better established, but it's still something that we have to think about all the time, how to work sensibly towards a long-term balance.

James: Absolutely. This is getting to be a tricky subject and somebody's going to put his foot in it. I know it won't be you, it will certainly be me. So, what about another interesting thing that's happening at the moment, and that is that an awful lot of the people of the world are moving to live in cities. In our part of the world, what they call the first world, it's already over 90% and I think in Britain about 95% live in the city. And this is a huge change and it's been happening relatively quietly without too much fuss and notice. The whole world is over 50% already.

This has enormous impacts on all sorts of the things. The one that I feel is very interesting at the moment, and it's right up your street, and that is if everybody virtually moves to live in the city, we don't have to worry about global warming or anything like that, because [inaudible 24:16] it's a relatively trivial task to look after the climate of the city, instead of trying to air condition the whole of the earth.

Gaia has been doing that for 3 billion years or more now, and done it very well, or we wouldn't be here talking about it. The system's been through far worse threats than we represent, as far as climate change goes, so leave it to Gaia to run the planet, and we just look after the city. It's enormously less of a task and far less contentious.

Crispin: Well, I see cities as superorganisms, the kind that I was talking about before.

James: Absolutely.

Crispin: They absorb resources and the emit waste. And if the absorb resources and emit waste and they can do so on a sustainable basis, well very well and good. But very often that is not the case. They absorb resources, and you find that cities, above all the children within cities have no idea about nature outside it. Children's education is thereby considerably damaged, and then what do we do with all of the waste that they emit? I wasn't thinking necessarily of the green house gases but all the innumerous other waste that cities emit.

I once sat on a kind of task force where we looked in on some of these issues, and we came to the conclusion, unlike you, that you don't want to have these big cities, and indeed, in an electronic future it won't be necessary to create big cities. Instead, you will find that most people don't have to take the road to work to go into a city everyday, or to operate there. The aim should be to go for smaller living communities with heavy public transport, not being in your cars but dependent on trains. And a lot of the work will be done at home in which you'll be using your electronic instruments for the purpose.

So, you would have a sort of dispersed society in which everyone would feel at home with nature, they wouldn't feel the need to go to work. Indeed, it was suggested that future archaeologists would look at those huge roads that we're still building, and say "What are all these roads for? What can they be for?" Because there's no need to bring so many people in and out everyday and indeed to maintain the urban life as we now know it.

So, I don't know whether that is a vision that others here have thought about at all, but one thing I do think is that we face a major problem with our cities in the future, not least because- to use this analogy again, of a superorganism which emits immense quantities of waste, absorbs resources, and isn't perhaps the kind of long-term proposition that we would like it to be.

James: Well, I think the best way to answer that one is, Sandy and I were lucky enough to travel a few years ago across Australia on the Ghan train, which goes all the way from Adelaide to Darwin in the North. It's a wonderful journey. If any of you ever get the chance to do it I can strongly recommend it. But, it was interesting. Now, the middle of Australia is semi-desert. All the way across, some of it's savanna, some of it's complete desert, but it's in that sort of condition.

It was fascinating, you see. Everywhere the train passed you saw these termite cities sticking up. They all had air-conditioned themselves, if not least by building themselves oriented north south, as good as a compass. The heat load from the sun was minimal during the daytime, and I have a feeling that's the we're going.

This is what I'm talking about. We are all moving into cities, whether we like it or not, or whether some committee decides it wouldn't be a good idea, we better disperse. I just think we're going there because people move of their own volition. The ants and termites are a lovely example of the way we're going to go.

The highest price of course, when you think about, and it's particularly true of some of the species of social insects, is that the workers, the great mass of the population get very dumb down. They become [inaudible 28:40] in their nest environment, as you say, there's no exposure to the natural world. They're unaware of it, and gradually they get dumber and dumber, but they just do their tasks just the same. And in a way, those nests are real models of the environment, and something we should look at. And again, I go back to that biblical injunction. Go to the ant.

Crispin: Well, I look at the ants, and I say to myself, what is the history of ant superorganisms? And the answer is that it's a very checkered history. Ant societies collapse very suddenly and horribly. Human societies have also collapsed. They haven't collapsed for quite a while, but if you look at the history of civilization, which after all is the last of the flash of geological time, that's to say the last 2,000, and perhaps 3,000 years, you'll see that human societies have indeed collapsed, and there the superorganism is indeed horribly exposed, because they can't do anything. And then people flood out.

You can see it happening in the plains of the great rivers of India, you can see it in the Middle East, you can see it happening when suddenly people become vulnerable to a specific disease like the Black Death, which greatly cut human populations in Medieval Europe. Whatever you do, you must recognize that superorganisms, whatever kind, cities or anything else, are very vulnerable. Something goes wrong, and then it becomes very difficult to maintain them.

I don't know whether others feel strong views about this but I would not like to see us become particularly dependent on urban society because I think that urban society might indeed be in peril partly from itself, as it has to have available resources, use them, and emit all the waste that can change our environment.

James: Do you think it's right to always aim for the safest possible option? Unless I read you wrongly, that's what you're saying. Evolution seems to suggest that all sorts of experiments have been tried. Some failed and some lead to the survivors and the successors, and really the thing that counts is the old way of expressing Darwin's views, those that leave the most progeny succeed.

Crispin: Yes, that is of course why people were interested in eugenics in the 1920s and 30s, they wanted to make sure that whoever did succeed they were the best people that succeeded and not the worst people that succeeded.

James: That's right.

Crispin: But as you rightly said it was very easily perverted. That kind of Darwinism I think became greatly discredited not least by the Nazi Party after the war.

James: During the war.

Crispin: During the war.

James: And subsequently in places like Russia, I think.

Crispin: But the human organism, I think one has to remember, is a very vulnerable thing. Whether it's an individual, or whether indeed as a society, and in looking at the future of the planet we have to remember that the way in which we are treating the planet at the moment is something that probably can't be continued beyond a certain amount of time without doing enormous damage to it.

We can debate the human future almost endlessly, but one of the things that is alarming about the human future is indeed, not only just the constant proliferation, but as Jim [Ratner] said a moment again, it's also the increase in consumption of resources that often can't be replaced. There of course is the test. This is where we go back to the beginning.

There is the test for scientists to try to produce interesting answers to some of these questions. I often think that scientists, for example in dealing in the huge implications of the energy problem, where we get our energy from, there's an obvious scientific need for a way of storing electricity, and I know that some of the major companies are spending an enormous amount of money to try and do just that. But I don't know if any of the individual scientists have come forward with the kind of hyper battery that can contain and look after energy for long enough for us to use the alternate sources of energy, that is to say not fossil fuels and burning forests and the rest in the future.

James: Well, in some ways I hope they don't in a hurry, because a hyper battery would be an exceedingly dangerous object. If you're going to store vast amounts of energy in a small space you've got a recipe for a quite powerful bomb that will self-explode if there's the slightest short circuit in the system.

No. Let's get back to cities. One of the things that fascinates me is Singapore. It's a very strange city. I don't know if you've ever been there, but if you do, one of the first things that you notice is, when you go out in the world, is the appalling climate. The temperature daily gets into the 90s and the humidity is very high, so it feels intensely hot and uncomfortable. But noticeably around everywhere are extraordinary fit and healthy and young looking policemen. They carry a cane and there's a large notice up, penalty for littering, five strokes of the cane, and there's no litter to be found anywhere in the city. That's the small point about it.

But what is extraordinary is that there is a city community that is one of the most successful in the world. The GDP of Singapore I think stands level with almost anywhere else you'd like to think of. And it survives and is highly efficient and has solved the climate problem in a sense, and it's choosing to do so on the very worst spot that you would ever think of choosing 65 miles from the equator, with a climate hotter than most of the projections of the climatologists would put.

For example, Europe, even at towards the end of the century. So, it can be done, and done very efficiently. I know many of you might thing that liberty and things like that in Singapore are nowhere near where they should be, and that may be true. However, as far as the quality of life goes for the average person I'd imagine that it's a lot better than most parts of the world. I'd far rather live in Singapore than, shall we say, equatorial Africa.

Crispin: I think I would agree with you. By chance I've just been in Singapore. I went there about a month ago to spend the wholly inside of a week conducting an inquiry into the affairs of one very new and interesting Singaporean University, which is looking into natural catastrophes. They've been working on this for three years and I chaired this little committee of inquiry. They face volcanoes, they face tsunamis, they face tectonic plate movement, and contrary to what you've been saying they're very worried about the future of Singapore in terms of sea level rise, which is perceptible everyday, and they are very much aware of.

But I entirely endorse what you say about Singapore, because they are a very disciplined people, their unemployment is down to about 2%, they are very hardworking, and also they are very nice, which makes an enormous difference. When you walk around and look at all the things that they're doing, and you realize the enthusiasm with which they're doing it, you cannot but be impressed. Even so, I think I prefer [Hawaii] if I'm going to live anywhere.

James: Yeah, exactly. I know what you mean Crispin.

Crispin: Now, look, I see what time it is. I think perhaps we should give anyone an opportunity to raise questions and put us all on the rack. Here's someone here. Sorry you have microphone coming. You better say who you are.

Audience Member: Yes, if I could get back to the role of the lone scientist. When I retired from industry, the big loss that I felt was being cut out from access to the peer reviewed, published science literature. Which perhaps posses two alternative questions for James Lovelock.

Is it a strength to be cut off from the sort of view of the scientific consensus because you can't access the paid for literature? Or is it a strength to be inside some corporation who is effectively paying for your access to what the scientific community are saying and thinking about the issues that you are involved in.

James: Thank you, that's a quite interesting question. I find that I'm referring to books and literature less and less and less. You may regret it, but more and more and more to Google. It's quite remarkable to have this amazing library almost at your fingertips, and when you combine it with the capacities of the search engines they have in that system, it enables me to work in a remote place which otherwise would be impractical, because there would be frequent journeys to libraries an things like that to get information on new topics.

That is really a flip on your question and I acknowledge that. The thing about lone scientists that I think Crispin made clear is that they are the ones that come up with new ideas, food for the team, team workers. But on the new ideas there's rarely any literature at all. I might add here that peer review is I think an abominable thing. It's very useful for editors who don't have to know so much as they used to, of journals. It's very useful for the "I" dotting and "T" dotting crossing research, which is most of what goes on. But it's very, very harmful to anything new.

In my experience the peer reviewers always through out anything that's truly original. They only let through what the group of cronies to which they belong subscribe to. So, I would think the loss of peer reviewed literature is no great loss at all as far as a lone scientist goes. In fact, good advice I've always had for lone scientists is read what is the prevailing view, and then proceed to criticize it. There you'll find the subject to work on. This I found true in many, many different fields of science.

Crispin: If I could just add to that. It's quite interesting, when someone comes up with an idea which is perhaps unwelcome, like I said, people will condemn it. There's an interesting book written recently by a man called Rupert Sheldrake. He puts forward the theory of what he calls morphic resonance. There he's discussing about how it that human's communicate with each other by telepathy, which of course is also a disgraceful subject that people can't mention, how they communicate with each other, how we judge people by the expressions on their faces, and all of the various means of communication that fall into roughly the area which has been long regarded with suspicion of telepathy and related subjects.

Now, Rupert Sheldrake's book, which I in fact reviewed myself, not saying I agree with it because I wasn't in a position to say if I agreed or not agreed, has had a tremendous success in the world, but has not been reviewed by the scientific journals.

James: I reviewed it for Nature.

Crispin: Well, there you are. Well, you see, I didn't. I don't know what conclusion you reached.

James: I said that I accepted the review as a kind of poison chalice.

Crispin: Well, that's exactly that. But what is quite interesting is the way in which the New Science didn't do it. I knew New Science refused to review it, but I missed your review in Nature.

James: Well, that was when Maddox was the editor.

Crispin: Oh, when Maddox was the editor. Did you review the book or the idea?

James: I can't remember now.

Crispin: I think it was the idea, because the latest book he's written-

James: Oh, not the latest one.

Crispin: The latest book is the one I'm referring to.

James: The one on morphic resonance. First one on morphic resonance.

Crispin: Yes, because he's written several books on it. But what I would say to you is that it may be wrong, but it's certainly a very interesting idea and it seeks to explain a phenomenon that is otherwise not at all understood or explained within the conventional wisdom. I think, Jim, your review was some time ago.

James: In the 80s.

Crispin: Well, his latest books came out only two or three months ago in which he tried to take account of all the objections that had been raised. He didn't entirely convince me because I wasn't able to be convinced, as you might say because I just don't know enough about it. But he did illustrate the point that both of us were making earlier, is that if you have an individual who comes forth with an idea which is unwelcome, then by God the forces of the establishment will try to kill it if they can.

James: I agree absolutely. But I think that if you're going to reject something that somebody has written at all, you should be very cautious about doing it. The one grounds you should choose for rejecting it is if there's any indication that it's shoddy work. That the information gathered is not Kosher.

Crispin: That's right.

James: Not enough care was taken. That stuff should be rejected by the peer reviewers, and I regret they don't do a very good job. There's an awful lot of rubbish appears in the literature.