The life of JBS Haldane

Photo by Tim Sackton via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0

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An experimental childhood

Kat: John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, known as Jack or JBS to his friends - and ‘Boy’ to his family while growing up - was born on the 5th November 1892 to a well-to-do family, and mostly grew up in Oxford. His father, John Scott Haldane, was a well-known physiologist, famous for carrying out fearless experiments upon himself and his colleagues in order to understand the limits of the human body and the impact of different gases upon it. 

Haldane Senior was working in an era of exploration, with divers heading to the depths of the ocean struggling to cope with decompression when they rose to the surface, climbers suffering from altitude sickness, and the threat of noxious gases in coalmines and then in the trenches of World War One. 

Samanth: His father was a physiologist. He was particularly concerned with respirations. So a lot of Haldane senior’s scientific work involved shutting himself up in a box and seeing how varying mixtures of carbon dioxide and oxygen affected him. Out in the world he would go out into coal mines and try to understand what was killing coal miners, it turned out to be carbon monoxide, something that was not previously understood. He would work on submarine research. He would go down himself or he would send people down into the bottom of lakes to see why they got the bends and how to avoid that. So really, Haldane senior's life was completely devoted to working on himself and both Haldane senior and Haldane himself had this philosophy that, you know, it's all very well to experiment on a rabbit, but a rabbit can’t tell you how it's feeling.

Kat: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the young Jack was quickly pressed into scientific service by his dad, being taken aboard the HMS Spanker, a naval torpedo gunboat, for a week of experiments that involved the 13-year-old boy being shoved into an ill-fitting diving suit and chucked into the sea off the west coast of Scotland. 

The aim was to see whether bringing Jack slowly up from the depths in stages, rather than the conventional practice of coming straight up in one go, would help to prevent the ‘bends’ - a life threatening condition caused by bubbles of nitrogen forming in the bloodstream due to the pressure differential between the sea and dry land. 

Although the experiment worked, and Haldane Senior was able to use data from Jack and the rest of his volunteers to calculate a table of decompression times for divers, the boy’s poorly fitting diving suit was another matter. It filled with freezing cold water up to his neck, leaving him shivering and terrified by the time he made it back to the deck of the Spanker, where he was sent to bed by papa with a stiff whisky. 

Another time, young Jack was taken down a coalmine by his father, who was keen to show the boy first hand the effects of breathing toxic methane gas, as well as an opportunity to meet people outside the Haldanes’ rarified academic bubble.

Jack and genetics

Haldane senior also introduced his son to what was then the brand new field of genetics, which was just starting to bloom. In 1901, when Jack was 8 years old, his father took him along to a lecture by Arthur Darbishire - the first person to give lectures on genetics in the UK.  

Darbishire spoke about Mendel’s laws of inheritance, which had just been rediscovered - a story you can hear more about in episode 14 of series one, The Seeds of a Great Idea. And this sowed the seeds of a future career in Jack Haldane’s mind.

Intrigued by these new concepts of heredity, Jack and his younger sister Naomi procured some guinea pigs - not as pets, but for the purposes of Mendelian breeding experiments, with Naomi left caring for the animals while Jack was away at Eton boarding school, as well as taking an equal share in the data gathering. 

Alas, the experiments did not go well - especially when several guinea pigs died in fear when terrorised by a neighbour’s dog - and the young scientists were unable to confirm Mendel’s laws. 

Fortunately JBS survived the experiments of his father, and his disappointingly non-Mendelian guinea pigs, and went to Oxford University where he studied maths and classics. This was an unusual combination but one that suited his logical but expansive mind. Despite never formally studying any the sciences, Haldane was already hooked on genetics, and presented his first paper on animal genetics in 1912 while he was still a student. 

But outside this scientific sphere, war was looming. JBS joined the Scottish Black Watch regiment and was eventually sent to the front line in France. 

Spotting Haldane’s scientific mind, his commanding officers set him to work as a bomb engineer, tinkering with explosives to create deadly mortars, then joining his colleagues in the field to throw them at the German troops.

He was a fearless fighter, known by nicknames like  “Bombo” or “The Rajah of Bomb” by his colleagues, who encountered him sleeping peacefully on top of a pile of bombs, and was described as “the bravest and dirtiest soldier in my army” by field marshal Douglas Haig.

Despite the intervention of war, Haldane continued to work on animal breeding experiments with Naomi back home, having switched their attentions from guinea pigs to mice. She wrote to him often with the results, and the siblings eventually published a paper in the Journal of Genetics in 1915, together with Jack’s friend at Oxford, Alexander Sprunt, outlining their findings on coat colour inheritance. It’s probably the only scientific paper to have been published from the trenches by an officer of the Black Watch.

Haldane made it through the first world war mostly intact, with some shrapnel wounds. He also had a wartime stint working back with his dad testing designs for gas masks - and as you might have guessed, it was Jack who got shut in a box pumped full of poison gas. It was lucky that he had such a strong constitution, and even as a young man he cut a distinctive figure, both physically and mentally.

Samanth: He was a larger than life character in every sense of the word. He was physically imposing, very tall and bulky running to fat in his forties and fifties, he had this big, giant Boulder of a head and this fierce mustache, always dressed quite dowdily and didn't really pay much attention to what you and I might call personal hygiene and personal grooming. He had a reputation for being something of a grouch, he was crotchety, he was impatient with fools or with people who took themselves too seriously, or people who thought they knew something that they actually didn't.

And he had this mind that was able to grasp the most original concepts in nearly every scientific discipline and to figure out new insights into those concepts. And I'm not just talking here about genetics and evolutionary biology, although that was what he was most famous for, but he had a mathematical mind that could really be turned to almost any scientific discipline. And this character of his, his slightly imperious, slightly arrogant, nevertheless, brilliant, this character really made him the person he was and dictated a lot of the decisions that he took during the course of his life.

Kat: As a geneticist, JBS soon shunned tedious breeding experiments and lab work, instead turning to mathematics to understand heredity. And, according to Samanth, that’s probably a good thing.

Samanth: He would knock over apparatus all over the labs that he went into, and so he was famously not trusted around particularly sensitive environment instruments, but this suited him to a T because what he really wanted to do was sit down with pen and paper and a log book of log tables and work out equations for evolutionary biology and for genetics.

Kat: It was this work - sitting down and grinding through the data - that led Haldane to some of the most important insights in genetics and evolution at the time, which still form the foundations of our understanding today.

Samanth: I think the thing that he's most remembered for is being part of and helping create what was known as the field of modern synthesis. And to understand this we have to go back to the early decades of the 20th century when biologists knew that there were two different strains of thought on how evolution and genetics worked. One was handed down by Darwin and one was handed down by Mendel, the monk who figured out how inheritance happens through genes or genetic units, but they couldn't figure out how to marry these two disciplines. And without the marriage of these two disciplines, it seemed as if Darwinian natural selection was a stillborn science.

In fact, at some point, people were predicting the death of natural selection and Haldane along with a couple of other similarly mathematically inclined biologists helped to wed these two strains of thought and came up with what is called the modern synthesis, which proved beyond a shadow of doubt that inheritance could proceed along Mendelian lines, and it would still have the kind of power that natural selection predicted. And so this really took almost 10 years of work. It resulted in 10 extremely famous papers that he published through the 1920s in the 1930s. 

Beyond that, I think he is more well-known for predicting small discreet pieces of information in our knowledge of evolutionary biology. So for example, he was the first to estimate the rate of mutation of a human gene, he was the first to estimate how linkage happens, which is essentially how two genes placed close to each other on a chromosome, how often they're inherited together or separated as the case may be. And he did this using a bunch of data involving haemophilia and colourblindness in a population. So these were the sort of incremental steps that he made throughout the rest of his career. 

I say in the book that Haldane isn't really known for one big shining discovery, the way Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin were, which is to discover the structure of the DNA molecule. But I do also say that this is exactly how science tends to happen more often than not, which is incremental steps, incremental gains and knowledge that eventually add to our understanding of the bigger picture.

Kat: By the end of the 1930s, war intervened again. Although Haldane was too old to fight, he was determined to serve his country with science. And just as in the first world war, that meant going back to self-experimentation. 

Samanth: The British Navy was trying to understand why submariners died in stricken submarines below the water, what happened to the mixture of gases under certain temperatures and pressures in the ocean. And after one particularly bad submarine accident, Haldane took on the responsibility of preparing a report for the Admiralty and this involved shutting himself and his colleagues, and even his wife at the time, up in a box and varying pressure and temperature and mixture of criteria, sometimes to devastating effect - he would throw up, he would pass out, he had a bubble formed at the base of his spine that remained with him through the rest of his life and made it very painful for him to sit anywhere.

So this was the kind of self-experimentation work that Haldane did during the second world war, but it resulted in perhaps the most comprehensive report yet on what submarine conditions can do to the human body. 

A scientific storyteller

Kat: Alongside his work as a scientist, Haldane was a passionate public communicator, giving hundreds of public lectures and frequently writing newspaper and magazine columns on everything from politics to philosophy to science to his own colourful life story. 

Initially suspicious of the popular press, warning a friend that it was a ‘sure road to quackery’, he quickly realised that not only did a public platform give him an opportunity to share his many opinions, but it fed his belief that science should be in the public eye. He even wrote a book for children, about a magician named Mr. Leakey, and most of a science fiction novel.

Haldane was widely read, with an impressive memory. He loved to drop quotes and ideas into his pieces and talks from the full canon of literature, covering everything from Dante and Norse mythology to the Bhagavad Gita, alongside examples from the full gamut of academia, from biology and chemistry to history and astronomy. Like so many great communicators, he saw the importance of making science relatable to the reader. As Samanth writes:

He spun his scientific lessons off the spindle of the daily world, so that no one could fail to understand them. “Start from a known fact, say a bomb explosion, a bird’s song, or a cheese,” he advised once. Then proceed through the science in a series of hops rather than one direct leap. His material was often filched from the week’s most lurid headlines: a murder trial, the deaths of alcoholics, the monkey gland extracts administered to the players on the Wolverhampton Wanderers football team. 

Unsurprisingly for a researcher in the public eye, Haldane got lots of letters from people with scientific ideas ranging from sensible to ridiculous. Ever the keen communicator, he wrote back to nearly all of them, often with advice for experiments that might prove - or disprove - their theory. As Samanth notes:

“Science advances by successive improvements in former theories,” Haldane wrote once to a man who sent him a hollow hypothesis about how thoroughbred racehorses inherited their coat colours. “If they are wrong”—the former theories, he meant—“the reasons for rejecting them should be stated. If they are right, this should be acknowledged.” To a W. Hague of Kingswood Cottages, London, who wished to alert the world to his discovery of “a new law of nature,” Haldane replied: “The test for a ‘new law of nature’ is this. Does it enable you to predict or control events which could not be predicted or controlled before? What is wanted . . . is a set of repeatable experiments which will go one way if it is true, and another way if it is not.”

He was equally merciless with his colleagues, advising one who came to him with a substandard manuscript that “It ought not to be published… “You would be better advised, if this is possible, to go back to experimental biology,” he wrote, “rather than to continue to work in human genetics.”

Ooof. Burn. 

Political problems

It’s impossible to separate JBS Haldane from his politics, which shaped every aspect of his life, including his work.

Samanth: Haldane had grown up in a house that was relatively agnostic. His father was clearly left leaning and I think those political stances percolated down to Haldane as well, and so Haldane might've been categorised as sort of vaguely centrist or left of centre when he started work at Oxford in the 1920s, but he moved further and further to the left through the course of the next two decades. And there were a number of reasons for this, one was of course his first wife who had a definite socialist tendencies, but more importantly, I think as fascism grew in continental Europe, he began to see the leftist movement as one of the strongest bulwarks against that.

He was extremely critical of what right of centre governments, both in the US and the UK thought about his preferred field of genetics and how they viewed genetic theory and used it as a pretext for separating populations, sterilising, minorities, things like that.

Kat: Haldane’s shift to the left eventually led him to a fascination with the Soviet Union and the principles of communism, even joining the British Communist Party in the 1940s - an action that only served to increase the suspicions of MI5, who had first opened a file on Haldane in 1928. 

He visited the Soviet Union only once in the late 1920s with his first wife Charlotte, before it became clear that life under Stalin was perhaps not the glorious utopia that leftists were hoping for. Haldane was impressed by the commitment to science, supported by hefty funding - a situation that seemed at odds with the attitude of the UK government at the time. And it’s here where Haldane’s political sentiments came clashing with his scientific ones. 

Samanth: Lysenko was an agronomist in the Soviet Union, not a trained geneticist who started to advance some slightly outlandish theories about how inheritance worked. In essence, what he tried to do was to contradict the one fundamental principle of Darwinian evolution, which is that the environment in which you live has no effect on the actual genes that you pass on to the next generation by which I mean, if as a full grown man I have a limb cut off I cannot then pass on that physiological change to my son or my daughter.

And this was, and continues to be, quite a strong tenet of the way evolution works. But Lysenko seemed to insist the opposite. He seemed to insist that he could alter the fundamental genetic properties of grain, for example, by exposing them to varying environmental conditions, he could grow super hardy strains of wheat that could then be grown in the Northern latitudes of the Soviet Union merely within the space of one generation. 

And in doing all of this, he also had to eventually contradict the way genetics was thought to work, which is the basic chromosomal structure of inheritance. He denied that there was any such a unit as a chromosome. He often denied that statistics and mathematics had any place at all in genetics and evolutionary genetics in particular, all of these were things that Haldane had worked on himself. In fact, denying the place of mathematics and statistics and genetics was to deny all of Haldane's work.

So that was one aspect of it. But then as Lysenko rose in power, as he grew more and more favoured by Stalin, he was also put in charge of masterminding these purges of geneticists and biologists who dare to oppose him and all of this culminated in one big Congress in 1948 in the Soviet Union where a number of biologists were purged from the Congress, their careers were ended. In some cases, they were sent away to die, and so these two prongs of the Lysenko affair eventually made their way to the UK. And at this point, Haldane made the fateful decision to defend Lysenko and to not admit that science had taken a dire turn in the Soviet Union.

Kat: As news of Lysenko’s shonky science spread, the BBC invited four geneticists—Sydney Harland, Cyril Darlington, Ronald Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane—to an on-air debate. The first three scientists strongly criticised Lysenko, not only for his science but for the purging of his peers. When it was Haldane’s turn to speak, something seemed...off. As Samanth describes it: 

Haldane’s short speech was a curious, un-Haldane-like affair: rickety and defensive, full of feints and distractions and muddy logic. He complained that he did not know what the other three scientists had said and that the full, 500-page transcript of the academy’s bygone conference was still unavailable in English. “Till I have read a translation, I cannot judge whether the Academy’s decision was right,” he said. “We are like the jury in Alice in Wonderland, considering our verdicts before we have heard the evidence.” Nevertheless, Haldane had his views on Lysenko’s work, and although he disagreed with a lot of it, he said, he found a few fundamental points to be in order. He proceeded through these, gliding over the evidence and ignoring the fallacies. His arguments were as fugitive as fog.

Kat: Haldane’s family and friends in the scientific community tried - gingerly, of course -  to pick apart his blind devotion to Lysenkoism and the communist cause, at the expense of his scientific reputation. So why did he do it?

Samanth: It was very puzzling to me when I started. I mean, this did not seem to be the rational man, the man who emphasised the scientific method, the man who was wedded to facts, who I had come to know, everything else you read about him portrays him as a coldly rational person. It took me a little while to figure out, and this was a lot of archival work and poring over Haldane’s letters and missives to the communist party of Great Britain, its members, his fellow colleagues in the party.

It took me a while to figure it out that what Haldane had judged for himself was that this was not the time to publicly abandon the party. This was the time maybe to raise your voice within the party and to decry Lysenko and Stalin within the circles of the party. But I think he thought he would be doing communism, the cause of socialism itself, a great disfavour by criticising Lysenko at this crucial time.

And so as a result, he really had to, in a very mealy mouth way, find small rationalisations for what was happening with biology and genetics and the Soviet Union. But you could see, and this is something that I say in the book, you could see in his letters to his fellow party colleagues, you could see him becoming increasingly agitated and angry and dispirited with the whole affair, to the extent that after the Lysenko incident of 1948, a few years later, he left the party altogether.

So I think it was a misstep in that sense that he chose to abandon his loyalty to rationalism and scientific accuracy in public perhaps at a time when it mattered most, but if there is anything any, any caveat to be advanced, or anything to be said in his favour, it is that he was actually genuinely standing up to his party colleagues trying to do the right thing.

Kat: Eventually, Haldane’s scientific head get the better of his leftist heart. He became disillusioned  and managed to pull away from the Communist Party, although he still felt very strongly about politics, arguing that “even if the professors leave politics alone, politics won’t leave the professors alone.”

A passage to India

By 1956, Haldane had got fed up of the scientific and political situation in the UK, ostensibly because of the British government’s role in the Suez crisis. Seeking a warmer, kinder climate he moved with his wife Helen to India, bringing a dozen jars of live fish along for the ride. 

Initially the pair took up positions at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, later moving down the coast to a newly established biometry research unit in Bhubaneswar after Haldane fell out with the ISI’s director.

Whether it’s really true, as he told reporters, that “sixty years in socks was enough”, Haldane had plenty of other reasons for leaving the UK. The fallout over the Lysenko affair and his subsequent rift with the Communist party and many of his colleagues had left him without an ideological anchor. 

He was growing old, and approaching the age of retirement from his position at University College London - and the fact that the university sacked Helen, who was also a researcher there, following her arrest for being drunk and disorderly probably didn’t help. 

Samanth: India offered an interesting alternative, it offered a new country, a fresh start. India had become independent in 1947, 10 years before Haldane got there. It was led by Jawaharlal Nehru who was not only a staunch socialist, but was also somebody the Haldanes knew - Haldane and his sister had met him a couple of times previously in the UK, and it was seemingly devoted to planning a nation state, and its economy, on scientific principles in ways that were far less humane than the Soviet Union's vision of that same project.

And finally there was, and this was something that I discovered only by poring over Haldane’s bank statements and letters and so on, is that the quite simple fact was he was running out of money. University college London had taken a number of bomb hits during the war and was slowly rebuilding, his own lab barely had any funds. In fact, he had to often pay researchers out of his pocket. He once had to spring for a new set of teaspoons for the common room, I mean it was that kind of situation. And while he was always happy to do it, his bank statements were perpetually in the red, he was paying alimony to his first wife. 

So all of these reasons contributed to Haldane’s move as well because in India, at the Indian statistical Institute in Kolkata, he was being offered a very generous package in a country where the money would go much further, he'd be given housing and a car and things like that, and so I think there was also a very practical fiscal element to his move.

Kat: The Haldanes quickly settled into life in India and their various research projects on all kinds of exotic plants and animals, with JBS swapping his English blazers for flowing white robes, even when he came back to Europe to visit. He learned both Bengali and Sanskrit, took Indian citizenship and liked to spend his evenings floating on his back in the local pond, staring at the stars with a pipe gripped firmly between his teeth. 

Haldane enjoyed lecturing to anyone who would listen about astronomy, and also his newfound vegetarianism. He did recognise that these habits probably made him very tedious, writing to his secretary’s fiancée, “You should probably avoid being on the roof with me at night. This is not for the reason which you might guess, for I am sixty-five years old, and love my wife; but because I am liable to start talking about the stars and many people find this very boring.”

Alas, this blissful time in India couldn’t last forever. Haldane was diagnosed with bowel cancer during a visit to England, and despite being told his doctors had carried out an apparently successful surgery, the disease spread to his liver. When Helen brought him the letter revealing the bad news, Haldane was with his students. He barely reacted, except to share with them a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “For one who has taken birth, death is certain. For one who is dead, birth is certain. Therefore, for what is unavoidable, Do not grieve.”

JBS Haldane died on the 1st of December 1964 on the porch of his home in Bhubaneswar, where he had spent much of the Autumn as his strength waned. A scientist to the end, he insisted that his body was donated for medical research, writing “I hope that I have been of some use to my fellow creatures while alive, and see no reason why I should not continue to be so when dead.”

Finally, there was just one more thing I had to ask Samanth about his research into Haldane’s life, and that’s the infamous quote “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” Although it’s attributed to Haldane in various forms, it’s not actually clear that he said it. But does it matter?

Samanth: It's really hard to tell, obviously what Haldane’s point in making this remark was that there are so many beetle species on the face of the earth that it can only mean particular fondness for the beetle on the part of the creator. But it seems to have circulated in so many different versions since his time that you can never really go to the exact original source or really, I haven't been able to do it. The one thing that I discovered only over the last week that thrilled me no end is that there is a Terry Pratchett book in which the creator, every time he is bored or depressed, he makes a new beetle. And I thought that was a fantastic use of Haldane’s supposed quote, but it really does have the Haldane stamp on it. It's pithy and it's elegant, and it's funny and maybe slightly snarky because obviously Haldane was an atheist and so didn't believe in a God per se, and at the same time it communicates an essential, scientific truth about biology and about the planet.

Photo by Tim Sackton via Flickr (Beetlemania!). CC BY-SA 2.0