Prof. J.B.S. Haldane, 72, Dies;
British Geneticist and Writer; Developed Simple Treatment for Tetanus—Marxist
Quit His Homeland for India
DEC. 2, 1964
BHUBANESWAR India
Dec. 1 —Prof. J. B. S. Haldane the world‐famous British geneticist died of cancer today at his
home here. He was 72 years old.
Facially Professor
Haldane resembled Rudyard Kipling; epigrammatically he took after George
Bernard Shaw; politically he followed Karl Marx; but in science he was
indubitably John Burdon Sanderson Haldane.
Biologist
biochemist geneticist and sage of science in general Professor Haldane was a
daring experimenter with himself as his own chief rabbit “It is difficult ” he
once said by way of explanation “to he sure how a rabbit feels at any time.
Indeed many rabbits make no serious attempt to cooperate with scientists.”
He was moreover ”
an indefatigable writer about science for the layman.
He made lasting
contributions in human physiology by‐developing a simple treatment for tetanus (lockjaw) by
laying the groundwork- for high‐pressure oxygen therapy and surgery and by pioneering the
principles of the heart‐lung machine now widely used in heart and brain surgery.
In genetics he was
the first to discover linkage in mammals to map the human chromosome and to
measure the mutation rate of a human gene. He also contributed to studies in
human physical endurance and defenses against mustard gas and lie demonstrated
the importance in terms of survival of deep bomb shelters in wartime.
Equally notable
were his indirect contributions as a stimulant and teacher for more than 40
years in Britain and in India. His students and his colleagues regarded his
imind as luminous and lucid and his ideas as suggestive and succinct. Honored
and decorated he became a philosopher of the life sciences shaping new pathways
for biology and genetics and pointing to new directions for research in
evolution.
In this respect
Professor Haldane counted human inequality as a blessing. “I believe that any
satisfactory political and economic: system must be based on the recognition of
human inequality ” he said in one of his last public lectures. He explained
that “as our understanding of genetics increases we shall I believe see that
that society is freest in which opportunity for acting according to one's
genotype hereditary makeup] is maximized.”
This appeal for
the recognition of innate diversity could well have stemmed from Professor
Haldane's own life. He was born and reared in a British society that refused to
be confined by The Establishment. Individualism even eccentricity was its
hallmark.
Of Scottish
ancestry Professor Haldane was born at Oxford on Nov. 5 1892 the son of Dr.
John Scott Haldane a physiologist and mining expert who developed the
decompression method used to avoid “the bends” in divers.
His sister was
Naomi Mitchison a novelist; his uncle was Viscount Haldane once Lord Chancellor
under a Labor Government. Professor Haldane attended Eton and New College
Oxford taking his degree in the classics.
He learned science
by apprenticeship. He assisted his father from the age of 8 onward until he
began formal research in 1910. His career was interrupted by World War I in
which he fought as a member of the Black Watch. He was wounded and gassed twice
and was mustered out as a captain in 1919.
It was after this
experience during the war that he became an expert on mustard chlorine and
other gases.
After the war he
became a Fellow of New College and from 1922 to 1932 he was a Reader in
Biochemistry at Cambridge.
There he was the
center of a cause celebre. He was dismissed for “gross immorality” in 1925
after being named corespondent in an undefended divorce suit involving
Charlotte Franken a writer. Supported by G. K. Chesterton Bertrand Russell W.
L. George and other notables Professor Haldane won a reversal of his ouster and
established the precedent that the private life of a Cambridge professor was to
be considered as having nothing to do with his work at the institution. Miss
Franken and the professor were .married shortly after his vindication.
After a year as
visiting professor at the University of California in 1932 a year in which he
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society he returned to Britain as a professor
first of physiology then of biometry at London University where he remained
until 1957 when he left Britain for India in a huff over the presence of
American troops on British soil.
Departing London
for Calcutta near where he later set up a laboratory and home Professor Haldane
said: “I want to live in a free country where there are no foreign troops based
all over the place; yes I do mean Americans.”
He became an
Indian citizen wore Indian garb fasted on occasion in the Gandhi manner and
lived quietly with his second wife the former Helen Spurway a science colleague
he married in 1945 after Miss; Franken divorced him There were no children by
either marriage
As a scientist
Professor Haldane believed in finding out things for himself. To study fatigue
he once shut himself for . long periods in a tight chamber the air charged with
carbon dioxide. Early in his career he poisoned himself by swallowing
bicarbonate of soda and hydrochloric acid and found that ammonium chloride
could cure convulsions in children. At one restless point in his life in 1927 he
underwent a blood‐transfusion test in which blood was transferred from one part of his body
to another.
In trying to find
a cure for diabetes he allowed himself to be put into a diabetic condition and
then operated on without anesthetic so other doctors could carry out tests on
him.
In addition to
winning wide acclaim for his popular science books he was also considered the
chief modern writer on evolution.
Professor Haldane
was a burly tweedy shaggy man with a remarkably large head. Describing himself
in 1940 he wrote “I measure 6 feet 1 inch weigh 245 pounds; - and enjoy
swimming arid mountain walking. I aim bald and blue‐eyed with a
clipped mustache; a moderate drinker and a heavy smoker. I can read 11
languagesand make public speeches in three; but am unmusical. I am a fairly
competent public speaker.”
He might have
added that he also liked to tweak Ameri” cans. “The trouble with your school
system ” he once remarked to an interviewer in New York “is based on its
failure to recognize that children differ from one another. Every child
receives the same training—an obvious error. In itself it is an indication of
your genetical ignorance.”
Professor
Haldane's serious shafts were usually directed to upholding the concept of a
pluralistic genetic society in which science would be man's servant. “It is
easier to alter the social organization than to alter human beings’ he said.
In a Shavian
aphoristic manner he observed that “the genetic heaven must be a place in which
there is room for all sorts of people each best at something or other.”
“There is not any
perfect man except in relation to tasks and environment ” he insisted
contending that “a feebleminded strong man would give a better account of‐himself in the
Darwinian natural struggle for existence than a physically weak intellectual.
Arguing the
virtues of diversity with a homely example he once remarked:
“You cannot have‐a successful
.marriage unless the wife is better than the husband at some things. For
example I cannot cook or play the piano like my wife but on the other hand she
is not as good a mathematician as I am. Mutual respect is what you want all
through society.”
From this he
concluded that “the society that enjoys the greatest amount of liberty is the
one that permits and respects the greatest amount of polymorphism ” or variety
in human forms.
Outlining his
genetic and social credo said:
“I do not believe
in uniformity. I think the more individuals in the world the better. If there
is one lesson man can learn from the animals it is just this: You have all
sorts of dogs—shepherd dogs wolfhounds Newfoundland dogs dachshunde terriers
and St.! Bernards.
“Would anyone
think of producing only one species of dog and call it the perfect dog
eliminating all the others? What makes human life amusing is getting all these
varieties of dogs into one family. And the hope for humanity is that that sort
of a thing should go on not only among dogs but among human beings as well.
“If we have any
lesson -to learn from animal and plant genetics it is that there is not any one
best type in the species. On the contrary we have various environments and
various species to fit into them.”
Professor Haldane
wanted man to control science for his own benefit. “While man does not yet know
how to control his own evolution ” he once asserted “it behooves us to begin
thinking about what we should do’ when the time does come as it probably will
when this knowledge becomes available to us.
“If we had
discussed in advance what we should do with nuclear energy long before we knew
how to use it we might have agreed in advance not to use it in atomic bombs and
would have gone a long way toward solving the problem we face today.”
Early in his
career Professor Haldane developed scorn for Nazi racial tenets. “The doctrine
of the equality of man although clearly untrue as generally’ stated has this
much truth—that on a knowledge of their ancestry we cannot yet say one man will
and another man will not be capable of reaching a given cultural standard.”
This conviction
plus the climate of opinion in liberal circles in Britain in the 1930's plus
his own reading in Marx Lenin and especially Engels drew the scientist toward
sympathy with the British Communist party.
In the middle
thirties he announced that he was a Marxist a description he applied to himself
in 1964. He joined the British party in 1942 served oh the editorial board of
The London Daily Worker until 1949 and wrote numerous articles for that payer
and The Daily Worker in. New York mostly on scientific subjects. He cooled
toward official Communism as time went on and declined to accept the biological
notion of Prof. Trofim D. Lysenko the Soviet biologist that characteristics
produced by environment can become hereditary. He left the party toward the end
of. the 1940's.
‘Cured’ by Lenin
As a Communist
writer Professor Haldane could make outrageous remarks with an apparent
straight face as when he wrote that Lenin had cured him of gastritis.
“I had it for about
15 years ” he said “until I read Lenin and other writers who showed me what was
wrong with our society and how to cure it. Since then I have needed no
magnesia.”
Although he
insisted that Marxism contained a working hypothesis for scientific research
and application—a view he expounded at some length in “The Marxist Philosophy
and the Sciences” in 1938—he was by no means a dogmatist nor did he quote
patristic utterances.
Professor Haldane
had a certain amount of wry humor about himself “I cannot deny the possibility
but at no time in my life has my personal survival seemed to
me a probable contingency ” he once said. And toward the close of his life
after he had been operated on for a particularly painful cancer he wrote a
doggerel in which he said “My final word before I’m done /Is ‘Cancer can be
rather fun.’’“ Then he added “I know that cancer -often kiils /But so do cars
and sleeping pills.” He titled his verse ‘‘Cancer's a Funny Thing!” v
Professor Haldane
held many academic honors; In addition to being a Fellow of the Royal Society
he was a corresponding member of the Societe” de Biologie -the Deutsche
Akademie der Wissenschaften the National Institutes of Sciences of India the
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences; and an honorary member of the Moscow Academy
of Sciences.
He held honorary
degrees from Oxford the Universities of Paris Edinburgh and Groningen. He wore
the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society the Darwin‐Wallace Commemorative Medal of- the Linnean Society and
the Kimber Medal of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was also
made - a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1937. for his scientific services
to France.
At his death he
was head of the Genetics and Biometry Laboratory of the Government of Orissa
India.
In addition to
numerous papers in scientific journals Professor Haldane's principal books
were: “Daedalus” (1924); “Callinicus” (1925); “Possible Worlds” (1927); “Animal
Biology” (with J. S. Huxley 1927); “Science and Ethics” (1928); “Enzymes”
(1930); “The Inequality of Man” (1932); “The Causes of Evolution” (1933); “Fact
and Faith” (1934); “Heredity and Politics (1938); “Science and Everyday Life”
(1939); “New Paths on Genetics” (1941); “Science Advances” (1947) and “The
Biochemistry of Genetics (1953).
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