A man who knew too much

A Dominant Character: The radical science and restless politics of JBS Haldane 

Author: Samanth Subramanian | Publisher: Simon & Schuster | Price: Rs 799

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) was often referred to as “the last man who knew everything there was to be known”. The bare details of his utterly unconventional life are stunning. This solidly researched biography connects the disparate strands of his political convictions, his irreverent attitude to everything including his own death, his complicated personal life, and his enormous contributions to science and the popularisation of science.  

Haldane was the scion of an aristocratic family that traces its origins back to the 12th century —the name is a version of Half Dane implying Viking ancestry. He was, however, a socialist and communist. He wrote prolifically for the Daily Worker, (published by the Communist Party of Great Britain) and headed its editorial board. Indeed, the  DW  archive is worth raiding purely for his column on popular science.  

He was an atheist who casually quoted the Bible (in multiple languages), or the Gita in Sanskrit, or Tagore’s hymns in Bengali. He wrote a sequence of mathematically driven papers, which transformed the biosciences and the understanding of genetics, despite never having formally received a degree in the sciences. He was utterly fearless in running experiments involving poison gases, drugs and explosives, often endangering his own life along with those of his assistants. 

Haldane used his mathematical skills to analyse data from multiple sources, and thus, put a firm foundation to Darwin’s theories and Mendel’s genetic experiments.  He was thorough in working out possible scenarios for evolution, and prescient in suggesting ways in which life could arise from the primordial “soup" of the early Earth without a nudge from a creator.

He also made a series of conjectures about genetic linkages, and the whys of mutation, which have since proved to be astonishingly close to the mark. Remember, the structure of DNA was discovered only when he was in his 60s. He designed gas masks for battlefields and contributed to safety in mines and submarines through investigations of toxic atmospheres. He almost killed himself multiple times figuring out how carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide affected human beings. This followed up on his father John Scott Haldane’s pioneering work in these areas.  

He wrote an incredibly wide-ranging set of pieces where he explained science in popular terms. He also wrote science fiction fantasy, which was always polemical, and ranged from the boring to the brilliant. He was known for his brutally honest adherence to the truth in his scientific work. Yet,  he was an apologist for Stalin and the Soviet regime, eliding Lysenko’ s pseudoscience, and overlooking Stalin's genocidal modus operandi, even though he lost friends and academic colleagues to Stalin’s purges.  He was also somewhat ambivalent about eugenics. 

He was a pacifist who worked for world peace. But he enjoyed a good physical scrap, using his fists with the same relish, as he deployed his tongue in an intellectual argument. He fought in the trenches in the World War-I where, upon his own admission, he enjoyed killing people and was once described as “The bravest and dirtiest officer in the British army”. He was wounded twice in France, and in Iraq and nicknamed “Bomber" for his facility with handling explosives. He also advocated the use of poison gas rather than high explosives, since gas killed fewer people and caused less damage.  

He actively participated in the Spanish Civil War and during World War-II, contributed critical research,  aiding in submarine design, and sitting on half a dozen secret scientific committees. This was while being under constant surveillance from MI5 as a committed communist, and fighting a running, public battle with Winston Churchill who shut down the Daily Worker  in exasperation after being unable to endure its tirades against Britain’s conduct of the war. 

Both his marriages were unconventional. His first union involved a farcical divorce case. He persuaded his mistress’ husband to sue him and invited a private detective to deliver newspapers to his hotel room to prove his adulterous affair with feminist author Charlotte Franken Burghes. He nearly lost his Cambridge readership as a result of the ensuing scandal.  His second wife,  Helen Spurway, was one of his students and 22 years younger. Marrying her required another complicated divorce and payment of substantial alimony.

In his old age, he relocated to India, first to the Indian Statistical Institute and then to Bhubaneswar, after a spat with P C Mahalanobis. He took Indian citizenship, wore a dhoti and turned vegetarian. He died in Odisha of cancer. When his cancer was first diagnosed he wrote “ I wish I had the voice of Homer / To sing of rectal carcinoma”. 

Samanth Subramanian does a pretty good job of chronicling the science and the insanity.