J. B. S. Haldane was quite a character:
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, FRS [1892-1964] was one of the three main founders of modern population genetics, along with Sir Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright.In his life he played many parts: biochemist, physiologist, geneticist, soldier, popularizer of science, and spy. On occasion, he was even a fictional character.
Son of Britain’s most prominent physiologist, (John Scott Haldane, another eccentric polymath) he worked in his father’s lab by age 8 and was already acting as a human guinea pig. He attended the Dragon School, Eton (which he hated) and Oxford, which he loved. He mastered Latin, Greek, French and German and received a double first in mathematics and classics, although his interest was already turning to science. He was fascinated by the newly rediscovered Mendelian theory of genetics and made a significant discovery before graduation – genetic linkage, which occurs when different alleles are inherited jointly because of their proximity on the same chromosome. He discovered this by analyzing his younger sister Naomi’s guinea-pig colony. That early work was interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an officer of the Black Watch – a Scottish regiment known by the Germans as the “Ladies from Hell”, because of their kilted ferocity. JBS Haldane in no way detracted from the regiment’s reputation: he was often in combat and actually enjoyed it. In fact he reveled in killing the enemy, personally delivering bombs behind enemy lines. His commander called him the “bravest and dirtiest officer in my Army.”
After service in France and Iraq, with occasional time outs for recovery from wounds and experiments in which his father exposed him to chlorine gas in order to test new gas masks, he resumed his research work, first as a fellow at Oxford and then accepting a Readership in Biochemistry at Cambridge where he taught until 1932. During that time at Cambridge he did most of his systematic work on evolutionary genetics. He was the first to estimate the mutation rate of a human gene and introduced the concept of genetic load, the net effect of the substandard genes in a population.
In 1927, he showed that the chance of fixation – reaching 100% frequency – of a single copy of an advantageous allele with advantage s is 2s. This key insight explains why a very limited amount of hybridization with another species is bound to result in the acquisition of most of their favorable alleles, and also plays a role in our analysis of the recent acceleration of human evolution. The work of this period is summed up in his classic The Causes of Evolution.
Of course helping to found the central theory of biology could not fully occupy his time. He made major contributions to enzyme chemistry. He acquired a wife, not without some trouble and strife, since she (Charlotte Burghes) was inconveniently married to someone else at the time. He was the first to suggest the possibility of ‘test-tube babies’ and the currently fashionable ‘hydrogen economy’. His famous essay “On Being the Right Size” elegantly shows how size itself (through the square-cube law) determines fundamental biological features.
His speculative writings such as Daedalus inspired works of science fiction, in particular Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. He even shows up as the villain: Weston, in C. S. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, is thought to be modeled (in part) on Haldane.
Keep reading to learn about his time in the Communist Party.