eBook - ePub
A Dominant Character
The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane
Samanth Subramanian
This is a test
Share book
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
A Dominant Character
The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane
Samanth Subramanian
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
Book of the Year in The Economist, Guardian, New Statesman, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize. 'A wonderful book about one of the most important, brilliant and flawed scientists of the 20th century.' Peter Frankopan 'Superb' Matt Ridley, The Times 'Fascinating... The best Haldane biography yet.' New York Times
J.B.S. Haldane's life was rich and strange, never short on genius, never lacking for drama. He is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionized our understanding of evolution, but his peers thought him a polymath; one student called him 'the last man who knew all there was to be known'.Beginning in the 1930s, Haldane was also a staunch Communist - a stance that enhanced his public profile, led him into trouble, and even drew suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously on science and politics for the layman, in newspapers and magazines, and he gave speeches in town halls and on the radio, all of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein. Arthur C. Clarke called Haldane 'the most brilliant science popularizer of his generation'. He frequently narrated aspects of his life: of his childhood, as the son of a famous scientist; of his time in the trenches in the First World War and in Spain during the Civil War; of his experiments upon himself; of his secret research for the British Admiralty; of his final move to India, in 1957. A Dominant Character unpacks Haldane's boisterous life in detail, and it examines the questions he raised about the intersections of genetics and politics - questions that resonate all the more strongly today.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is A Dominant Character an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Technology & Engineering & Science & Technology Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
1.
The Scientific Method
1.
THE LETTER ARRIVED UNSOLICITED, like thousands of others. A retired chemist in Surrey had taken up plant genetics and set himself an immodest task: to improve the yield of his plants by a process that could then be applied by any farmer anywhere in the world. Now, in July 1948, he thought heâd cracked it. His flax plants were producing 12 or 14 seeds in each pod, instead of the usual 10âa bumper strain for flaxseed oil. âThe results seem beyond doubt,â he wrote in his letter, after two and a half pages of jumbled description. He had read J. B. S. Haldaneâs essay âScientific Research for Amateurs.â Would Haldane, as a renowned geneticist, be interested in this radical piece of amateur research?
Haldane wrote back. He nearly always did, even though he hated to be bothered by correspondence. His letters piled up around his various offices over the years: in Cambridge in the 1920s, in University College London until the 1950s, in Calcutta and Bhubaneswar thereafter. Some letters went missing, sinking under the flotsam that occupied these offices: notebooks, journals, Haldaneâs own papers on genetics and biometry, reprints of papers by other scientists, pamphlets, issues of the Daily Worker. If the letters bobbed back up to the surface, they were rescued. Haldane would first scrawl his response, often on some piece of paper on which he had been working out equations. Then his secretary typed it up. Which was just as well, because his handwriting resembled ants somersaulting through snow.
âDear Sir,â Haldane wrote, âThank you for your letter.â The chemistâs results seemed striking, but Haldane needed more: fuller details of the techniques he used and the results he obtained. âYou will realise that an account is useless unless it is so worded that others can repeat the work.â This forms the kernel of the scientific method: that researchers elsewhere be able to replicate experiments and derive identical results. Science is held up by principles, and these principles have to be inherent in every place, not just in an amateur horticulturistâs patch of Surrey earth.
Haldane never shrank from exalting the scientific method, even in casual correspondence. âScience advances by successive improvements in former theories,â he wrote once to a man who sent him a hollow hypothesis about how thoroughbred racehorses inherited their coat colors. âIf they are wrongââthe former theories, he meantââthe reasons for rejecting them should be stated. If they are right, this should be acknowledged.â To a W. Hague of Kingswood Cottages, London, who wished to alert the world to his discovery of âa new law of nature,â Haldane replied: âThe test for a ânew law of natureâ 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.â The custom of accuracy in statement is essential, Haldane thought; it is, in fact, desirable to be pedantic. A scientist no doubt needed imagination to sense what nature hides, but when it came time to test and publish, Haldane considered it wise to heed Francis Bacon, to âbuckle and bow the mindâ to the procedures of science.
Restraint was not Haldaneâs style. He was a man armed with infinite provocations, and a grouch besides, his bluntness shading quickly into rude hostility. A journalist described him as a âlarge woolly rhinoceros of uncertain temper.â Even with friends, Haldane could be pungent in his remarks if something smelled like bad science. In 1953, Hans Kalmus sent Haldane a manuscript of his new book on human genetics. Kalmus was a longtime colleague and a protĂ©gĂ© of sorts, a Czech refugee who had, with Haldaneâs help, found work at University College just before the Second World War. None of these personal ties softened Haldaneâs assessment of the manuscript: âIt ought not to be published.â He listed some errors, then added: âI could go on indefinitely.â The proposed book would not only harm Kalmus but the science of genetics itself. âYou would be better advised, if this is possible, to go back to experimental biology,â he wrote, ârather than to continue to work in human genetics.â
If Haldane was merciless with others, he demanded similar rigor of himself. His career overlapped tidily with the bloom of genetics as a field of study and with the effort to discover the role of the gene in Charles Darwinâs theory of evolution. Genetics grew severally studded with Haldaneâs contributions. He demonstrated, for the first time in mammals, the mechanism of genetic linkage, by which two genes that reside near each other on a chromosome tend also to be inherited together. (He wrote up parts of this paper while serving in the trenches during the First World War.) He mapped the genes for hemophilia and color blindness. He introduced a theory for how life began on Earth. His speculations on âectogenesisâ forecast the development of in vitro fertilization.
His most important work came in a series of 10 papers, written between 1924 and 1933, in which he subjected evolution to the unflinching stare of statistics. The papers modeled the processes of natural selection and estimated rates at which gene mutations develop and spread through a population. He was gaining the measure of life itself. The stringency of statistics delighted Haldane. Everyone should know more mathematics, he always thought. Numbers were so satisfyingly precise, equations so universal. How well they ministered to the scientific method!
Had Haldane done just this and little else, he would have been an important scientistânot as revolutionary as Einstein, perhaps, and not associated for perpetuity like Watson and Crick with a single, shining discovery, but certainly among the few who altered their field beyond recognition, pushing it forward paper by paper. This is how science progresses most of the time, after all: through the accretive power of daily work, through meat-and-potatoes research. What made Haldane one of the most famous scientists of his age, though, was not just his science but also his writing and his politicsâthe first clear and illuminating, the second unbending and forthright, both deeply attractive during a time of shifting, murky moralities.
In magazines and newspapers, Haldane wrote about everything. He wrote cutting opinion pieces on politicsâlike razor blades in print. He wrote about his own boisterous life, which was stocked with enough danger and drama for a dozen ordinary humans: his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, his time in the trenches, his numerous experiments on himself, his sorties into the teeth of the Spanish Civil War, his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during the Second World War, and his emigration to India. He wrote of his views on governments and philosophies, and he wrote about history and literature. He wrote a book for children, about a magician named Mr. Leakey, and most of a science fiction novel. But mainly, he wrote columns that unpicked the convolutions of science for the inexpert reader. He preached science to the laity. Arthur C. Clarke called Haldane âthe most brilliant scientific popularizer of his generation.â
The breadth of these columns was staggering. They dealt with trifles like lice and the funny bone, with grave issues like lead poisoning and air raid precautions, and with grand matters like the chemistry of sex and the Milky Way. On every front of science, he seemed to know of every journal article being published, every item of research being conducted, as if scientists confided their dreams to him every morning before heading off to their laboratories. He spun his scientific lessons off the spindle of the daily world, so that no one could fail to understand them. âStart from a known fact, say a bomb explosion, a birdâs song, or a cheese,â 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 weekâs most lurid headlines: a murder trial, the deaths of alcoholics, the monkey gland extracts administered to the players on the Wolverhampton Wanderers football team.
At first, Haldane was scornful of colleagues who wrote for the public, but he came to enjoy his role as a communicator of scientific truth. It satisfied his need to vent his opinionsâof which he never ran shortâas well as his belief that research ought to make its way into the public gaze. When he gave a talkâand at his most active, he gave nearly a hundred a yearâthe hall filled swiftly. He made for an arresting lecturer: a king-sized man in rumpled clothes, his moustache so thick and his head so large and bare that it was as if a bird had built a nest at the base of a boulder. His voice filled the room as he quoted Dante, Norse myth, and the Bhagavad Gita from memory, beckoning with ease his knowledge of genetics, chemistry, history, and astronomy. In Great Britain, he grew as famous as Einstein. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who grew up admiring Haldane, called him âone of our major intellectual emancipators.â One of Haldaneâs acquaintances thought he was âthe last man who might know all there was to be known.â
Haldaneâs relationship with his readers was punctilious. Although he simplified the science, he was never less than exactâor at least as exact as the research of the day permitted. Questions poured in by mail, and he addressed the interesting ones at length in his columns. (Are X-rays dangerous to human beings? How do complicated tasks become easier with practice? Whatâs the difference between reflex and instinct?) At other times, Haldane would reply by pleading that he didnât really have time to reply.
âWhat is the ultimate cause of Germanyâs retrograde mentality?â Margaret Murray, an archaeologist and a scholar of witchcraft, asked him in a letter in 1942.
Haldane spent a brave paragraph trying to respond to this riddle before huffing: âI do not propose to start a correspondence. Anyway I am pretty busy, and shall be a lot busier in the future on research in connexion with the war.â Then another paragraph followed. He hated to leave a question unanswered.
Much of Haldaneâs writing appeared in the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the British Communist Party. Haldane joined the party in 1942, having already been a fellow traveler and a dedicated Marxist for years. His work and his ideology, he felt, were in absolute concord. Haldane thought Marxism practical and transparentâscientific, really. Marxists studied history and economics the way physicists studied atoms: with objective curiosity, so that they could then predict and control events. Haldane never believed that a formula on a chalkboard or a cured guinea pig represented the climax of science. He wanted science to sweep out of the lab and into the world, to improve or perfect the way people lived. (The titles and subtitles of his books reflected this, again and again: Science and the Future, Science and Life, Science and Everyday Life, Science and Ethics, Science and Well-Being.) Marx, too, wanted just that kind of material change. For Haldane, Marxism was the scientific method as applied to society, and both genetics and Marxism were avenues to a more utopian civilization.
HE VISITED THE SOVIET UNION just once, for a month in the summer of 1928, in the company of his wife Charlotte. They had been invited by Nikolai Vavilov, a geneticist whose stature and networks drew many of his Western colleagues to his country. Vavilov was familiar with the men and women who staffed British science. He had worked for a while with the biologist William Bateson, who first affixed the word genetics upon the study of heredity; the pair had collaborated across Cambridge and the John Innes Horticultural Institution in south London, of which Bateson was the founding director. In 1928, Haldane was working part-time at John Innes as the âOfficer in Charge of Genetical Investigations,â balancing these duties with his role as a biochemistry reader at Cambridge. He was 35 years old, and storms of change were overrunning his life. He was newly married and beginning, slowly, to suspect that Charlotte and he could not have children. His moustache was robust but his hair was ebbing, and his stockiness was clotting into fat. He was halfway along the journey from the offhand socialism of his youth to the gritted-teeth Communism that lay ahead. He was in the midst of writing his series of 10 papers on natural selection. He was also starting to relish the sweetness of a wider fame. He wasnât yet one among the worldâs bestknown scientists, but he was getting there in a hurry.
Like Haldane, Vavilov was born to a bourgeois family, but he possessed a most Soviet enthusiasm: to rid humanity of hunger. By rummaging through the world for hardy, productive plants and by seeking the secrets of their endurance in their genes, Vavilov thought he could culture new species to thrive in any season anywhere. His mission blessed by Lenin himself, Vavilov had set outâfor Iran and Afghanistan, Canada and the United States, Western Europe and northern Africa, China and Latin America. From more than 50 countries, he gathered seeds and plants, and every time he came home, he deposited his collections in a seed bank heâd startedâthe worldâs first, its vaults lodged in an old tsarist palace in Leningrad. The bank stored a quarter of a million specimens. It was an aristocratâs bauble converted into an institute committed to feeding the poor. What more potent symbol of Soviet principle could there be?
In Moscow and Leningrad, Haldane delivered lectures on genetics, and he made an excursion to Vavilovâs experimental farm in a town called Detskoe Selo, near Leningrad. He also stopped by the seed bank and noticed the incongruity of botanists conducting their noble research amidst the manor houseâs parquet floors and marble mantelpieces; they would no doubt have preferred laboratory benches and a decent set of sinks, he thought. Still, he grew to like Vavilov and admire his work. It promised not only to improve crop yields but also to expand the worldâs knowledge of agriculture and of civilization itself.
In turn, Vavilov proved a most attentive host. He was a handsome man, Charlotte noticed. His moustache was neat, his eyes good-humored, and his three-piece suits refined and elegant. He had nothing of the monkish, withdrawn quality that scientists sometimes possessed. In Moscow, Vavilov threw a rambunctious party for the Haldanes, with champagne and dancing. He arranged for them to go everywhere: to famous churches; to Leninâs tomb, on a special, private visit; to the Kremlinâs museum, where they saw Ivan the Terribleâs crown, with its collar of sable and its diamond-cross steeple. They went to the Bolshoi to watch The Red Poppy, in which a Soviet ship captain tries to rescue the employees of a cruel harbormaster in a Chinese seaport. They attended the performances of two Rimsky-Korsakov operas. In Leningrad, Charlotte happened to mention that she was fond of caviar, so Vavilov had delivered, to the Haldanesâ hotel, two of the Soviet Unionâs greatest luxuries: a tin of caviar and a fresh loaf of white bread. That night, half asleep, Charlotte thought she heard a strange symphony of squeaks; the next morning, she found that the hotelâs resident mice had climbed up onto the table and eaten their way through half the bread and even the paper in which it was wrapped.
Even in June, Leningrad was frigid. The wind lunged across the Neva River and into the Haldanesâ Hotel Europa, forcing them to go to bed fully dressed. In Moscow, the couple stayed in a borrowed apartment. The main street in their neighborhood was tidy and broad, but as the streets ramified into smaller and smaller lanes, they grew progressively grubbier. âThe housing situation was bad,â Charlotte wrote later. âWhole families huddled in one room. The staircases of the houses were filthy, [and] cooking was done on kerosene stoves in the passages, which reeked of refuse. Although each house was supposed to have a concierge and a house committee to organize the general upkeep among the tenants, there was no real organisation. Everyone who could, passed the buck. Quarrels between tenants were incessant.â
Charlotte couldnât make up her mind about the Soviet Union. She thought the Russians to be spirited people, and optimistic despite their recent cavalcade of crises. At the Red October chocolate factory, she saw women on the production line looking happy and industrious; the factory, admirably, had a crĂšche for their children. But she wearied of the grime and the poverty. A scientist of their acquaintance lived with his wife and three young children in a flat that was, really, just one room. She was so uncomfortable with the feeling of people being under surveillance everywhere and all the time, she would claim later, that she was relieved to leave at the end of the month.
But Haldane felt differently. In those early years, when the revolution was still warm, the Soviet Union resembled an essential experiment in itself: a state actively setting out to advance through the use of science. Lenin had believed, as Haldane did, that the chief utility of science lay in its capacity to enhance society, to improve the way people lived. The Soviet Union treasured its scientists, Haldane thought, and not without reason. At the time, Soviet scientists were still able to travel overseas, and if they qualified for a certain intellectual eminence, they were provided nearly anything they might require. âOne must spare a great scientist or major specialist i...