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LRB, Vol. 40 No. 10 · 24 May 2018
Hit by Donald Duck
by Oliver Hill-Andrews
Popularising Science: The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane by Krishna
Dronamraju
Oxford, 367 pp, £26.99, February 2017, ISBN 978 0 19 933392 9
The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith believed that his former
supervisor J.B.S. Haldane ‘wasn’t an ordinary mortal’. Haldane moved
between the fields of physiology, biochemistry, genetics and
evolutionary biology, making contributions to each that would ‘satisfy
half a dozen ordinary mortals’, and also wrote scientific articles and
books aimed at non-specialists. In the 1930s, he was one of Britain’s
most famous communist-sympathising intellectuals and, through his pieces
in the Daily Worker, the most famous of the ‘red scientists’, a loose
affiliation of individuals – including the biologists J.D. Bernal,
Lancelot Hogben and Joseph Needham – united by their belief that science
under socialism could provide an age of plenty. The challenge for the
biographer is to do justice to this multifarious activity, which
ultimately dissipated Haldane’s overall achievement. Krishna Dronamraju
– another of Haldane’s students, whom he apparently treated ‘like a son’
– mostly ducks the challenge, giving us a disjointed biography that
isolates Haldane from his context. Popularising Science has further,
more serious problems: it is littered with self-aggrandising remarks;
whole sections from one chapter are reproduced verbatim in another; and
it follows Ronald Clark’s biography of Haldane from 1968 a little too
closely, and without attribution. Dronamraju, a geneticist, is good on
Haldane’s scientific achievements, but his use of unexplained
technicalities will leave most readers behind.
Born in 1892, Haldane was schooled in biology at an early age by his
father, John Scott Haldane, a physiologist at New College, Oxford. There
was a laboratory on the ground floor of the house where J.B.S. and his
younger sister, Naomi (later, as Naomi Mitchison, a prolific writer and
political campaigner), grew up. Haldane wrote later that from an early
age he had associated scientific experiments with play. Soon, he even
joined his father in carrying out physiological research in coal mines.
He was sent to Eton – ‘not usually thought of as pre-eminently a
scientist’s school’ (in 1905 there were eight times as many classics as
science masters) – on a scholarship, then studied mathematics at Oxford,
switching to Greats after his first year. He attended the zoology
lectures given there by E.S. Goodrich, who was (like M.D. Hill, one of
his science masters at Eton) a disciple of Edwin Ray Lankester and a
believer in natural selection at a time when other modes of evolution
seemed to many equally, if not more, persuasive (saltationism, for
example, which held evolutionary changes to be abrupt, or
neo-Lamarckism, the idea that an organism’s acquired characteristics
were passed on to its offspring). Haldane never had a formal scientific
training, and didn’t have the degree increasingly seen as a prerequisite
for entry into the profession.
He sat his final exams in 1914 and joined the army, but Dronamraju has
little to say about Haldane’s experiences during the First World War,
which is surprising given the war’s importance in undermining the red
scientists’ confidence in the 19th-century version of progress. Haldane
joined the Black Watch, taught officers how to use hand grenades, and
was wounded twice, first on the Western Front and then in Iraq. He found
grenade-throwing ‘the next most exciting thing to being under fire’ and
told his sister he was ‘enjoying life very much’, yet admitted that if
‘I hadn’t to use my brains when out … I should be either very frightened
or very excited or both.’ He earned a reputation as ‘a proper wild man’,
something he cultivated to increase his authority with his platoon.
Though he enjoyed war, he did not approve of it, as he made clear in a
handful of poems written at the front:
… the maddening mind
Forgets that life was good once, and fate kind,
Remembering only these long years of war,
The great grim battles by the northern shore,
The comrades dead and maimed and mad and blind.
He found much to admire in his comrades, and their example pushed him
further from his mother’s conservatism. ‘We are a very democratic lot,’
he wrote to Naomi, and in a letter complained to her that there were
‘rather a lot of Tories’ in Lloyd George’s coalition government. ‘I wd.
like to see some Radical & Socialist comments on the ministry.’
It was not obvious what Haldane would do after the war: he was
interested in the classics and poetry at least as much as in science.
The lack of a science degree was not an insuperable problem for someone
with Haldane’s surname, especially as his mathematical skills had
already been put to use in a paper on haemoglobin, which appeared in
1912 with his father as the co-author, and one on genetic linkage in
mammals (the tendency for particular traits to be inherited together),
which appeared in 1915 with A.D. Sprunt and Naomi as co-authors. He
ended up pursuing both physiological and genetic research as a fellow of
New College, before being appointed at the age of thirty to a
biochemistry readership at Cambridge.
It was there that Haldane began to produce the series of articles that
comprise his most important scientific work. This work, which used
mathematics to model the roles and interaction of natural selection and
Mendelian genetics, established him as one of the founders of population
genetics and a key figure in what Julian Huxley later called the modern
evolutionary synthesis, in which the theories of natural selection
(which assumed small, continuous variations between organisms) and
Mendelian inheritance (which initially postulated large, discontinuous
variations) were seen as complementary. ‘Quantitative work shows clearly
that natural selection is a reality,’ Haldane wrote in 1929, ‘and that,
among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be
distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws
of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are
an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the
raw material on which selection acts.’
The synthesis involved more than this – a union of laboratory methods
and fieldwork; a consensus that the natural world should be studied
experimentally and quantitatively – but population genetics played a
crucial part. Haldane’s contribution defies generalisation, as he
continued his evolutionary work until his death and tackled problems in
an ad hoc manner. In his earliest and most important articles on the
subject, he attempted to establish the number of generations needed to
change the frequency of particular genes under the influence of
selection, and the length of time required for a mutation to become
established in a population. Like Ronald Fisher, and to a lesser extent
Sewall Wright, the other pioneers in this field, Haldane made certain
assumptions to simplify his calculations, including that organisms mated
at random in large populations. (Tracing the fortunes of a gene,
conceived of as an individual unit, in what might uncharitably be
described as a make-believe population, was later described as ‘beanbag’
genetics.)
Recently, historians of the synthesis have been examining the seemingly
mundane fieldwork and practical breeding that made Haldane’s theorising
possible. He looked, for example, at the reason for the appearance of a
new variant of the peppered moth (then called Amphidasys betularia). The
black variant of the moth first appeared in Manchester in 1848 but its
population increased as industrialisation caused trees to become
sootier; against a dark background, the standard pale moth stood out to
predators. Haldane worked out that fifty per cent more of the black
moths’ offspring must survive in order to explain the observed change in
population. This was typical of Haldane’s work. He lacked the patience
to cultivate an experimental organism (Wright bred guinea pigs). C.D.
Darlington of the John Innes Horticultural Institution, where Haldane
worked part-time from 1927, remembered him spending most of his time
doing sums. He was even less suited to experimental work. The scientific
journalist J.G. Crowther felt that ‘the fiddling bits of apparatus’ made
him ‘look rather like a great bear with a small but weighty cannonball
tied to his leg’. But even those who had uneasy personal relations with
Haldane (a not inconsiderable number) admired his evolutionary work: the
working-class Hogben, who disliked his Etonian swagger, judged it ‘a
contribution of really outstanding importance’ that was more likely to
be remembered than Haldane’s other research.
It was at this point that Haldane emerged as a public figure, a
‘romantic’ biologist just like the hero of his influential pamphlet
Daedalus; or Science and the Future (1923). Haldane realised that
biology would be the science of the 20th century; he also predicted that
the first ‘ectogenetic’ birth – outside the womb – would occur by 1951,
leading to a ‘separation of sexual love and reproduction’ and a solution
to the problem of the rapidly multiplying poor. Two years later, in
another pamphlet, Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare, he put
forward the unattractive argument that chemical warfare was more humane
than conventional, explosive-based methods, because it caused less pain
(this was before the development of nerve agents). He gained a justified
reputation for being a rationalist who used science to torpedo
sentiment, leaving controversy in his wake. As far as he was concerned,
he represented and practised the science of the future.
Meanwhile, he moved further to the left, partly as a result of the
influence of the Daily Express journalist Charlotte Burghes, whom he met
in 1924 and married during the General Strike in 1926, having
successfully appealed against his dismissal from Cambridge for his
involvement with her (she was married when it began). Haldane told his
sister that he wanted ‘a wife who considers the work I am doing to be of
some value & interest, and will accept my aberrations from the normal
and even try to adapt herself to them’. Their house became a meeting
place for talented undergraduates. William Empson was one visitor (he
asked Haldane for help after he was thrown out of Cambridge when condoms
were found in his room). Haldane and Charlotte divorced in 1945, and he
married one of his PhD students, Helen Spurway. Dronamraju devotes a
chapter to Spurway, in which he discusses her research on genetics and
animal behaviour as well as her ‘masculine clothes and … very short
haircut’. Their house, he remarks, was ‘devoid of the usual decorations
and feminine touches one normally expects in a home’.
By 1935, now attached to University College London, Haldane was
describing himself as a ‘not too thoroughgoing Marxist’. He feared that
capitalism threatened the progress of science and of society itself. As
he put it in 1940, ‘Donald Duck stepped off the screen and hit me on the
jaw. Hitler started dismissing my German colleagues.’ The USSR, which he
had visited with Charlotte in 1928, offered a sharp contrast, especially
in its support for science generally and genetics in particular. By
1937, he was supporting the Communist Party. In My Friend Mr Leakey, a
collection of stories for children published in the same year, he
portrayed a magician as a Stalinist scientist in his own mould: arrogant
and aloof, yet working for the ultimate benefit of humanity. The Spanish
Civil War confirmed Haldane in his communism. He visited Spain to advise
the Republican government on gas warfare and the war was the main topic
of the thirty or so political speeches he gave in Britain in 1937 and 1938.
As the political situation worsened, it seemed that ‘we probably have
not many years, let alone generations, to save our civilisation from
collapse.’ To Haldane, Marxism satisfactorily diagnosed ‘the cause of
our present distresses’, which had to be sought in the external world.
It also assisted his science. A sympathetic reviewer in the Listener
described The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (1938) as a ‘bright
flower that has risen in dialectical antithesis to the carnage’.
Dronamraju avoids the question of whether (or how much of) Haldane’s
science actually followed from his application of a dialectical method.
Haldane himself declared that he benefited from viewing nature as
consisting ‘of processes, not things’, and the knowledge that ‘even in
what appears to be most stable, such as a mountain or a long-established
state, there are internal conflicts which are bound to lead to their
transformation.’
*
It was this view of the world that Haldane tried to impart in his Daily
Worker articles, which appeared weekly from December 1937 and which he
considered ‘much the most important work I do for the Party’. Haldane’s
earliest articles for a non-specialist readership had been in the
19th-century tradition of T.H. Huxley, written in the belief that the
scientific method, as interpreted in talks and articles, would dissipate
fogs of unreason, especially religious ones. The difference now was
Haldane’s recognition that ‘without a much broader knowledge of science,
democracy cannot be effective in an age when science affects all our
lives continually.’ If only people understood the possibilities of
science they would, in Bernal’s words, ‘become more reasonably impatient
of their present state, and more capable of changing it.’ For Haldane,
workers who were not communists were ‘mugs, deluded by the vast weight
of propaganda which is poured over them daily’. The reach of his writing
remains impressive: Science and Everyday Life, a collection of seventy
Daily Worker articles (his first 16 months of contributions), sold more
than 66,000 copies in two months in its Pelican edition.
Haldane assumed that interpreting science was also a contribution to
science itself. It wasn’t simply that some would-be scientists received
their education from such articles (Maynard Smith, writing in the LRB of
17 September 1981 recalled that his science education ‘to the age of
almost thirty, depended entirely on reading the popular works of men
like Julian Huxley, Wells, Haldane, Jeans, Eddington and Infeld … the
ideas I got from them were profound, not superficial’). Haldane intended
all his articles to contain information unavailable in textbooks, ‘and
which a student leaving a university with an honours degree would not be
expected to know’. Sometimes, new research appeared in the Daily Worker
before its publication in specialised journals: the discovery of the
‘living fossil’ coelacanth Latimeria, for example, was announced in the
Daily Worker ‘two days before a much fuller account appeared in Nature’.
Haldane’s ‘popular’ work also served to acquaint scientists themselves
with developments outside their own specialism, at a time when they were
becoming aware that increasingly distinct sub-disciplines were in fact
‘so linked up that we cannot tell how they will affect one another’.
Julian Huxley recognised as early as 1927 that ‘the progress of biology
in Great Britain is being retarded by the failure of specialists in its
various branches to appreciate the bearings of work done in other fields
than their own.’ The evolutionary synthesis emerged in this space,
uniting the work of evolutionary naturalists and experimental
biologists, and drawing, as Huxley later put it, on ‘ecology, genetics,
palaeontology, geographical distribution, embryology, systematics,
comparative anatomy – not to mention reinforcements from other
disciplines such as geology, geography and mathematics’. As the
historian of biology William Provine pointed out, general publications
and broadcasts by the likes of Haldane and Huxley made it possible for
scientists to perceive the connections between these different branches
of biology. New theories, on the boundaries between disciplines, often
appeared in non-specialist periodicals: Haldane’s widely discussed
theory about the origin of life appeared in the Rationalist Annual. Here
he speculated – based on knowledge of genetics, cosmology, chemistry,
biochemistry and viruses – that primitive life evolved in a ‘hot dilute
soup’ formed in the oceans after the sun’s ultraviolet rays acted ‘on a
mixture of water, carbon dioxide and ammonia’ (the Soviet biochemist
Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin independently arrived at a similar theory).
Haldane hinted at the value of knowing what was happening in other
disciplines when he said that he ‘published rather more purely
scientific work’ when he wrote his Daily Worker articles ‘than I had
ever done before’.
During the Second World War, Haldane combined journalism with ‘work for
the Services which is quite rightly secret, making about a hundred
speeches a year and writing books on other subjects’. The navy asked
Haldane to investigate physiological responses to different gases at
different pressures, a matter of immediate concern after the sinking of
the submarine HMS Thetis during trials in 1939 (resulting in the death
of most of the crew from carbon dioxide poisoning). Characteristically,
Haldane experimented on himself: mortifying his flesh by lying in a bath
of ice and water for half an hour at a time ‘had the effect of dulling
my response both to pains and sensual pleasures’, something that ‘many
saints, and some revolutionaries (e.g. Blanqui) would have approved of’.
In fact, CPGB officials worried that he was working himself to death;
one suggested he should give up the dangerous experiments, while Harry
Pollitt thought Haldane only kept going ‘by a bit of doping’. The MI5
file on Haldane (which, surprisingly, Dronamraju has chosen not to
consult) shows that his relationship with the party was fraught. He
complained of not having enough time to prepare a lecture; of
unnecessary editorial interventions in his articles; of party
sluggishness in finding him a new secretary; and of being given ‘truly
futile’ work. Party colleagues described him as a ‘silly old fool’, but
also valued his ‘brilliant mind’.
In 1948 the Soviet Union suppressed ‘bourgeois’ genetics, at the same
time making Trofim Lysenko’s theories the orthodoxy. Lysenko promised to
make Russia a verdant land through vernalisation, a process whereby
plants were treated with cold, which accelerated their flowering,
allowing winter wheat to be planted in spring; according to Lysenko
these changes were inherited by the next generation. Haldane ‘kept an
open mind’ about Lysenko’s work, repeatedly asking for more accurate
information on his experiments (rather than summaries), and meekly
rebutting some of his criticisms of genetics, while admitting others
were fair. Responding to reports of the persecution of Soviet
scientists, he said that capitalist science was equally ideological:
hadn’t Western scientists been dismissed from academic posts? ‘My
brother is getting into a tangle,’ Naomi wrote to their friend the
science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, ‘and he has made a great many
enemies. The “Liberal” scientists are not nearly as much interested in
freedom of speech as they are in downing a rival.’ Behind the scenes,
Haldane and the CPGB’s other geneticists attempted to hold their ground,
but it is undoubtedly the case that Haldane discredited himself in the
eyes of many by not being firmer about Lysenko in public. Dronamraju
describes his behav iour as ‘disappointing’. The Lysenko affair probably
made Haldane even more irritated at the party’s disciplinary demands,
but his ‘break’ with it was neither sudden nor complete. He did not
resign in 1949, as Dronamraju claims; instead it seems he let his
membership lapse sometime after 1950, though party members hoped he
would come ‘back into fraternity again’.
Haldane first visited India when he was sent there to recuperate during
the First World War, and wrote to Naomi that it was ‘an odd country, but
I feel quite at home here.’ He sent her evocative descriptions of mice,
insects and snakes, and wrote that he’d ‘like to Mendel’ the
hairy-tailed rats. Forty years later, he decided to move there, partly
out of disgust at Suez. As well as being a refuge from Western politics,
India offered Haldane a shelter from the professionalised science that
had emerged from the Second World War. Research, he said in his final
essay, ‘is being more and more debased by team work, in which a large
number of workers do what they are told to do, not what they want to do,
and the results are remote.’ In India Haldane supervised genetic work,
including Dronamraju’s, and attempted to increase the country’s rice
yield, which ‘if it comes off, will be the most sensational bit of
applied biology since Pasteur’. But India was not entirely paradisiacal.
‘The first thing to realise about this country,’ he wrote to Theodosius
Dobzhansky, ‘is that from the “Western” and communist points of view
alike its principal occupation is wasting time.’ His own time was
largely wasted in railing against bureaucracy.
Haldane died at the age of 72, not long after an operation for bowel
cancer. It wasn’t exactly the death he had imagined: he had wanted to
die for his convictions at about seventy and laughing (he’d settle for
two of the three, he said), and hoped to live ‘to see capitalism
overthrown and the workers in power through most of Europe’. He was
confident that at least ‘some of my work will not die when I do’.
Dronamraju’s book doesn’t re-evaluate that work or the man who produced
it, but with any luck it will inspire someone else to do justice to
Haldane, in Peter Medawar’s reckoning one of the ‘three or four … most
influential biologists of his generation’, who was after all ‘a
with-knobs-on variant of us all’.
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