JBS Haldane – “Jack” to his family and friends – was once described as “the last man who might know all there was to be known”. His reputation was built on his work in genetics, but his expertise was extraordinarily wide-ranging. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he studied mathematics and classics. He never gained any kind of degree in science, but he could explain the latest work in physics, chemistry, biology and a host of other disciplines. He could recite great swathes of poetry in English, French, German, Latin and Ancient Greek. A big man (another description of him is “a large woolly rhinoceros of uncertain temper”), he was unafraid to take anyone on in a fight and, equally, could drink anyone under the table.
In his lifetime (he died in 1964 at the age of 72), Haldane was very well known because of his journalism, his appearances on the radio, his bestselling books of popular science and his promotion of communism. Today, what most people know about him is often confined to the probably apocryphal story that, when asked what his studies of nature had taught him about the Creator, he replied that He has “an inordinate fondness for beetles”.
Samanth Subramanian’s energetic account of Haldane’s life, politics and science might just revive interest in this extraordinary man. It has, though, a significant rival. Ronald Clark’s The Life and Work of JBS Haldane, published in 1984, is still in print. The two books are very different and provide a fascinating contrast in biographical styles. Clark’s workmanlike book is conventionally structured, strictly adhering to chronology in a way that seems a little unambitious and dull, but is also reassuring and satisfying. You know where you are with a biography that begins: “John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born on 5 November 1892.”
Subramanian’s book has a rather more cryptic opening, the point of which seems to be to set up what he evidently believes is the defining conflict of Haldane’s life: his commitment to scientific rigour and objectivity on the one hand, and his loyalty to Soviet communism on the other. For about ten pages, Haldane disappears altogether as Subramanian provides us with an account of the meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1948 at which its president, Trofim Lysenko, gave an ideologically driven speech that turned the meeting into an inquisition, and allowed the science of genetics in the Soviet Union to be guided by Stalinism rather than by truth. A few months after Lysenko’s purge, the BBC broadcast a discussion featuring Haldane, who disappointed his family, friends and fellow scientists by being equivocal rather than robustly denouncing Lysenko.
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