Two apocryphal stories were very much in vogue during my doctoral years reading ecological sciences in the United States. The first involved a comment that J. B. S. Haldane made to an interviewer who had asked him what the diversity he saw around him said about the mind of the Creator. Haldane is understood to have responded, with, no doubt, appropriately beetling brows, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” The second episode took place during the 1950s. Haldane is reported to have leapt onto a table in a pub and loudly declared, “I would give my life for two brothers or eight cousins,” thereby neatly illustrating filial loyalties through coefficients of relatedness and anticipating the notion of kin selection or inclusive fitness elaborated by William Hamilton in 1964.1
Neither of these anecdotes appears to have found its way into Popularizing Science, Krishna Dronamraju’s respectful tome on his mentor, Haldane. Even so, the book is peppered with other aphorisms uttered by the venerable protagonist or by other luminaries about him. James Watson, for instance, memorably described Haldane as “England’s most clever and eccentric biologist.”2 But it is not merely a series of proclamations that makes this book engaging. It is a life that is described as idiosyncratically as it played out which compels the reader. By the same token, it also frustrates.
The book is divided into 21 chapters chronologically categorized into five parts, each spanning a decade from the 1920s to the 1960s. The chapter titles are varied—from “Charlotte and Sex Viri (Marriage and Scandal)” to the decidedly more staid “Chemical Genetics”—at least in nomenclature if not necessarily in content. Taken together, the titles point to a life that was anything but ordinary. What makes the book harder to review is the manner in which seemingly disparate elements are thrown together; theoretical considerations sit alongside recollections, and in some cases there is egregious repetition, even to the extent of nearly exact recapitulation of whole sections.3
If one were to essay at disentanglement, the following narrative would present itself. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born in 1892 to an old Scottish lineage, the product of a celebrated physiologist father and a paradoxically feminist and imperialist mother. A brilliant boy, Haldane trained at Eton and Oxford. In due course, he went on to play a significant role in the development of new disciplines such as population genetics, biochemical genetics, and immunogenetics, as well as the formulation of a new theory of life.4 Haldane’s work influenced the fields of “biometry, cosmology, animal behavior, cybernetics, origin of life on planet earth, epidemiology of infectious diseases, radiation effects, science in India, nonviolent biological research, popularization of science, and ethics.”5 Remarkably, he achieved all of this without ever obtaining a degree in the sciences.
Although the book begins in the 1920s, the first chapter includes a description of Haldane’s time at school and university in the preceding decade. It was during this period that he met and befriended the Huxleys and Gielguds, undertook research in physiology with his father, and conducted early experiments on linkage in vertebrates with his sister Naomi Haldane, later Mitchison, and Alexander Sprunt. The experiments were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. Haldane and Sprunt both served, but only Haldane returned.6 It was in the 1920s, however, that both exciting experiments and concomitantly, predictive statements directed to the general public emerged. In particular, the controversial Daedalus, which anticipated both the systematic practice of eugenics and the appearance of test-tube babies, inspired works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.7 In 1923, Haldane was invited to work at Cambridge, where he would stay for the next decade. It was an eventful period, embracing both
the time of his worst personal crisis—which led to his dismissal from his biochemistry readership at Cambridge University—and also his most rewarding period scientifically, when he produced first-rate research in population genetics, biochemistry, and physiology.8
The crisis arose from a relationship with a journalist, Charlotte Franken. Upon interviewing Haldane, Franken was immediately drawn to him. Inconveniently, she was also married. The circumstances of their early intimacy remain obscure, but the fallout was adultery, whether justified or otherwise. Franken duly received her divorce, and Haldane was asked to resign from his readership in biochemistry. Haldane refused and was stripped of his readership. He was only reinstated after an appeal and upon referral to a tribunal. Marriage to Franken followed, in short order, and for a number of years they lived in relative contentment, Haldane in his science, Franken in her journalism and writing. They had political persuasions in common, particularly Marxism, which would have an influence on Haldane’s own decisions, notably his participation in the Spanish Civil War.9 She would grow increasingly disenchanted with communism, particularly of the Soviet stripe, while Haldane lingered.10 The marriage eventually foundered. In 1935, Haldane met a woman more than two decades his junior, a student named Helen Spurway, for whom he would divorce Franken in 1945, and who would remain his companion for nearly the rest of his life.
In the meantime, Haldane’s scientific work continued unabated. Perhaps the most significant contribution was the creation of a whole new field, population genetics, of which he would be celebrated as one of three founders, along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. “No other field of science,” Dronamraju remarks, “was dominated for so long by so few.”11 The field sought to bring together the Darwinian theory of natural selection and the Mendelian theory of genetic inheritance.12 In his first paper on population genetics, published in 1924, Haldane declared:
In order to establish the view that natural selection is capable of accounting for the known facts of evolution, we must show not only that it can cause a species to change but that it can cause it to change at a rate which will account for present and past transmutations.13
Haldane also made fundamental contributions to the study of biological evolution, through such distinctions as “effective [emphasis original] selection, which changes the gene frequencies, and ineffective [emphasis original] selection, which does not.” He proposed the term “normalizing evolution” as a replacement for “normalizing selection,” keeping in mind that “the elimination of phenotypically extreme genotypes may be ineffective and does not necessarily lead to normalization.”14
The advent of population genetics was not always favorably received. Ernst Mayr referred to it as “beanbag genetics,” where “the Mendelian was apt to compare the genetic contents of a population to a bag full of colored beans. Mutation was the exchange of one kind of bean for another.”15 Haldane responded to Mayr’s charge in his paper “A Defense of Beanbag Genetics.”16 He acknowledged that the mathematical foundations upon which he, Fisher, and Wright had placed early population genetics still required testing through the accrual of experimental data.17
Haldane’s gift for theorizing and popularizing, supplemented by a felicitous turn of phrase, made him among the most widely-quoted of British academics during the 1930s and 1940s. He spoke passionately about eugenics, with which he came to be increasingly at odds due to the manner in which it was being advanced. He addressed the origins of life, propounding a “primordial soup” idea that was also advanced by Alexander Oparin.18 On the causes of evolution, he swiftly discounted intervention from the Almighty on two counts: the fact of extinction and the presence of parasitic species.
We have now to ask whether God made the tape-worm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.19
Perhaps on account of his early experiments with his father,20 Haldane would often use himself as a test specimen,21 functionally serving as a human guinea pig.22 In 1937, along with Julia Bell, he initiated what would eventually come to be known as the human genome project, by estimating distances “between the loci for the genes for hemophilia and color blindness on the X chromosome map” using statistical measures.23
Considerable attention is paid throughout the book to Haldane’s relationships with other scientists. Dronamraju recounts how Haldane was passed over for the directorship of the John Innes Horticultural Institute, a snub that inflected his relations with Cyril Darlington, who eventually obtained the position. This is but one of several contentious relationships described in Popularizing Science. Haldane’s interactions with other academics entrenched in the left, notably Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy, J. Desmond Bernal, and Joseph Needham are also examined.24 His association with his childhood friend, Julian Huxley, receives considerable attention.25 A particularly diverse group of personages are discussed in a subsequent account, ranging from the population geneticist Fisher to the ornithologist Sálim Ali and including the likes of the celebrated science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke.26 The descriptions are often anecdotal and their inclusion decided by a combination of what might be deemed general salience and matters of particular interest to the author. The arrangement is consequently quixotic and perhaps less focused than the author may have desired.
These frustrations notwithstanding, lines of continuance peep through the narrative, inviting the reader to persevere. An example is the story of Haldane and Spurway in India, where they moved in 1957.27 Dronamraju suggests, for instance, that although the Lysenko controversy may have been an indirect reason for the move,28
Haldane’s political alienation in Great Britain was closely followed by his increasing interest in India as a possible future home. He had long admired India’s cultural and philosophical foundations and developed an increasing admiration for Prime Minister [Jawaharlal] Nehru’s political neutrality as well as his intellectual standing.29
The tipping point was the attack on Egypt by Britain and France in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. In a press statement, Haldane remarked that he did not wish to live in a police state or, indeed, a criminal state. Prior to his death in 1964, Haldane’s final years were spent as an Indian citizen. Working with Spurway, there were significant publications and ongoing research in animal behavior and physiology, even as sophisticated speculations arose on the nature of Darwinism as viewed through a Hindu lens.30 Dronamraju remarks of Spurway:
Her conversion to Hinduism was so complete that she regarded herself as a Hindu widow after Haldane’s death. Accordingly, she wore the traditional widow’s white and gray clothing. Her decision to continue living as Haldane’s widow was, I am sure, mainly due to the intense feeling and closeness she felt with his spirit.31
Although Haldane adopted Indian attire and became a vegetarian, the degree to which he truly accepted and embraced the Hindu religion remains unclear. What is undeniable, however, is the rigor that he brought to his work at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta and the Genetics and Biometry Laboratory that he founded in Bhubaneswar. Alongside these activities, he also spoke passionately to the moral conscience that such work demanded in the greater scientific imagination of the country. Through it all, his love for India and the possibilities that he saw in it, couched in both exterior irascibility to the public and tremendous generosity to his mentees, shone. As Julian Huxley wrote:
That Jack should have chosen India for his final refuge, rather than the USA or some European country, is a measure of the liberal treatment accorded here to science and technology. He was able to make some important contributions and initiate many projects, and found happiness and fulfilment in his Indian home until he died.32
His sister Naomi Mitchison was even more forthcoming.
These were the last decades of my brother’s life. He was no longer, on the whole, experimenting. He had come to the point where he was bound to try to see science as a whole, to calculate what might happen next, to develop a philosophy which could make sense of it. He had to look into the dark glass of the future.33
Haldane died in Bhubaneswar on December 1, 1964.
The most personal aspect of the book concerns the author’s working relationship with Haldane, which developed after Dronamraju completed his masters in genetics and plant breeding at Agra University.34
Quite rapidly, I became a close confidant of both Haldane and Spurway. By the end of my first year, 1958, I was invited to share their residence, first an apartment in the Institute and later a house nearby. We travelled together all over India and Europe, attending and presenting research papers at scientific conferences. Memorable visits included those to Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Scotland, France, and Israel … Both marriages of Haldane were childless. He treated me like a son and depended on me for carrying on various domestic issues related to our daily routine as well as communicating with other colleagues and the local bureaucracy. I hired the staff, including the cook and other servants in the household, and helped Spurway in resolving various domestic crises.35
Dronamraju is a distinguished scientist whose major early contributions include the determination of hairy ears as being Y-linked and therefore only inheritable by males, and studies on inbreeding in the author’s home state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India36 These studies were largely motivated by Haldane. Dronamraju also participated in other studies that took place in the Haldane-Spurway household concerning animal behavior, such as the nest-building activities of wasps, Sceliphron madraspatanum,37 originally started in Calcutta, and those of yellow-wattled lapwings, Vanellus malabaricus.38 In 1978, these studies were to have tragic consequences.
There was no clear distinction between home and the lab. We kept experimental animals in both the house and the lab. We talked about our research most of the time. There was an almost religious fervor about any topic related to the maintenance and safety of animals and plants. Helen had always been keenly interested in the nature and causes of domestication of various animal species. And that is what led to her death eventually. She died of tetanus resulting from a jackal bite.39
A 367-page book focused on a single individual and that seeks to encompass the life of an already contradictory character is bound to be a challenging endeavor. Add to these constraints the particular preferences of a close and admiring associate and there might be a tendency to lean towards the hagiographic. To his credit, Dronamraju has sought with great perseverance to achieve balance. Clearly devoted to Haldane and Spurway, he does not shy away from aspects of the rebarbative in the lives of either, to the extent that he even calls into question some of the choices made by his protagonists. This tendency is one of the most refreshing elements of a book that is exhaustive in details, exhausting in parts, muddily arranged, but undeniably a labor of love. For a giant of an intellect that towered above his feet of clay, such clear-sighted reverence in the accounting is no mean effusion of deserved tribute.
