J. B. S. Haldane

See also: Haldane's dilemma

For the physiologist see John Scott Haldane.

J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane in 1914
Born	November 5, 1892 Oxford, England
Died	December 1, 1964 Bhubaneswar, India
Nationality	British (until 1961) Indian
Alma mater	Oxford University
Known for	Population genetics, enzymology
Awards	Darwin Medal (1952)
Scientific career
Fields	Biologist
Institutions	Cambridge, UC Berkeley, UCL
Doctoral advisor	Only obtained an M.A., but then worked under Frederick Gowland Hopkins
Doctoral students	John Maynard Smith
Notes
Note that Cambridge did not have PhD degrees until 1919. So Haldane obtained an M.A., but then directly worked under Frederick Gowland Hopkins who was the equivalent of a doctoral mentor.

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (November 5, 1892 – December 1, 1964), who normally used "J.B.S." as a first name, was a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.

Biography

Haldane was born in Edinburgh, to physiologist John Scott Haldane and Louisa Kathleen Haldane, and descended from Scottish aristocrats (see Haldane family). His younger sister Naomi Mitchison became a writer. Haldane was educated at Dragon School, Eton College (which he hated) and at New College, Oxford.

During the First World War, he served with the Black Watch in France and Iraq. He was initially Bombing Officer for the 3rd Battalion before becoming a Trench Mortar Officer in the 1st. While in the army, he became a socialist, writing "If I live to see an England in which socialism has made the occupation of a grocer as honourable as that of a soldier, I shall die happy".

Between 1919 and 1922 he was a fellow of New College, then moved to Cambridge University until 1932. He then moved to University College, London where he spent most of the remainder of his academic career. In the late 1950s he moved to India at the invitation of P. C. Mahalanobis. The move was ostensibly a protest against the Suez War, but had been a possibility for some while.

In 1924 Haldane met Charlotte Burghes (nee Franken) and the two later married. To do so Charlotte divorced her husband Jack Burghes, causing some controversy.

In 1925, Briggs and Haldane derived a superior form of the 1913 Michaelis-Menten equation, still a mainstay of enzyme kinetics in biochemistry. The original authors assumed that enzyme (catalyst) and substrate (reactant) are in quasi-equilibrium with their complex, which then dissociates to yield product and free enzyme. The Briggs Haldane equation was of the same algebraic form, but with a better interpretation of the Michaelis constant. Their derivation makes the more realistic assumption that the intermediate complex(es) are initially in a quasi-steady-state as substrate is consumed and product is formed.

Haldane made many contributions to human genetics and was one of the three major figures to develop the mathematical theory of population genetics. He is usually regarded as the third of these in importance, after R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright. His greatest contribution was in a series of papers on "A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection" which was the major series of papers on the mathematical theory of natural selection. It treated many major cases for the first time, showing the direction and rates of changes of gene frequencies. It also pioneered in investigating the interaction of natural selection with mutation and with migration. Haldane's book, The Causes of Evolution (1932), summarized these results, especially in its extensive appendix. This body of work was a major component of what came to be known as the "modern evolutionary synthesis", reestablishing natural selection as the premier mechanism of evolution by explaining it in terms of the mathematical consequences of Mendelian genetics.

Haldane introduced many quantitative approaches in biology such as in his essay On Being the Right Size. His contributions to theoretical population genetics and statistical human genetics included the first methods using maximum likelihood for estimation of human linkage maps, and pioneering methods for estimating human mutation rates. His was the first to calculate the mutational load caused by recurring mutations at a gene locus, and to introduce the idea of a "cost of natural selection".

Haldane was a keen experimenter, willing to expose himself to danger to obtain data. One experiment involving elevated levels of oxygen saturation triggered a fit which resulted in him suffering crushed vertebrae. In his decompression chamber experiments, he and his volunteers suffered perforated eardrums, but, as Haldane stated in What is Life, "the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."

He was also a famous science populariser like Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, or Richard Dawkins. His essay, 'Daedalus or Science and the Future' (1923), was remarkable in predicting many scientific advances but has been criticized for presenting a too idealistic view of scientific progress.

Haldane was very idealistic, and in his youth was a devoted Communist and author of many articles in The Daily Worker. Events in the Soviet Union, such as the rise of the anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko and the crimes of Stalin, caused him to break with the Communist Party later in life. He joined the Communist party in 1937 but left in 1950, shortly after having toyed with standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate. However, his support for the Socialist ideal appears to be a pragmatic one. Writing in 1928, in On Being the Right Size, Haldane doubts whether the Socialist principle could be operated on the scale of the British Empire or the United States (or, implicitly, the Soviet Union): "while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge."

He is also known for an observation from his essay, On Being the Right Size, which Jane Jacobs and others have since referred to as Haldane's principle. This is that sheer size very often defines what bodily equipment an animal must have: "Insects, being so small, do not have oxygen-carrying bloodstreams. What little oxygen their cells require can be absorbed by simple diffusion of air through their bodies. But being larger means an animal must take on complicated oxygen pumping and distributing systems to reach all the cells." The conceptual metaphor to animal body complexity has been of use in energy economics and secession ideas.

Haldane was a friend of the author Aldous Huxley, and was the basis for the biologist Shearwater in Huxley's novel Antic Hay. Ideas from Haldane's Daedalus, such as ectogenesis (the development of fetuses in artificial wombs), also influenced Huxley's Brave New World.

The most famous of Haldane's many students, John Maynard Smith, shared his mixture of political and scientific interests.

Haldane died on December 1, 1964. He willed that his body be used for study at the Rangaraya Medical College, Kakinada. [1]

My body has been used for both purposes during my lifetime and after my death, whether I continue to exist or not, I shall have no further use for it, and desire that it shall be used by others. Its refrigeration, if this is possible, should be a first charge on my estate

Misc

• He was righthanded
• Wives: Charlotte Burghes (née Franken), Helen Spurway
• He had no children
• He has an Erdos number of 5.
• He is famous also for the response he gave, when a clergyman asked him what attribute of the Creator he found the most remarkable: "An inordinate fondness for beetles".

References

• Bryson (2003) A Short History of Nearly Everything pp. 300-302; ISBN 0-552-99704-8
• Clark (1968) JBS: The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane ISBN 0-340-04444-6
• Geoffrey Zubay et al, Biochemistry (2nd ed., 1988), enzyme kinetics, pp. 266-272; MacMillan, New York ISBN 0-02-432080-3

Publications

• Daedalus; or, Science and the future; a paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923
• A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection, a series of papers starting in 1924
• Possible Worlds and other Essays, 1927
• The Causes of Evolution, 1932
• My Friend Mr Leakey, 1937
• A.R.P, 1938
• Adventures of a Biologist, 1947
• What is Life?, 1947
• JBS Haldane, "Origin of Man", Nature,176,169(1955))

External links

• An online copy of Daedalus or Science and the Future
• A review (from a modern perspective) of The Causes of Evolution
• Royal Society citation
• Unofficial SJG Archive - People - JBS Haldane (1892-1964) Accessed 22 February 2006. Useful text but the likeness is not of JBS but of his father John Scott Haldane.
• Haldane's contributions to science in India
• Marxist Writers: J.B.S. Haldane
• You can see and hear J.B.S. Haldane speak during the introduction of the rather disturbing Soviet film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940)

There are photographs of Haldane at

• Photograph from 1946 Royal Society
• JBS Haldane, on the Portraits of Statisticians page.

The biography on the Marxist Writers page has a photograph of Haldane when younger.