John Scott Haldane

For the geneticist see John Burdon Sanderson Haldane.

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John Scott Haldane

John Scott Haldane CH (May 3 1860 – March 15/March 14 1936) was a Scottish physiologist.

Biography

Haldane was the son of Robert Haldane, and his grandfather was the Scottish evangelist James Alexander Haldane. His mother was Mary Elizabeth Burdon-Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson and the granddaughter of Sir Thomas Burdon. His maternal uncle was the physiologist John Scott Burdon-Sanderson. He was the brother of Elizabeth Haldane, William Stowell Haldane and Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane.

He married Louisa Kathleen Trotter and had two children; the scientist J.B.S. Haldane and the author Naomi Mitchison.

He was Gifford Lecturer in the University of Glasgow, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Honorary Professor of the University of Birmingham. Haldane was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, then at the Universities of Edinburgh and Jena, and held the degrees of Master of Arts from Edinburgh and Oxford, Doctor of Law from Edinburgh and Birmingham, and Doctor of Medicine from the University of Edinburgh. He was also President of the English Institution of Mining Engineers, a Companion of Honor of the British Court, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Haldane was an international authority on ether and respiration and the inventor of the gas-mask during World War I. (The Sciences and Philosophy: Gifford Lectures, University of Glasgow, 1927–28 by J.S. Haldane, Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1929)

Accomplishments

John Scott Haldane helped find out how to determine the regulation of breathing. He was the founder of The Journal of Hygiene. Haldane made a decompression apparatus to help make deep-sea divers safer and produced the first decompression tables after extensive experiments with animals. He was also an authority on the effects of pulmonary diseases. He investigated the principle of action of gases.