American Scientist

A DOMINANT CHARACTER: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane. Samanth Subramanian. 384 pp. W. W. Norton, 2020. $40.

Samanth Subramanian devotes much of the first chapter of his biography of the legendary biologist J. B. S. Haldane to Haldane’s notorious refusal to condemn Lysenkoism during a 1948 BBC television broadcast. Haldane, who was by that time famous both as a scientist and as a member of the British Communist Party, gave an uncharacteristically short and equivocal commentary on Trofim Lysenko’s state-sanctioned attack on genetics. His defense of Lysenko was weak, but he had been confronted with a critical choice between his science and his politics, and he had chosen the party. Subramanian characterizes this event as a defining moment and makes it central to the book’s narrative.

In the pages that follow, we learn that Haldane’s passions for science and politics intertwined throughout his life. His popular science writing, his political advocacy, and his love life brought him notoriety, and he remained a popular and controversial figure throughout his long career. Subramanian’s biography offers a portrait of Haldane’s celebrity, which was furthered by both his science and his politics.

Haldane’s father, born in Scotland, was an academic at the University of Oxford, and the son was drawn into his father’s research on the effects of different atmospheric gases on the human body. One of the finest features of Subramanian’s biography is his demonstration of the intellectual continuity between father and son. He notes that the elder Haldane regularly took his scientific ideas into the world in service of a range of practical problems, such as improving the air quality in industrial Great Britain. J. B. S. Haldane absorbed both his father’s passion for physiology and his eagerness to apply it to the world.

After being admitted to study mathematics at Oxford, the younger Haldane switched to ancient history and philosophy. His love of classics did not keep him away from science, however, and he was drawn into the emerging field of genetics before being swept away by World War I. As an officer in the Black Watch (a “very Scotch” regiment sent to France), Haldane loved the camaraderie, the danger, and the explosives with which he proved himself to be highly adept. After the war, he returned to academia as a reader (a rank indicating distinguished original research) in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. His mathematical abilities drew him to new problems in enzyme dynamics and to the new field of population genetics, in which genetics and evolutionary biology were being merged.

Biographers of scientists must decide how deeply they are going to engage with their subject’s research. Haldane’s scientific interests were broad and deep. A careful accounting of their development in all their technical glory would require a book easily twice as long as this one. Such a book would also struggle to balance the details of Haldane’s public life with those of his more private scientific life. Subramanian offers enough scientific background to provide an intellectual context for Haldane’s research and to explain its significance; the result is an account of his major contributions to genetics and physiology, which brought him scientific renown. His most important work modeled natural selection, using statistics to estimate the rates at which gene mutations spread in a population. For balance, Subramanian also describes the popular commentaries on science that made Haldane a public figure.

Not long after returning home from World War I, Haldane wrote his first popular book: Daedalus; or, Science and the Future. Predicting a future without infectious disease, without oil, and without the need for traditional morality, it was a sensational success. Haldane’s speculations about test tube babies and eugenic selection fueled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. More importantly, the success of Daedalus hooked Haldane on writing for a mass audience. As Subramanian puts it, “With Daedalus, Haldane became a man who did his thinking in public.” Haldane thought quite a bit, and he wrote even more: His hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles made him perhaps the most widely read biologist of his time.

Haldane’s public persona gained even more attention in 1925, when the married woman with whom he was having an affair, Charlotte Burghes, divorced her husband. Immediately afterward, a tribunal at Cambridge decreed that Haldane was guilty of gross immorality; when he refused to resign, they fired him. He appealed the decision and won, and then married Charlotte. But the trial set him apart from academic orthodoxy in the public eye.

Haldane’s political views reinforced his commitment to putting science into action. He saw both genetics and Marxism as ways of materially improving people’s lives. He was sympathetic to socialism in his youth and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1928; later, he became increasingly active in the Communist Party of Great Britain. He wrote extensively for The Daily Worker and headed its editorial board for a while, but his discomfort with the embrace of Lysenko’s pseudoscience by that publication and by the party finally led him to resign from both in 1950. Subramanian offers a compelling portrait of Haldane’s political commitment that makes clear how important his political beliefs were to him, both personally and scientifically.

In 1957, at age 65, Haldane left England for India with his second wife, Helen (née Spurway). The reason he gave for the move was that he viewed Britain as “a criminal state” for having joined forces with France and Israel to attack Egypt in an attempt to gain control of the Suez Canal. Haldane threw himself into life in India, but his new work life at the Indian Statistical Institute was somewhat turbulent—he had not left his ego or his anti-authoritarian streak in England. Unfortunately, his health began to decline in India, and he died there of cancer in 1964.

A Dominant Character offers a fascinating portrait of Haldane’s life. Subramanian succeeds in capturing his public life, fame, and influence, while giving readers a sense of Haldane as a person and as a groundbreaking scientist. Without getting weighed down by technical detail, the book explains why J. B. S. Haldane was one of the most prominent biologists of the 20th century.