Genetics: Always a Good Show

“”I’ve been very much a dabbler, and I’m not ashamed of it. Sometimes I wonder idly what I might be remembered for a hundred years from now—but I don’t really very much care what people think about me, especially a hundred years hence.” Perhaps John Burdon Sanderson Haldane did not really care, but last week, when it came time for BBC-TV to present a prefilmed obituary of the versatile British scientist in which he appeared, it was clear that he would be remembered for a multitude of contributions to man’s knowledge of his world and of himself.

Infected with Experiment. Geneticist Haldane would have been the first to deny that his intellectual gifts and interests could have been genetically determined, but there was no doubt that they were early and firmly imprinted on him by his father, John Scott Haldane (1860-1936). Longtime professor of physiology at Oxford, the elder Haldane risked his own life by deliberately inhaling carbon monoxide for more than an hour and by sitting in ovens heated as high as 300° F. Young John was only four years old when his father took him down into coal mines and sewers to let him experience the befuddling effect of methane gas. Having figured out why divers get “the bends” and devised the decompression tables on which all diving practice has been based ever since, his father put young J.B.S. into a diving suit and dropped him into 40 feet of water. It was a quick but effective lesson for the boy; it taught him how to keep his Eustachian tubes open.

Thus the boy was thoroughly infected with the bug of self-experimentation. Gassed in World War I, he plunged into experiments to compare the effectiveness of different types of gas masks. Sent to India, he tested the value of his typhoid inoculation by deliberately drinking unboiled water and chewing betel nuts bought at filthy roadside stands. Haldane did not get typhoid—but he caught a sand-fly fever, which was about as bad.

Sex Viri. Demobbed, Haldane took a post as a lecturer in biochemistry at Cambridge University. He also took another man’s wife, Writer Charlotte Franken. When he had to pay £1,000 damages as corespondent, the university asked Haldane to resign. He refused. He was called before the Sex Viri* and fired. Haldane appealed, and a special university court upheld Haldane in his contention that a professor’s private life is none of the university’s business. Then Haldane and Charlotte Franken got married.

In 1933, Haldane switched from Cambridge to the University of London. Wherever he went, he persisted in self-experimentation. He had the blood supply to his arm shut off with a tourniquet until the arm was paralyzed, then watched another man move it with an electric current. To upset his body’s acid-alkali balance, he drank ammonium chloride and panted for days afterward. To prove that “sunstroke” (properly, heat stroke) is not caused directly by the sun’s rays, but by the overheating of the brain and spinal cord, he sat in Egypt’s broiling sun for two hours, periodically dousing his head and spine with water. He got no heat stroke, but he suffered a severe sunburn across his broad shoulders.

Haldane breathed air containing as much as 11 % carbon dioxide—generally accepted as more than any other man has survived—and recorded his experiences as he went under. This was soon after the Royal Navy’s submarine Thetis sank with the loss of all but four in her crew, and Haldane was explaining the heavy death toll. While breathing pure oxygen, he took a “dive” in a compression chamber to seven atmospheres, and it nearly killed him.

But his most extravagant dream of medical martyrdom was not to be fulfilled. In 1949 he wrote: “If King Charles I’s or King Louis XVI’s head [after their executions] had been stuck within a minute or so on a pump which supplied oxygenated blood to it, it would almost certainly have come around, after half an hour or so, enough to open its eyes and move its lips, and would probably have recovered consciousness. I hope that if I have an inoperable cancer this experiment will be tried on me.”

Party Before Wife. Haldane’s loudly proclaimed political sympathies were with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Wife Charlotte had led him into the Communist Party, and in 1940 he took over as editorial chairman of London’s Daily Worker. Charlotte returned disillusioned from Russia and tried to lead Haldane out of the party. But he stuck to it, not to her, and they were divorced. That same year, he married an assistant, Helen Spurway.

Despite his die-hard Marxism, Haldane was too good a scientist to be taken in by all Russian dogma. When the party line sanctified Geneticist Trofim Lysenko, whose theories echoed the “Lamarckian Heresy” holding that environmentally induced characteristics can be inherited, Haldane quit the party.

The London Times called him “a great shambling bear of a man with a big bald head and a loud booming voice which could rise to an indignant bawl.” His antiwar passions led him to irritation with Britain because of the Suez incident and in 1957 he went to India. There he eventually settled down, as head of the Orissa state government’s Genetics and Biometry Laboratory.

A year ago, Haldane was stricken with cancer of the rectum. Still irrepressible, he wrote a piece of doggerel for London’s New Statesman and Nation entitled “Cancer’s a Funny Thing”:

I wish I had the voice of Homer

To sing of rectal carcinoma . . .

I know that cancer often kills,

But so do cars and sleeping pills;

And it can hurt one till one sweats,

So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.

A spot of laughter, I am sure,

Often accelerates one’s cure.

Laughter was not enough. Last week recurrence of his cancer ended the stormy, 72-year life of John Haldane. At his bidding, his widow sent his body to a medical college to be used for research. Haldane had amply fulfilled a lifelong desire: “I hope that I shall find time to think as I die, ‘I am glad that I lived when and where I did. It was a good show.’ ”

* Latin for “the six men”—a court of senior dons.