A scientist who was a spy?

J B S Haldane's extraordinary life was a strange mixture of science and politics

Samanth Subramanian’s biography is a fascinating portrait of his distinguished scientific career and remarkable life. Haldane is well known for applying statistical methods to show how discrete changes in genes produce a smooth curve of continuous evolution.

In the very first chapter of his book, Subramanian tells us what made Haldane “one of the most famous scientists of his age”. It wasn’t just his science, but his writing and politics. Haldane made a point to meticulously reply to every letter he received — answering scientific queries and offering his opinions.

He also wrote for magazines and newspapers about everything ranging from politics, philosophy, literature and of course, science. He even authored a book for children and a science fiction novel.

Born into an aristocratic Scottish family in 1892, Haldane’s father, J S Haldane, was a physiologist and scientist.

Haldane grew up learning about and taking part in his father’s experiments about human respiration. He went to Eton and later graduated with first-class Honours in Mathematics and Classics from Oxford. The First World War proved to be a transformative experience for Haldane as he met people from all walks of life, and many of the assumptions of his patrician upbringing were shattered. Amidst dodging bullets and dropping bombs, Haldane managed to write his first scientific paper based on experiments with breeding mice that he carried out with his sister before the outbreak of the war.

Support for Soviets?

The book also talks about how Haldane was drawn towards Marxist philosophy and communism in the inter-war period. He briefly joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but later drifted apart due to its overt support for Soviet geneticist Lysenko, whose scientifically questionable claims were receiving substantial political support in the Soviet Union.

Despite Haldane’s service to the British war effort during the Second World War, after the war, he was regarded with suspicion by the British due to his political affiliation and perceived sympathies with the Soviet Union. Britain’s involvement in the Suez Crisis proved to be a breaking point when he denounced Britain as a “criminal state” and migrated to India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961.

Haldane admired Nehru for his “determination to make India a secular state” and believed that post-independence India would be a vast experiment to see how a wise application of science could advance the lives of hundreds of millions of people. However, following his migration, Haldane developed a more nuanced understanding of the country.

The book provides details of Haldane’s distaste of the stifling bureaucracy at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta — some of which are found to this day in many institutes. Fixed lab timings, the policy of locking away journals, his inability to hire an assistant who did not have a first-class degree in science, the need for his students to sign an attendance ledger every day — all of these bothered him greatly.

Haldane resigned after an altercation and the matter went to the very highest levels. Nehru intervened, writing to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) director requesting him to be “flexible in some matters”.

Haldane was then offered a chance to start his own genetics and biometry unit in Calcutta, but only after a year’s delay. CSIR too had equally onerous restrictions; Haldane could not speak out on political issues, nor could he procure items costing more than Rs 10 without permission from New Delhi. Soon, Haldane came to refer to CSIR as the “Council for the Suppression of Independent Research”.

Haldane spent his last two years working out of four rooms on the campus of an agricultural college in Bhubaneswar, awaiting the completion of a new genetics laboratory he had been promised by Orissa’s then Chief Minister, Biju Patnaik. He succumbed to colorectal cancer in 1964 and left his body to the Rangaraya Medical College in Andhra Pradesh to be used for research.

Subramanian’s book is slightly short on scientific explanation but provides well-researched biographical details. The biography is not chronological but organised by themes, which may make for difficult reading.

Nevertheless, Subramanian has successfully conveyed the sheer excitement in Haldane’s life to the reader.