J. B. S. Haldane

    As commonly done, we will omit the spaces between the initials when we refer to J. B. S. Haldane in this article.

Referred to by most as J. B. S. Haldane (or J.B.S. Haldane), sometimes 'Jack', the initials stand for John Burdon Sanderson ('Burdon Sanderson' from his maternal line), born in Oxford, England, in 1892, his father an accomplished and honored (respiratory) physiologist, John Scott Haldane (J. S. Haldane), with whom J.B.S. worked as his laboratory assistant during childhood. Educated at Eaton (equivalent to an American high school) and Oxford University, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1914 — in classics, philosophy and ancient history, graduating with honors — served in combat in World War I, and later teaching and doing research at Oxford (1919, elected Fellow in physiology), Cambridge (1922-1932), and University College London (1933, appointed professor of genetics; 1937, appointed Weldon Chair in Biometry), and for a short time at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1932 J.B.S. Haldane published The Causes of Evolution, a founding document in the modern evolutionary synthesis of population genetics, reflecting the interest he developed in college in biology, genetics and applying mathematics to questions in biology and genetics.

This article will give a summary of J.B.S. Haldane's life and thinking, his contributions to science and to the popularization of science, his impact on his times, and his vision of the future. One science historian, Mark B. Adams, sets the task:

J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) is one of the most fascinating, perplexing and troublesome figures in the history of science. That he was a major biologist of his time goes without saying, but attempts at further scientific classification are futile: there is hardly a field of modern biology in whose history he does not deserve at least some mention. And, beyond biology proper, Haldane had yet other personae that at times seemed no less central to his career. Any attempt to come to terms with his life and work must face the dual challenge of his extraordinary multiformity and his utter singularity.

Haldane's youth

As a child J.B.S. Haldane learned much of his father's 'trade', human physiology, essentially as an non-indentured apprentice. He states in his "An Autobiography in Brief":

At the age of eight or so I was allowed to take down numbers which I called out when reading the burette of a gas-analysis apparatus and later to calculate from these numbers the amounts of various gases in a sample. After this I was promoted to making up simple mixtures for his use and, still later, to cleaning apparatus. Before I was fourteen, he had taken me down a number of mines, and I had spent some time under water both in a submarine and in a diving dress. He had also used me as the subject in many experiments. In fact I spent a good deal of my holidays from school in learning my father's trade…After I was twelve, he discussed with me all his research before publication, and sometimes tried out a lecture course on me before delivering it to students.

By age fourteen years he had apparently learned about gases and human respiratory physiology, learned mathematical applications for interpreting experimental data, and from discussions with his father, learned about presenting research results for publication, and about developing lecture courses. (For more on J.B.S. Haldane's father's life and scientific work, see)  J.B.S. Haldane had a head start in science and scientific thinking, leading him in school to complement his studyies Latin and Greek with studies of physics, chemistry and biology — and history..

Through his study of chemistry, he reportedly had learned about advances in chemical knowledge that helped his father and colleague, C. G. Douglas, in their research. His first scientific paper, at age seventeen years (1909), co-authored with his father and C. G. Douglas, was read to the Physiological Society, likely what appeared in the Journal of Physiology in 1912, as Douglas CG, Haldane JS, Haldane JB. (1912) The laws of combination of haemoglobin with carbon monoxide and oxygen. J. Physiol 44:275-304.  It reflected physiology at the mathematical and chemical level. J.B.S. Haldane had achieved credentials as a scientist with sophisticated mathematical ability by age twenty years, and he followed up in the years ahead with mathematical perspectives applied in enzymology and population genetics (vide infra).

Scientific contributions

Early on (1925), at Cambridge University, Haldane applied his evidenced passion for mathematical analysis of biological chemistry in the field of enzymology. Enzymologists study the behavior of enzymes, the protein catalysts that accelerate biochemical reactions in living cells without themselves getting consumed in the reactions. Among other studies, enzymologists perform schematic and mathematical modeling of the many different kinds of biochemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes. Initially with a colleague, George E. Briggs, Haldane presented a theoretical analysis that could account for quantitative measurements of the rates of many of such reactions, devising equations that improved on earlier models in respect of accordance with experimental results. Later (1930) he wrote a book entitled Enzymes in which he presented a modified scheme. Both the Briggs-Haldane and Haldane analyses remain in the mainstream of enzymatic reaction ‘kinetics’, and have set a foundation for, and stimulated, the further developments in that field up to the 21st century.