The Genius of Genes

JBS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF J.B.S. HALDANE by Ronald W. Clark. 326 pages. Coward McCann. $6.95.

What a scientist does outside his laboratory is as absorbing to the global villagers of this electronic age as the personal foibles of the parish priest were to parochial villagers of an earlier time. Thus the biography of J.B.S. Haldane, British geneticist, biochemist, politician and honored boffin,* is doubly interesting. As one of the last great Victorian eccentrics, Haldane carried the belligerent confidence of that era into the conformist corridors of the mid-20th century. As an aristocrat turned Communist, he was a classic caricature of the greathearted scientist who, as social pundit, squanders the fame acquired in one field on wild causes in another.

Talking Before Walking. Haldane fittingly began life as a prodigy. The son of an Oxford physiologist, he could read and talk almost before he could walk. It is said that once, when the talented toddler fell and cut his forehead, he inspected the blood with detachment and asked: "Is it oxyhemoglobin or carboxyhemoglobin?" At Eton, Haldane was regularly beaten by senior boys. But by the time he left school, he could read Latin and Greek, French and German, and, as he observed with matter-of-fact pride, "I knew enough chemistry to take part in research, enough biology to do unaided research, and I had a fair knowledge of history and contemporary politics." Thus equipped, he went to New College, Oxford, started in mathematics, switched to "Greats" (classics and philosophy), and broke an oar in the college crew. Strong in mind and body, he entered the military in 1914, eventually to be praised by Marshal Haig as "the bravest and dirtiest officer in my army."

Holy Goats. Haldane became one of the world's greatest authorities on the biological mechanism of heredity and on hereditary diseases. But throughout his career, he continued to embrace the "two cultures" and to pursue the world with a remarkably pragmatic sensibility. This quality is perhaps best illustrated by Haldane's conversion to vegetarianism under the impact of the Hindu doctrine of transmigrating souls. "Once you teach evolutionary biology to people with the Indian ideological background," he observed, "the distinction between eating goats and cannibalism appears rather thin. My claim to a more immortal soul than a goat's is not strong enough to justify me in eating the goat."

Such anecdotes permit Ronald Clark to avoid one of the pitfalls of scientific biography--the depressing fact that the research that makes famous scientists famous in the first place is virtually incommunicable to the general public. Haldane's great, obsessive scientific passion, for instance, was the genetic structure of Drosophila, a particular variety of the common fruit fly, an absorption that only another scientist, or another Drosophila, could reasonably be expected to share.

Skillfully, the author does show how the humble Drosophila led Haldane to what may be considered the central drama of his life. He was one of the last of the hard-core Stalinists in the Western intellectual community--a genuine holdover from the liberal-Communist marriage of the '30s. During the Civil War, he went to Spain as to a shrine. He closed his eyes to the horrors of Stalin's purges, shrugged off the Hitler-Stalin pact. Unused to the logic of the world, he failed to draw the conclusions that occurred to less talented men as a result of these debacles.

In the late 1940s, the Kremlin finally decided to proclaim as scientific truth the biological theories of Lysenko, who held that changes caused by environment could be inherited. Haldane had never fully agreed with Lysenko. But the matter had not troubled him unduly as long as the Russian's unproved theories remained merely that. Now, after years of unbudging loyalty to the party line, it suddenly occurred to Haldane that the official Soviet position on the vexed matter of genetics was nonsense. "I am a Mendelist-Morganist," he was later to exclaim plaintively. He had accepted the stifling grip of dictatorship on the spirit of a people who had given birth to Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoevsky. But Haldane finally choked on what was essentially a split hair--a technical scientific point.

Unrecognized Intentions. Haldane died of cancer (at 72) in 1964. In an effort to check the disease, he underwent a colostomy, an event he commemorated with a poem:

I wish I had the voice of Homer

To sing of rectal carcinoma,

Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,

Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked . . .

I know that cancer often kills, But so do cars and sleeping pills.

True to form, Haldane, the worst of psychologists, was astonished that many people failed to recognize his praiseworthy intentions: to make known that some cancers can be cured. Soon afterward he died of his.

-A British term for civilians doing scientific work for the Air Force. Haldane served both Air Ministry and Navy during World War II.

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