On this date in 1892, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane — a scientist who worked in the fields of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics — was born in Oxford, England, to Louisa (née Trotter) and John Scott Haldane, a physiologist and philosopher. Both parents had aristocratic Scottish ancestry. He was raised Episcopalian.
Treated as a miniature adult rather than a child, Haldane proved to be a prodigy, reading by age 3, attending scholarly lectures and assisting his father with experiments. He enrolled at Eton College in 1905, where he became friends with Julian Huxley. Transferring to New College, affiliated with the University of Oxford, he studied mathematics, the classics and genetics, the last of which he is most renowned for. He earned an M.A. in classics from Oxford in 1914.
Serving as a commissioned officer after World War I broke out, he was wounded twice, once so severely he was sent to India to recover. Despite not having an academic degree in the sciences, after the war he was appointed a New College fellow and then did research in physiology and genetics or taught at the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California-Berkeley (1932) and the University of London (1933–57).
Haldane became a Marxist in the 1930s and was London editor of The Daily Worker before becoming disenchanted with communism and leaving the party. He moved to India to head a genetics and biometry lab in 1957, renouncing his British citizenship. He became an Indian citizen in 1961 and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata until his death.
He is regarded as a principal founder of neo-Darwinism, an integration of the theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetics. His major works include “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (1924), “Animal Biology,” with Julian Huxley (1927), “The Inequality of Man” (1932), “The Causes of Evolution” (1932), “Faith and Fact” (1934), “The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences” (1938), “Science Advances” (1947) and “The Biochemistry of Genetics” (1954).
In a speech to the Heretics of Cambridge, he read this passage from “Daedalus”: “We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.” (Feb. 4, 1923)
Haldane was married twice, first to journalist Charlotte Franken in 1926. They divorced in 1945. Later that year he married Helen Spurway. They met while she was an undergrad at University College London. Twenty-three years his junior, she had earned her Ph.D. in genetics in 1938 under his supervision. Haldane had no children.
He died at age 72 after a long struggle with colo-rectal cancer in Bhubaneswar in eastern India. His skeleton and organs are on display in the Haldane Museum in the pathology department of Rangaraya Medical College. (D. 1964)
