Open Writing

Haldane was one of his kind among his peers and predecessors. He came from a family of scientists. When he was a boy of 12, his father took him down a mine and made him suffocate almost to death to teach him a point in science. On another occasion later in life, he drank quantities of hydrochloric acid to study its role in muscle action.

This early exposure to the “cause and effect” part of scientific quest and hunger must have made him what he became later in life. When he was hardly in his teens, he studied Mendelian genetics, evolution and other subjects. In one experiment, involving elevated levels of saturation, he suffered a fit, resulting in crushed vertebrae. In his decompression chamber experiments, he and his volunteers suffered perforated eardrums. The response of an irrepressible Haldane was, "The drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."

In essence, J B S Haldane was the quintessential experimenter - a scientist to the core, who repeatedly made his own body the laboratory for his very original experiments. While many of these experiments showed him up as a very courageous man, it also told the world that JBS Haldane was a queer fish indeed.

Though essentially a scientist, Haldane was a multi-faceted man. Even when he was a student, he mastered Greek, Latin and German. He fought in World War I as part of the Scottish Black Watch. During his life, he published 24 book, over 400 scientific papers and was a regular contributor to magazines on popular science. His most famous work was Daedalus(1924) where, with remarkable prescience he predicted the birth of the “test tube baby”- decades before it became a reality. He is credited with coining the word “clone” which is a byword in scientific circles today.

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