John B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (/ˈhɔːldeɪn/; 5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964) known as Jack (but who used 'J. B. S.' in his printed works), was a British naturalised Indian scientist. He was a polymath well known for his works in physiology, genetics and evolutionary biology. He was also a mathematician making innovative contributions to statistics and biometry education in India. In addition, he was an avid politician and science populariser. He was the recipient of National Order of the Legion of Honour (1937), Darwin Medal (1952), Feltrinelli Prize (1961), and Darwin–Wallace Medal (1958). Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, himself recognised as the "wittiest" or "cleverest man", called Haldane "the cleverest man I ever knew". Arthur C. Clarke credited him as "perhaps the most brilliant scientific populariser of his generation". Haldane was born of an aristocratic and secular Scottish family. A precocious boy, he was able to read at age three and was well versed with scientific terminology. His higher education was in mathematics and classics at New College, Oxford. He had no formal degree in science, but was an accomplished biologist. From age eight he worked with his physiologist father John Scott Haldane in their home laboratory. With his father he published his first scientific paper at age 20, while he was only a graduate student. His education was interrupted by the First World War during which he fought in the British Army. When the war ended he resumed as research fellow at Oxford. Between 1922 and 1932 he taught biochemistry at Trinity College, Cambridge. After a year as visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley, in 1933 he became full Professor of Genetics at University College London. He emigrated to India in 1956 to enjoy a lifetime opportunity of not "wearing socks". He worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and later in Orissa (now Odisha), where he spent the rest of his life. His first paper in genetics, written with his sister Naomi, published in 1915 became a landmark as the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals. His subsequent works helped to establish a unification of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright, he laid the groundwork for modern evolutionary synthesis, the concept more popularly known as "neo-Darwinism" (popularised by Richard Dawkins' 1976 work titled The Selfish Gene). Their pioneering combination of mathematics with biology established a branch of science called population genetics. His article on "The origin of life" in 1929, though initially rejected, introduced a new hypothesis "primordial soup theory", now called abiogenesis, the process of formation of cellular life from inorganic molecules on primordial Earth. Independently developed by Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin, the concept came to be called Oparin-Haldane hypothesis, and is the foundation of modern understanding of the chemical origin of life. Haldane was also the first to construct human gene maps for haemophilia and colour blindness on the X chromosome. His "malaria hypothesis" was confirmed to be the genetic basis of resistance to malaria among people with sickle-cell disease. Haldane was a socialist and a staunch Marxist. He served as chairman of the editorial board of Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper in London, between 1940 and 1949. However, disillusioned by the totalitarian Lysenkoism in Communist Russia, he denounced the party though he continued to admire Vladimir Lenin. From childhood he was known to have strong opposition towards any form of authoritarianism. It was this political dissent that made him leave England and become a "proud" citizen of India. He was particularly critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis for which he accused Britain of violating international law. A renowned atheist, humanist, self-experimenter and prolific author, Haldane is remembered for his several extraordinary visions and witty remarks. He was the first to suggest the central idea of in vitro fertilisation (more popularly "test tube babies"), fictionalised in his book Daedalus. The concept of hydrogen economy for generating power originated from his Cambridge speech in 1923. Many scientific terms including cis, trans, coupling, repulsion, darwin (as a unit of evolution) were coined by him, as well as the term "clone" to describe the possibility of creating exact copies of humans. His imminent death due to colorectal cancer was lamented by himself in a poem Cancer's a Funny Thing. He willed his body for medical studies, as he wanted to remain useful even in death.