JBS Haldane

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JBS Haldane

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (born November 5, 1892 in Oxford , † December 1, 1964 in Bhubaneswar in the state of Orissa , India ) was a theoretical biologist and geneticist . Along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright , he was one of the founders of population genetics in the 1920s .

Life

Family tree

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was the son of John Scott Haldane , Professor of Physiology at Oxford , and Louisa Kathleen Trotter. His sister was Naomi Mitchison . As a boy he already assisted his father in his work. At the age of 13 he dived for the first time with a helmet diving device . He studied humanities at Oxford, but then switched to science. When the First World War broke out, he joined the British Army, where he primarily dealt with explosives . He was an avid soldier and was wounded several times. After the war he returned to his research at Oxford University (1919–1922). From 1922 to 1930 he was a lecturer in biochemistry at Cambridge University . He knew perfectly how to present the results of the natural sciences in a popular way. His notable essay Daedalus or Science and the Future (1923) predicted many scientific advances but was criticized for being too idealistic.

He researched enzymes and mathematical methods for natural selection. After an adultery scandal, he was removed from his post at Cambridge for 'immorality'. He married his lover (Charlotte Burghes) in 1926, from whom he divorced in 1945.

Haldane is also known for an observation from his essay On Being the Right Size , which Jane Jacobs and others referred to as the Haldane Principle . It says:

“The mere size determines how the physical equipment of an animal must be: Insects have no blood circulation to distribute the oxygen because they are so small. The little oxygen your cells need can be absorbed into your body through simple diffusion. But when an animal is bigger, it needs a complicated oxygen distribution system to reach all cells. "

From 1930 to 1933 he was Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution in London. In 1932 he was elected a member of the Royal Society .

His famous book, The Causes of Evolution (1932), was the first major work to be known as the Synthetic Theory of Evolution . In the book, natural selection was reintroduced as the main mechanism of evolution and justified mathematically with Mendelian rules . Haldane supported the idea of ​​the natural origin of life on earth ( Abiogense ), as it was already represented by Alexander Oparin .

At a young age, Haldane was a communist. He wrote numerous articles in the communist newspaper The Daily Worker in the 1930s . In 1938 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain ( CPGB ). Despite the Moscow trials and other excesses of Stalinist terror, he initially remained a fellow traveler . In 1950 he broke with the Communist Party.

From 1933 to 1937 he worked as a professor of genetics at University College London (UCL). In 1937 he and Julia Bell showed the genetic connection between hemophilia and color blindness .

Haldane also examined the influence of carbon dioxide in the blood on breathing behavior, especially under high pressures. He and his employees also carried out self-experiments in a pressure chamber , which often drove those involved to a state of unconsciousness. He used helium as a breathing gas early on in order to reduce the negative effects of nitrogen under high pressure. In 1937 he was given a chair in biometrics at University College London, which he held until 1957. In 1952 he was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society .

Haldane and his second wife, Helen Spurway, immigrated to India in 1957 to protest against the behavior of the British government during the Suez Crisis . He took Indian citizenship in 1961. From 1957 to 1961 he was a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute and headed the Orissa State Government Genetics and Biometry Laboratory.

Haldane was friends with the author Aldous Huxley and served as a template for the biologist Shearwater in Huxley's novella Antic Hay (Fools' Dance). Ideas from Haldane's Daedalus, such as the development of fetuses in artificial wombs, influenced Huxley's Brave New World .

He had many students; the most famous was John Maynard Smith , with whom he probably had the most in common.

In one of his last speeches, Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years (1963), Haldane introduced the term clone , a Greek word for branch.

Memberships and honors

In 1932 he was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1952 awarded him the Darwin Medal . Also in 1932 he became a member of the Leopoldina . In 1961 he was awarded the international Antonio Feltrinelli Prize and the Kimber Genetics Award . In 1964, Haldane was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

The moon crater Haldane and the Martian crater Haldane as well as the asteroid (36061) Haldane are named after him.

bibliography

  • Sex ratio and unisexual sterility in hybrid animals. In: J. Genet. 12, 1922, pp. 101-109. ( Haldane's rule )
  • Daedalus or, Science and the Future. 1923
    • Daedalus or Science and Future. Drei Masken Verlag, Munich 1925
  • A mathematical theory of natural and artificial selection. 1924-1932
  • Animal Biology. 1927
  • Possible Worlds and Other Essays. 1928
  • On being the right size. 1928
  • Enzymes. 1930
  • with Kurt G. Stern: General chemistry of enzymes. With a foreword by L. Michaelis . Theodor Steinkopff publishing house , Dresden / Leipzig 1932
  • The Inequality of Man. 1932
  • Science and the Supernatural. A correspondence between Arnold Lunn and JBS Haldane. 1933
  • If ... 1934
  • Human Biology and Politics. 1934
  • My friend Mr. Leakey. 1937 (children's stories)
  • A Dialectical Account of Evolution. 1937
  • with Julia Bell : The linkage between the genes for color-blindness and haemophilia in man. 1937
  • The Causes of Evolution. 1937, ISBN 0-691-02442-1
  • The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences. 1938
  • Heredity and Politics. 1938
  • Reply to AP Lerner's Is Professor Haldane's Account of Evolution Dialectical? 1938
  • Preface to Engels' Dialectics of Nature. 1939
  • From The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences. 1939
  • Lysenko and Genetics. 1940
  • Why I am a Materialist. 1940
  • The Laws of Nature. 1941
  • New Paths in Genetics. 1941
  • Dialectical materialism and modern science. Labor Monthly, 1942
    • Dialectical materialism and modern science. Dietz, Berlin 1948
  • What is life? 1949
  • The Origin of Life. 1954
  • Biochemistry of Genetics. 1954
  • The cost of natural selection. 1957
  • The Man with Two Memories. 1976 ( science fiction novel)
collection

literature

Web links

Commons : JBS Haldane  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. Michael Marshall: The secret of how life on earth began , on: BBC - Earth, October 31, 2016
  2. Stefan Klein : The sense of giving. Why selflessness triumphs in evolution and why we can't get any further with egoism . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2010. ISBN 978-3-10-039614-3 . P. 36.
  3. ^ Bill Bryson : A Brief History of Almost Everything , Goldmann-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-442-46071-9 , Chapter 16, Page 308