A DOMINANT CHARACTER THE RADICAL SCIENCE AND RESTLESS POLITICS OF JBS HALDANE

SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN Atlantic, 400pp, £20, ebook £10.99

Matt Ridley’s Times review of A Dominant Character opened with an arresting summary of its subject’s achievements. ‘When he knew he was

dying,’ wrote Ridley, ‘the scientist JBS Haldane wrote that he hadn’t walked on the seafloor from England to France, but he had been wounded in war, known the love of two women, tried heroin and bhang, eaten 60g of hexahydrated strontium chloride in an attempt to change the acidity of his blood, and spent 48 hours in a miniature submarine.’

Haldane (1892-1964) was ‘relentlessly logical, obsessively mathematical and pugnaciously confident’, not to mention possessed of ‘bonkers courage’; cheerfully gassing himself over and over again in order to understand the effects of various toxic gases on the human body. He discovered how to prevent divers getting the bends, was an expert on explosives and had ‘a longer list of genetic insights to his name than probably any other scientist’. He was also a passionate Communist who, wilfully blind to Stalin’s evil, publicly threw his lot in with the fraudulent Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko.

All this and more is deftly and lucidly explored by Samanth Subramanian, thought Ridley, in a ‘superb biography of this extraordinary man’. Jonathan Weiner, writing in the New York Times, agreed wholeheartedly. ‘At his best, Haldane was a heroic example of the scientist as activist, humanist and idealist,’ he said, and A Dominant Character is ‘the best Haldane biography yet’.