Do scientists have a duty to engage with politics? This is a question that animates Samanth Subramanian’s A Dominant Character, an absorbing biography of one of the greatest scientific minds of the twentieth century, JBS Haldane. Haldane’s genius, wit, and passion seem to leap from the pages of this work.
Haldane – whose career included stints at Cambridge, University College in London, and the Indian Statistical Institute – made pioneering contributions to the fields of genetics and evolutionary biology. But he became equally well-known as a public figure: a popular writer, a tireless critic of the British government, and the most prominent intellectual in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the 1940s. For Haldane, Subramanian writes, science and politics “were wrapped tight around each other, like strands of a double-helical DNA.” There were times, however, when this delicate weave threatened to unspool itself.
The contrarian
Haldane was practically reared in the laboratory. From an extremely young age, he assisted his father, the Scottish physiologist JS Haldane, who investigated everything from the causes of deaths in coal mine explosions to ways to avoid “the bends” from underwater pressure. Sometimes the laboratory was the open sea, and sometimes JBS was the test subject.
Father ingrained into son the practice...
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