1892-1964

British Geneticist

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born in Oxford, England, but spent much of his childhood in Scotland. He was the son of an eminent physiologist, John Scott Haldane. His sister became the well-known novelist Naomi Mitchison. He went to Eton and then Oxford University, where he began to study classics, but then switched to the study of genetics. He was particularly interested in the mathematical study of biological questions and eventually became Professor of Biometry at University College, London, for 20 years from 1937. His father had worked on poison gases and the efforts to devise an effective gas mask during the First World War. The young Haldane and his sister often served as experimental subjects for these studies. As a young boy he went into mines with his father to test devices for detecting dangerous gas buildups, and took a...