A Dominant Character E-Book

Samanth Subramanian

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 684

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Book of the Year in The Economist, Guardian, New Statesman, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize. 'A wonderful book about one of the most important, brilliant and flawed scientists of the 20th century.' Peter Frankopan 'Superb' Matt Ridley, The Times 'Fascinating... The best Haldane biography yet.' New York Times J.B.S. Haldane's life was rich and strange, never short on genius, never lacking for drama. He is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionized our understanding of evolution, but his peers thought him a polymath; one student called him 'the last man who knew all there was to be known'. Beginning in the 1930s, Haldane was also a staunch Communist - a stance that enhanced his public profile, led him into trouble, and even drew suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously on science and politics for the layman, in newspapers and magazines, and he gave speeches in town halls and on the radio, all of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein. Arthur C. Clarke called Haldane 'the most brilliant science popularizer of his generation'. He frequently narrated aspects of his life: of his childhood, as the son of a famous scientist; of his time in the trenches in the First World War and in Spain during the Civil War; of his experiments upon himself; of his secret research for the British Admiralty; of his final move to India, in 1957. A Dominant Character unpacks Haldane's boisterous life in detail, and it examines the questions he raised about the intersections of genetics and politics - questions that resonate all the more strongly today.

Leseprobe

ADominantCharacter

ALSO BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN

This Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War

Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

This edition published by arrangement with

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Samanth Subramanian, 2019

The moral right of Samanth Subramanian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-281-4

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-283-8

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-284-5

Book design by Lisa Buckley

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Padma,

the most patient recipient imaginable

of a writer’s daily bulletins of torture

Suffer.

—The family motto of the Haldane clan

Pathei-mathos (“We suffer into knowledge”).

—Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Contents

Chapter 1: The Scientific Method

Chapter 2: The Deep End

Chapter 3: Synthesis

Chapter 4: Red Haldane

Chapter 5: The War at Home

Chapter 6: India

Chapter 7: Ten Thousand Years

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

ADominantCharacter

1.The Scientific Method

1.

THE LETTER ARRIVED UNSOLICITED, like thousands of others. A retired chemist in Surrey had taken up plant genetics and set himself an immodest task: to improve the yield of his plants by a process that could then be applied by any farmer anywhere in the world. Now, in July 1948, he thought he’d cracked it. His flax plants were producing 12 or 14 seeds in each pod, instead of the usual 10—a bumper strain for flaxseed oil. “The results seem beyond doubt,” he wrote in his letter, after two and a half pages of jumbled description. He had read J. B. S. Haldane’s essay “Scientific Research for Amateurs.” Would Haldane, as a renowned geneticist, be interested in this radical piece of amateur research?

Haldane wrote back. He nearly always did, even though he hated to be bothered by correspondence. His letters piled up around his various offices over the years: in Cambridge in the 1920s, in University College London until the 1950s, in Calcutta and Bhubaneswar thereafter. Some letters went missing, sinking under the flotsam that occupied these offices: notebooks, journals, Haldane’s own papers on genetics and biometry, reprints of papers by other scientists, pamphlets, issues of the Daily Worker. If the letters bobbed back up to the surface, they were rescued. Haldane would first scrawl his response, often on some piece of paper on which he had been working out equations. Then his secretary typed it up. Which was just as well, because his handwriting resembled ants somersaulting through snow.

“Dear Sir,” Haldane wrote, “Thank you for your letter.” The chemist’s results seemed striking, but Haldane needed more: fuller details of the techniques he used and the results he obtained. “You will realise that an account is useless unless it is so worded that others can repeat the work.” This forms the kernel of the scientific method: that researchers elsewhere be able to replicate experiments and derive identical results. Science is held up by principles, and these principles have to be inherent in every place, not just in an amateur horticulturist’s patch of Surrey earth.

Haldane never shrank from exalting the scientific method, even in casual correspondence. “Science advances by successive improvements in former theories,” he wrote once to a man who sent him a hollow hypothesis about how thoroughbred racehorses inherited their coat colors. “If they are wrong”—the former theories, he meant—“the reasons for rejecting them should be stated. If they are right, this should be acknowledged.” To a W. Hague of Kingswood Cottages, London, who wished to alert the world to his discovery of “a new law of nature,” Haldane replied: “The test for a ‘new law of nature’ is this. Does it enable you to predict or control events which could not be predicted or controlled before? What is wanted . . . is a set of repeatable experiments which will go one way if it is true, and another way if it is not.” The custom of accuracy in statement is essential, Haldane thought; it is, in fact, desirable to be pedantic. A scientist no doubt needed imagination to sense what nature hides, but when it came time to test and publish, Haldane considered it wise to heed Francis Bacon, to “buckle and bow the mind” to the procedures of science.

Restraint was not Haldane’s style. He was a man armed with infinite provocations, and a grouch besides, his bluntness shading quickly into rude hostility. A journalist described him as a “large woolly rhinoceros of uncertain temper.” Even with friends, Haldane could be pungent in his remarks if something smelled like bad science. In 1953, Hans Kalmus sent Haldane a manuscript of his new book on human genetics. Kalmus was a longtime colleague and a protégé of sorts, a Czech refugee who had, with Haldane’s help, found work at University College just before the Second World War. None of these personal ties softened Haldane’s assessment of the manuscript: “It ought not to be published.” He listed some errors, then added: “I could go on indefinitely.” The proposed book would not only harm Kalmus but the science of genetics itself. “You would be better advised, if this is possible, to go back to experimental biology,” he wrote, “rather than to continue to work in human genetics.”

If Haldane was merciless with others, he demanded similar rigor of himself. His career overlapped tidily with the bloom of genetics as a field of study and with the effort to discover the role of the gene in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Genetics grew severally studded with Haldane’s contributions. He demonstrated, for the first time in mammals, the mechanism of genetic linkage, by which two genes that reside near each other on a chromosome tend also to be inherited together. (He wrote up parts of this paper while serving in the trenches during the First World War.) He mapped the genes for hemophilia and color blindness. He introduced a theory for how life began on Earth. His speculations on “ectogenesis” forecast the development of in vitro fertilization.

His most important work came in a series of 10 papers, written between 1924 and 1933, in which he subjected evolution to the unflinching stare of statistics. The papers modeled the processes of natural selection and estimated rates at which gene mutations develop and spread through a population. He was gaining the measure of life itself. The stringency of statistics delighted Haldane. Everyone should know more mathematics, he always thought. Numbers were so satisfyingly precise, equations so universal. How well they ministered to the scientific method!

Had Haldane done just this and little else, he would have been an important scientist—not as revolutionary as Einstein, perhaps, and not associated for perpetuity like Watson and Crick with a single, shining discovery, but certainly among the few who altered their field beyond recognition, pushing it forward paper by paper. This is how science progresses most of the time, after all: through the accretive power of daily work, through meat-and-potatoes research. What made Haldane one of the most famous scientists of his age, though, was not just his science but also his writing and his politics—the first clear and illuminating, the second unbending and forthright, both deeply attractive during a time of shifting, murky moralities.

In magazines and newspapers, Haldane wrote about everything. He wrote cutting opinion pieces on politics—like razor blades in print. He wrote about his own boisterous life, which was stocked with enough danger and drama for a dozen ordinary humans: his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, his time in the trenches, his numerous experiments on himself, his sorties into the teeth of the Spanish Civil War, his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during the Second World War, and his emigration to India. He wrote of his views on governments and philosophies, and he wrote about history and literature. He wrote a book for children, about a magician named Mr. Leakey, and most of a science fiction novel. But mainly, he wrote columns that unpicked the convolutions of science for the inexpert reader. He preached science to the laity. Arthur C. Clarke called Haldane “the most brilliant scientific popularizer of his generation.”

The breadth of these columns was staggering. They dealt with trifles like lice and the funny bone, with grave issues like lead poisoning and air raid precautions, and with grand matters like the chemistry of sex and the Milky Way. On every front of science, he seemed to know of every journal article being published, every item of research being conducted, as if scientists confided their dreams to him every morning before heading off to their laboratories. He spun his scientific lessons off the spindle of the daily world, so that no one could fail to understand them. “Start from a known fact, say a bomb explosion, a bird’s song, or a cheese,” he advised once. Then proceed through the science in a series of hops rather than one direct leap. His material was often filched from the week’s most lurid headlines: a murder trial, the deaths of alcoholics, the monkey gland extracts administered to the players on the Wolverhampton Wanderers football team.

At first, Haldane was scornful of colleagues who wrote for the public, but he came to enjoy his role as a communicator of scientific truth. It satisfied his need to vent his opinions—of which he never ran short—as well as his belief that research ought to make its way into the public gaze. When he gave a talk—and at his most active, he gave nearly a hundred a year—the hall filled swiftly. He made for an arresting lecturer: a king-sized man in rumpled clothes, his moustache so thick and his head so large and bare that it was as if a bird had built a nest at the base of a boulder. His voice filled the room as he quoted Dante, Norse myth, and the Bhagavad Gita from memory, beckoning with ease his knowledge of genetics, chemistry, history, and astronomy. In Great Britain, he grew as famous as Einstein. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who grew up admiring Haldane, called him “one of our major intellectual emancipators.” One of Haldane’s acquaintances thought he was “the last man who might know all there was to be known.”

Haldane’s relationship with his readers was punctilious. Although he simplified the science, he was never less than exact—or at least as exact as the research of the day permitted. Questions poured in by mail, and he addressed the interesting ones at length in his columns. (Are X-rays dangerous to human beings? How do complicated tasks become easier with practice? What’s the difference between reflex and instinct?) At other times, Haldane would reply by pleading that he didn’t really have time to reply.

“What is the ultimate cause of Germany’s retrograde mentality?” Margaret Murray, an archaeologist and a scholar of witchcraft, asked him in a letter in 1942.

Haldane spent a brave paragraph trying to respond to this riddle before huffing: “I do not propose to start a correspondence. Anyway I am pretty busy, and shall be a lot busier in the future on research in connexion with the war.” Then another paragraph followed. He hated to leave a question unanswered.

Much of Haldane’s writing appeared in the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the British Communist Party. Haldane joined the party in 1942, having already been a fellow traveler and a dedicated Marxist for years. His work and his ideology, he felt, were in absolute concord. Haldane thought Marxism practical and transparent—scientific, really. Marxists studied history and economics the way physicists studied atoms: with objective curiosity, so that they could then predict and control events. Haldane never believed that a formula on a chalkboard or a cured guinea pig represented the climax of science. He wanted science to sweep out of the lab and into the world, to improve or perfect the way people lived. (The titles and subtitles of his books reflected this, again and again: Science and the Future, Science and Life, Science and Everyday Life, Science and Ethics, Science and Well-Being.) Marx, too, wanted just that kind of material change. For Haldane, Marxism was the scientific method as applied to society, and both genetics and Marxism were avenues to a more utopian civilization.

HE VISITED THE SOVIET UNION just once, for a month in the summer of 1928, in the company of his wife Charlotte. They had been invited by Nikolai Vavilov, a geneticist whose stature and networks drew many of his Western colleagues to his country. Vavilov was familiar with the men and women who staffed British science. He had worked for a while with the biologist William Bateson, who first affixed the word genetics upon the study of heredity; the pair had collaborated across Cambridge and the John Innes Horticultural Institution in south London, of which Bateson was the founding director. In 1928, Haldane was working part-time at John Innes as the “Officer in Charge of Genetical Investigations,” balancing these duties with his role as a biochemistry reader at Cambridge. He was 35 years old, and storms of change were overrunning his life. He was newly married and beginning, slowly, to suspect that Charlotte and he could not have children. His moustache was robust but his hair was ebbing, and his stockiness was clotting into fat. He was halfway along the journey from the offhand socialism of his youth to the gritted-teeth Communism that lay ahead. He was in the midst of writing his series of 10 papers on natural selection. He was also starting to relish the sweetness of a wider fame. He wasn’t yet one among the world’s bestknown scientists, but he was getting there in a hurry.

Like Haldane, Vavilov was born to a bourgeois family, but he possessed a most Soviet enthusiasm: to rid humanity of hunger. By rummaging through the world for hardy, productive plants and by seeking the secrets of their endurance in their genes, Vavilov thought he could culture new species to thrive in any season anywhere. His mission blessed by Lenin himself, Vavilov had set out—for Iran and Afghanistan, Canada and the United States, Western Europe and northern Africa, China and Latin America. From more than 50 countries, he gathered seeds and plants, and every time he came home, he deposited his collections in a seed bank he’d started—the world’s first, its vaults lodged in an old tsarist palace in Leningrad. The bank stored a quarter of a million specimens. It was an aristocrat’s bauble converted into an institute committed to feeding the poor. What more potent symbol of Soviet principle could there be?

In Moscow and Leningrad, Haldane delivered lectures on genetics, and he made an excursion to Vavilov’s experimental farm in a town called Detskoe Selo, near Leningrad. He also stopped by the seed bank and noticed the incongruity of botanists conducting their noble research amidst the manor house’s parquet floors and marble mantelpieces; they would no doubt have preferred laboratory benches and a decent set of sinks, he thought. Still, he grew to like Vavilov and admire his work. It promised not only to improve crop yields but also to expand the world’s knowledge of agriculture and of civilization itself.

In turn, Vavilov proved a most attentive host. He was a handsome man, Charlotte noticed. His moustache was neat, his eyes good-humored, and his three-piece suits refined and elegant. He had nothing of the monkish, withdrawn quality that scientists sometimes possessed. In Moscow, Vavilov threw a rambunctious party for the Haldanes, with champagne and dancing. He arranged for them to go everywhere: to famous churches; to Lenin’s tomb, on a special, private visit; to the Kremlin’s museum, where they saw Ivan the Terrible’s crown, with its collar of sable and its diamond-cross steeple. They went to the Bolshoi to watch The Red Poppy, in which a Soviet ship captain tries to rescue the employees of a cruel harbormaster in a Chinese seaport. They attended the performances of two Rimsky-Korsakov operas. In Leningrad, Charlotte happened to mention that she was fond of caviar, so Vavilov had delivered, to the Haldanes’ hotel, two of the Soviet Union’s greatest luxuries: a tin of caviar and a fresh loaf of white bread. That night, half asleep, Charlotte thought she heard a strange symphony of squeaks; the next morning, she found that the hotel’s resident mice had climbed up onto the table and eaten their way through half the bread and even the paper in which it was wrapped.

Even in June, Leningrad was frigid. The wind lunged across the Neva River and into the Haldanes’ Hotel Europa, forcing them to go to bed fully dressed. In Moscow, the couple stayed in a borrowed apartment. The main street in their neighborhood was tidy and broad, but as the streets ramified into smaller and smaller lanes, they grew progressively grubbier. “The housing situation was bad,” Charlotte wrote later. “Whole families huddled in one room. The staircases of the houses were filthy, [and] cooking was done on kerosene stoves in the passages, which reeked of refuse. Although each house was supposed to have a concierge and a house committee to organize the general upkeep among the tenants, there was no real organisation. Everyone who could, passed the buck. Quarrels between tenants were incessant.”

Charlotte couldn’t make up her mind about the Soviet Union. She thought the Russians to be spirited people, and optimistic despite their recent cavalcade of crises. At the Red October chocolate factory, she saw women on the production line looking happy and industrious; the factory, admirably, had a crèche for their children. But she wearied of the grime and the poverty. A scientist of their acquaintance lived with his wife and three young children in a flat that was, really, just one room. She was so uncomfortable with the feeling of people being under surveillance everywhere and all the time, she would claim later, that she was relieved to leave at the end of the month.

But Haldane felt differently. In those early years, when the revolution was still warm, the Soviet Union resembled an essential experiment in itself: a state actively setting out to advance through the use of science. Lenin had believed, as Haldane did, that the chief utility of science lay in its capacity to enhance society, to improve the way people lived. The Soviet Union treasured its scientists, Haldane thought, and not without reason. At the time, Soviet scientists were still able to travel overseas, and if they qualified for a certain intellectual eminence, they were provided nearly anything they might require. “One must spare a great scientist or major specialist in whatever sphere, even if he is reactionary to the nth degree,” Lenin had once told one of his commissars. For a living example of these generous dispensations, Haldane needed to look no further than Vavilov: a botanist whose research the state thought so promising and practical that it funded his expeditions, his institute, and his seed bank. In this new society, the ideas of science formed a new, privileged class unto themselves.

On the other hand, religious instruction was forbidden, and this, too, fit Haldane’s sensibilities. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” he wrote six years later. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course, and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” The Soviet government exhorted its subjects to avoid superstitions or rituals; the year after Haldane visited the country, Stalin’s government began to shut down thousands of churches. By way of replacement, the state suggested Marx, Engels, and Lenin; busts of these men, with their variety of beards, sprouted by the side of avenues and in public buildings. Although religious worship was not banned outright, its demotion was evident. In Red Square, the Haldanes saw, in a corner, an old icon depicting Mary and the child Jesus. Above it, in large lettering, were installed Marx’s words: “Religion is the opium of the people.”

Given these captivations, perhaps it was not easy for Haldane—or for anyone of his temperament who visited the country so briefly—to peer around the corner, to the persecutions and show trials that crouched in wait. After he returned from the Soviet Union, Haldane inched closer and closer to the Communists before eventually becoming one himself. For nearly two decades, British intelligence agents kept diligent watch on him, their suspicion building all the while that he was a Soviet spy. Whenever he went to the Communist Party’s headquarters on King Street in London, MI5 listened in. Whenever he received envelopes that appeared suspect, MI5 peeked into them. Whenever he gave speeches, about biology or air raid shelters or Franco-held Spain, MI5 agents were in his audience, scribbling notes. What’s your game, Haldane? they wondered. What kind of trouble are you trying to make?

Throughout his life, Haldane refused to trust any kind of authority—teachers, provosts, officials, bureaucrats. They knew too little, and their hidebound thinking had no science or rationality to it at all. Most of all, he mistrusted his government and the governments of other capitalist societies. He felt, as we now feel afresh in our century, that nations were held rapt by the wealthy, that they were warmongering and venal, that they placed the narrow interests of the powerful above the well-being of the powerless. They had failed to frame systems of statecraft and ethics that spoke to the modern age. “When applied science has created so many new moral problems,” he once wrote, “the morality of our ancestors must in any case be drastically revised.”

It is difficult now to imagine a scientist like Haldane, who recognized how deeply political his work was and who thought it his duty to speak loudly about it. Except in rare cases, scientists today wipe their public selves clean of any trace of politics or ideology. The impetus to seal science away from politics fails to realize that all science, like all art and all other aspects of life, is already cut and shaped by the society in which it is created. For Haldane, there was no hermetic boundary between the two forces. His science and his politics were wrapped tight around each other, like strands of double-helical DNA. On one occasion, though, the strands bent themselves into a knot. It would prove to be Haldane’s greatest moral crisis, and it began not long after that retired chemist in Surrey wrote in about his flaxseed marvels.

2.

Diamat is a tank.

—Czeslaw Milosz

In the summer, a pedestrian on Moscow’s Prechistenka Street has to peer hard through the foliage of trees to see, in its full, wide nobility, the pistachio facade of the Central House of Scientists. It still looks like the wealthy man’s mansion it used to be. The house was once owned by a textile baron, whose family sold it to a financier for half a million rubles—an unfortunately huge sum to pay in 1916, a year before the Bolshevik Revolution. After the financier fled overseas, the state annexed the house; in 1922, it was turned over to the cause of science. Here, amid ornate statuary and lush tapestries and gilt-encrusted mirrors, Soviet scientists gathered to receive their monthly rations: 40 pounds of bread, 2 pounds each of sugar and buckwheat, a pound or two of oil or butter, and some meat. The mansion became a sort of club for scientists, where they could present their research, listen to lectures and chamber concerts, and talk over cut-rate soup in the commissary.

In this House of Scientists, over one combative week in 1948, the Soviet Union abolished the gene altogether.

The Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences began its conference on the evening of July 31. More than 700 agronomists, researchers, and professors from across the Soviet Union attended. Every day save one, until August 7, they packed a lecture hall and listened to speeches that frequently spilled over their allotted 30 minutes apiece: a morning session from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., a respite for dinner, then an evening session from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Only on August 1—a Sunday—did the scientists take a break, and on that day they climbed into buses and rode out to Gorki Leninskiye, a few miles south of the city, where the academy ran an experimental station. Through that entire week, Pravda covered the proceedings in all their stormy detail. After Trofim Lysenko, the academy’s president, delivered his official report—edited with care by Joseph Stalin, no less—its full text was published in every central newspaper.

Lysenko was 50 years old at the time, a slab-faced man with astonishing blue eyes and a forelock of hair that hung heavy with brilliantine. He wore, out of habit, a sour look. A reporter, upon meeting Lysenko in his pea fields in the Azerbaijan in 1927, complained that Lysenko gave him the feeling of a toothache: “Stingy of words and insignificant of face is he; all one remembers is his sullen look creeping along the earth as if, at the very least, he were ready to do someone in.” Perhaps he was only beset by shyness, or nervousness, or deep unhappiness, as some suspected. But he was passionate and ambitious, and as he came to dominate Soviet agronomy, he became the prophet of a new, homebrewed theory of heredity. “He is the peasants’ demagogue,” a visitor to the Soviet Union observed in 1944. “What he says to them, goes.”

On the inaugural evening of the academy’s session, Lysenko rose to speak.

The history of biology, Lysenko said, was a history of ideological battle. Darwin’s theory of evolution was scientific and true, but it was not free of error, Lysenko pointed out. It was wrought too heavily in the idea of competition, in the idea that life pushed forward only by vanquishing others in the eternal struggle for resources. This was just capitalism dressed up as biology. The loose-thinking, “reactionary” geneticists of the West had debased Darwin further. They insisted that an organism’s acquired characters—the ways in which a plant or an animal adapted to, or was shaped by, its environment—could not be bequeathed to its offspring. Instead, they believed that inheritance and evolution relied purely on random, unpredictable combinations of genes. But Lysenko scoffed at this notion of heredity as a game of dice, an abstract arithmetic. What happened to a gene altered the body in which it was carried, these reactionaries claimed, but what happened to the body never altered its genes. How was this not an absurdity?

Fortunately, the Soviet Union was available to rescue science from the brambles of these falsehoods. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of The Communist Manifesto, had already seeded the high laws of dialectical materialism—“diamat,” an all-purpose lens to scrutinize history and nature. The conditions of the material world give rise to everything, they determine all historical change and all social reality. Soviet scientists, Lysenko claimed, had been able to pull these laws into biology. They had proved that a material change induced in an organism would modify its genes, percolate down to its offspring, reorient the very trajectory of its species. What swelling promise this held for the project of feeding the people of the Soviet Union, he effused: hardier wheat, for instance, or cattle that produce more milk. He quoted Ivan Michurin, the father of this new Soviet biology: “We cannot wait for favours from Nature; we must wrest them from her.”

Lysenko’s speech, by turns grandiose, cutting, and reverent, went over well; the official transcriber ensured that passages were followed by parenthetical observations such as (Amusement) or (Animation, laughter) or, at the final invocation of the two greatest teachers of all, V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin, (Loud applause). Everything was framed as an –ism, an ideology: capitalism and Communism, of course, but also diamat and idealism; Mendelism and Morganism and Weismannism, named for the reactionary biologists whom Lysenko held to be the architects of scientific lies; and Michurinism, after the Russian fruit farmer whose experiments in the early twentieth century lit the way into these revolutionary concepts of heredity. Once anything—even scientific research—became an –ism, it could be fought. Sides could be taken, traitors could be identified. Lysenko singled out several members of the audience whom he deemed to be foolish or disloyal. Their work, based on misguided principles of genetics, would soon cease to be indulged by the state’s universities and research institutes, he warned. The Soviet Union had no time for their shiftless science.

Having drawn these battle lines, Lysenko ended his speech. Over the next seven days, 56 biologists, in the guise of presenting their research, defended themselves or attacked others. The conference turned into an inquisition; the speeches rang with recrimination. On occasion, Lysenko acidly heckled speakers, but mostly he sat and watched this conflagration of science and politics, and the scientists struggling to escape the flames.

THE SON OF A FARMER, Lysenko grew up working his family’s fields in the Ukraine, learning to read and write only when he was 13. He enrolled in a horticultural school just as Lenin and his Bolsheviks were gathering power, so his early career—growing sugar beets; correspondence courses at the Kiev Agricultural Institute; a post at the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetics in Odessa—neatly tracked the sharpening ambitions of the new Soviet Union. Lysenko never became a conventional, widely read academic, but this did not hinder his progress. The science his country believed it required was the practical, earthy sort that could benefit its millions. Every farmer was an agronomist in pupa; one state newspaper, Bednota, conscripted 23,000 “peasant scientists” to work in their “hut labs,” dabbling with seeds to stimulate their development.

Lysenko launched himself into this movement. He stalked his fields in his threadbare overcoat, supervising experiments. When other scientists paid long visits to his agricultural stations, he was happy to give them the bed and sleep on the floor. Pravda called him “the barefoot professor.” First he busied himself trying to grow peas through the Transcaucasian winter, but that project failed. Then he attempted to cultivate new varieties of grain. The Soviet Union’s standard winter wheat, sown late in autumn, was often wiped out by cruel winters, and it never grew if sown in the spring. So Lysenko set about vernalizing the wheat—artificially providing it the short snap of cold required to activate its growth and then seeding it in the spring.

Early in 1929, he and his father soaked 48 kilograms of winter wheat in water, packed the wheat into sacks, and interred the sacks in a snowbank for a month. Once retrieved and sown in the spring, Lysenko claimed, the wheat not only flowered quicker but grew fabulously, granting more grain than it ever had. Further, this vernalized fertility wrote itself so deeply into this lineage of winter wheat that it persisted generation after generation. This was an ancient theory, and it had long been abandoned by farmers who never found it to deliver any real, lasting rise in yield. But on the basis of Lysenko’s one experiment on half a hectare of land, Soviet officials began to sense grand, golden prospects—of tremendous harvests, bread for everyone, crops in the Arctic. In 1932, the state ordered 43,000 hectares to be planted with vernalized wheat; in 1934, 600,000 hectares; in 1937, 10 million hectares. The sheer force of politics pressed tons of vernalized seed into the soil of the steppe.

Finding himself suddenly esteemed, and flush with new titles and appointments, Lysenko turned his attention to genetics.

Through the first decades of the twentieth century, the most fundamental facts about the gene were still indistinct, but their outlines had begun to clarify. With patient experiments, scientists were peering into the clockwork of evolution, discovering how the cogs locked, how fast the wheels spun. Chance, they found, had a lot to do with it. An animal or a plant was born with an accidental genetic mutation that gave it some manner of advantage, made it better suited to its surroundings. Its descendants inherited the mutation and flourished, crowding out the ill-equipped peers of their species. The first giraffe with a longer neck was likely a freak of nature, but the neck was so useful in reaching for leaves on tall trees that the freak proved better adapted to the savanna. It prospered and multiplied and, with time, constituted an altogether new species. Fewer and fewer scientists believed—as the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had a century earlier—that life on Earth unfolded and progressed in a preordained sequence, or that a life-form’s environment imprinted itself upon genes and heredity.

Lamarck had proposed something like a Just So story: The animals of a species in the African veldt once stretched their necks to eat, those necks lengthened gradually, over successive generations, and that was How the Giraffe Got Its Neck. In the principles of this story, the Marxists of the Soviet Union saw plenty to admire. They illustrated how important the material conditions around an organism were to its development. Modifying those conditions could elevate the organism, just as revolutionizing the material structure of society could elevate a proletariat. The fable was undiluted diamat. It was also morally stirring, a call to the powerless to improve themselves through pure action, striving upward to reach the leaves that had been denied to them. It appeared to supply the Soviet Union with a blueprint for agriculture—a way to farm the future, to do rather than to just theorize prettily. “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx had written. “The point is to change it.”

Fired up, Lysenko organized his experiments along muddled, neo-Lamarckian lines, and he reported excellent news—always in Pravda or in journals and pamphlets he controlled. With his Potemkin genetics, he claimed that he could produce frost-resistant grain of any kind within two to three years and that potatoes and cotton could be vernalized just like wheat. He thought he could accurately pick out, in the very first generation of hybrid wheat, the plants whose offspring would go on to ripen quickest for decades and decades. He argued that young oaks planted in a tight cluster didn’t vie with each other for sunlight and nutrients—that such bourgeois competition occurred only between species and not within a single species, and that the weaker saplings died out, in some kind of agreeable suicide, so that the stronger might survive. If wheat was cultivated in “appropriate” conditions, he suggested, it could be transformed directly into rye—the equivalent, a historian would later say, “to saying that dogs give birth to foxes when raised in the woods.” In 1943, without running any tests, the government obeyed Lysenko’s advice to plant sugar beets in the desiccated summer soil of central Asia. The saplings withered, but Lysenko remained undaunted. The botanical world, he bragged to Pravda, had now become “clay or plaster for the sculptor: We can easily sculpt from them the forms we need.”

In the Soviet Union, this marriage of science and ideology proved fatal for those with different opinions. It did one’s career no favors, for instance, to disagree with Lysenko when he first started to reject the classical conception of the gene, toward the middle of the 1930s. (“We deny little pieces, corpuscles of heredity,” he said during a scientific congress.) The air began to thrum with words like “sabotage” and “treason.” As Stalin expanded his power, such accusations spilled forth more and more easily. As in every sphere, so in genetics: Those who did not agree with Lysenko, Stalin’s favored expert, found themselves in peril. Dissenters were accused of being part of “the powers of darkness.” One of Lysenko’s supporters called an opponent a “Trotskyite bandit”; Pravda denounced another’s “fascist ideology.” At least 22 geneticists were arrested; around 77 biologists of various kinds suffered one form of repression or another.

Lysenko became president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1938 and then director of the Institute of Genetics two years later. The appointments were overt attempts to squash the classical genetics of the man Lysenko replaced in 1940: Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov continued to defy Lysenko’s imposition of shoddy science. “We shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions,” he declared in a speech in 1939. The pyre came to him, though. The very next year, he was arrested in the middle of a field in western Ukraine, in full sight of his expedition, with no pretense. “He was taken so fast that his things were left in one of the cars,” the biologist Zhores Medvedev wrote. “But late at night three men in civilian clothes came to fetch them. One of the members of the expedition started sorting out the bags piled up in the corner of the room, looking for Vavilov’s. When it was located, it yielded a big sheaf of spelt, a half-wild local type of wheat collected by Vavilov.”

To the military collegium that tried him, Vavilov denied all charges: He wasn’t acting as a British spy, he wasn’t sabotaging the Soviet Union’s campaigns in agriculture, and he wasn’t a member of a right-wing conspiracy. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to death and dispatched to a subterranean cell in a gulag in Saratov, where he had once taught at the local university. Vavilov died here—of malnutrition, having been allowed only mold-ridden flour and frozen cabbage—in January 1943. That sheaf of spelt in his bag, it turned out, was a new species. On his last day as a working scientist, Vavilov had made one final, modest, but ineradicable discovery.

AT THE 1948 CONFERENCE, in the House of Scientists on Prechistenka Street, academicians fell into line with alacrity. Biologist after biologist applauded Lysenko and the new Soviet genetics and then hurried on to demonstrate how their own research conformed to these radical principles. One scientist called classical genetics “a pseudoscience,” another a “propaganda of obscurantism.” (“Hear, hear!” an audience member yelled.) For a while, these supporters of Lysenko dominated the proceedings. “Why has no one of the adherents of formal genetics taken the floor?” a needling note, passed up to the conference chair midway through the first day, wondered. “Is it because they do not want to speak themselves, or because they are not being given a chance to speak?” After one such adherent, I. A. Rapoport, delivered a short, careful talk that merely urged reflection, he was chastised promptly.

“Is it worthy of a scientist to behave as Professor Rapoport did yesterday?” a speaker asked.

Voice from the hall: “It was ruffianism!”

“It should not be left at that,” the speaker continued.

Voice from the hall: “Quite right!”

Seven others tried harder than Rapoport. B. M. Zavadovsky outlined some of his disagreements, only for hecklers to ask him, time after time, the question that was the litmus test of loyalty: “Do you agree with the inheritance of acquired characters?” I. M. Polyakov argued that only a few heritable physiological variations—the protective coloring of a butterfly, for instance—were influenced by the environment. “Can it be predicted or not?” Lysenko called out.

Polyakov tried to push forward his methodical reasoning, but was cut off again. “Can it be predicted or not?”

“It is hard for me when I am interrupted,” Polyakov said.

“It is hard for me when I have to listen to wrong statements,” Lysenko shot back.

Lysenko’s opponents faced demands to resign their posts. Some quarrels turned personal. P. M. Zhukovsky, a geneticist, insisted that plants could not be “trained” in the manner Lysenko claimed. The science was clear: genes were lodged on chromosomes, and chromosomes were housed within cells. The genes, and not the cells themselves, were the currency of inheritance. Nothing but a mutation to a gene could produce a change that would travel into the next generation.

When Lysenko broke in, asking if anyone had even seen a chromosome, Zhukovsky announced: “I will leave this rostrum if I am interrupted.”

“A certain author—I have forgotten who it was—described a maiden who blushed at the sight of a roasted capon,” Lysenko said. “As soon as the word ‘chromosome’ is mentioned, some people blush.” (Laughter, animation.)

“You are wrong in sticking labels on us,” Zhukovsky said. “Trofim Denisovich, this year I lectured to your son. Ask him whether my lectures have spoilt him?”

“There is no need to go into family matters,” Lysenko responded. “That is my business as a father. Tell us something that is more important. You complain of being ill-treated. But have you forgotten, Piotr Mikhailovich, what names I was called in your presence? Did you forget them?”

“You were never abused in public, at meetings.”

“In holes and corners.”

“That was the gossips,” Zhukovsky protested.

On the morning of August 7, the scientists all woke to read, in Pravda, a letter from the chemist Yuri Zhdanov to Stalin. Zhdanov had written to Stalin in July, so it was no coincidence that Pravda published the text of his message on the conference’s final day. Zhdanov confessed, in his letter, that he had made “a number of serious mistakes” in his recent paper on contemporary Darwinism and that he had failed to “mercilessly criticise the radical methodological defects of Mendel-Morgan genetics.” He was guilty of trying to reconcile the opposing strands of genetic thought, “but in science, as in politics, principles are not subject to compromise.” His criticism of Lysenko was another error. “All this is because of inexperience and immaturity. . . . I will repair my mistakes in work.” It was the most public of rebukes, a dressing-down in the town square—and it had happened to Zhdanov, son of a powerful Stalin loyalist, husband-tobe of Stalin’s daughter. The letter must have shredded the nerves of the biologists who had just picked apart Lysenko’s theories and who now read their Pravda over their congealing breakfasts.

Arriving that morning at the House of Scientists, Lysenko launched into a triumphant concluding address. The party’s central committee had examined his inaugural report on the state of biology and approved it, he revealed. (Stormy applause. Ovation. All rise.) “We recognise the chromosomes. We do not deny their existence. But we do not recognise the chromosome theory of heredity.” And it simply couldn’t be that random mutations drive the development of a species, Lysenko declared, for “science is the enemy of chance,” and an unpredictable model of genetics was of no value to the state’s farmers and planners. Lysenko was satisfied: This conference, as a whole, had turned out to be a victory for Michurin’s ideas of Soviet biology over those of reactionary geneticists. He roused his audience as if he was rallying unionists at a factory. “Long live the Michurin teaching, which shows how to transform living nature for the benefit of the Soviet people!” (Applause.) “Glory to the great friend and protagonist of science, our leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin!” (All rise. Prolonged applause.)

A series of quick, startling recantations followed, by scientists who’d now sensed the permanence of the new wind and who were desperate to preserve their careers, their families, and their lives. Zhukovsky insisted he had changed his mind about gene theory the previous evening and that “there is therefore no connection between my present statement and Yuri Zhdanov’s letter. The speech I made . . . was my last speech from an incorrect biological and ideological standpoint.” Another geneticist, Sos Alikhanian, began, almost comically: “Comrades, it is not because I had read Yuri Andreyevich Zhdanov’s letter in today’s Pravda that I requested the chairman to allow me the floor.” He would emancipate himself from his old ideas, Alikhanian promised: “We must be on this side of the scientific barricades, with our Party, with our Soviet science.” Polyakov, having confirmed that he, too, had refurbished his thinking before seeing Zhdanov’s letter, now said: “One must frankly say that the Michurinian trend is the high road of development of our biological science.”

The dissenters had been shaken down, their opinions erased, their spirit broken. In a further matter of weeks, the party ordered universities to dismiss lecturers and professors who held views that contradicted Lysenko. Libraries destroyed their old genetics textbooks; research stations shut down; laboratories murdered every last fruit fly in the stocks of Drosophila that they used to run genetic experiments. Scientific institutions prominently displayed portraits of Lysenko. If you wished, you could buy a bust of the man, or you could visit a monument to him. In a state-sanctioned book of folk songs, one composition ran:

Merrily play on, accordion

With my girl friend, let me sing

Of the eternal glory of Academician Lysenko

He walks the Michurin path

With firm tread;

He protects us from being duped

By Mendelist-Morganists.

As vaunted as he was, though, Lysenko was only an instrument, the brand with which the state burned its programs upon the flanks of biology. The 1940s had been, in any case, a superheated decade, and everywhere the advances of science were bent by political purpose. At no time is there such a thing as pure research, untroubled by the politics of its age. But the middle of the twentieth century was, by any measure, extraordinarily fraught. Ideology and war harnessed for themselves the theories of race science and chemistry, of computing and communication, of medicine and aeronautics, of the gene and of the atom. In this morass, scientists struggled—and occasionally failed—to keep their footing and to keep in pursuit of the truth.

3.

Four months after the purge at the House of Scientists, the BBC broadcast a symposium on the Lysenko controversy. A translation of Lysenko’s address had been published in England a few weeks earlier, to utter consternation. Two Nobel Prize winners resigned their honorary memberships of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in protest. The BBC invited four geneticists—Sydney Harland, Cyril Darlington, Ronald Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane—to a debate, although perhaps “debate” isn’t strictly the right word. Each scientist individually recited his prepared text into the microphone, without hearing what the others had to say; there were no questions or interruptions. The program ran from 6:50 p.m. to 7:25 p.m. on November 30. Haldane, now 56 and in the plump fullness of his reputation, spoke last.

The first three scientists heaped criticism on Lysenko—on his science, but also on the way he had drained his field of peers who disagreed with him. Harland reminisced, warmly and at length, about Vavilov’s intellect: “Ideas sprang from his mind like a constant succession of balls of fire from a human Roman candle.” Harland had visited the Soviet Union and had seen Vavilov’s scrupulous work and his library of botanical collections. He had also met Lysenko, and to talk to him, he discovered, “was like trying to explain differential calculus to a man who didn’t know his twelve times table.” Darlington pointed out that none of Lysenko’s claims of genetic jugglery were ever fulfilled. There were no new, miraculous wheat strains of incredible fertility, there was no species that had been transformed into another, and there were no crops carpeting the Arctic. “The official English translation of the Lysenko fairy tale is now available. Any gardener, any farmer, any stockbreeder, any scientist even can now judge for himself the rights and wrongs of the question,” Darlington said. He was shocked not by the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union but by the indifference of his British colleagues to these horrors. Fisher quoted ugly passages from Lysenko’s address and called him a “Grand Inquisitor” stamping out the last, feeble sparks of intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union. Lysenko did not crave scientific knowledge or prosperity for poor farmers, Fisher said. “The reward he is so eagerly grasping is power: power for himself, power to threaten, power to torture, power to kill.”

Haldane’s short speech was a curious, un-Haldane-like affair: rickety and defensive, full of feints and distractions and muddy logic. He complained that he did not know what the other three scientists had said and that the full, 500-page transcript of the academy’s bygone conference was still unavailable in English. “Till I have read a translation, I cannot judge whether the Academy’s decision was right,” he said. “We are like the jury in Alice in Wonderland, considering our verdicts before we have heard the evidence.”

Nevertheless, Haldane had his views on Lysenko’s work, and although he disagreed with a lot of it, he said, he found a few fundamental points to be in order. He proceeded through these, gliding over the evidence and ignoring the fallacies. His arguments were as fugitive as fog.

There was some proof to endorse Lysenko’s belief that acquired characters were heritable, Haldane argued, but he cited two weak experiments by others: one that had yet to be replicated and a second, involving fruit flies and their intolerance to an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, that could fit several other theories. Lysenko aspired to modify the process of biological inheritance, and agents like X-rays did just that, Haldane said. But X-rays altered heredity by directly mutating genes, not by deforming the physiology of the organism. Haldane knew this and said nothing of it, even though it had been proved, beyond contention, two decades earlier. He also failed to mention that controlling the course of these mutations with a beam of X-rays, to “improve” genes in one way or another, was impossible. Dice were still being rolled. Chance still reigned over this whole enterprise.

Lysenko’s denial of the gene’s function, in fact, invalidated Haldane’s own research. Haldane’s investigations of how linked genes are inherited together, his estimations of mutation rates, his mathematics of natural selection—all of these relied on the premises that genes carry hereditary information and that they mutate in unforeseeable ways. He had even written, years earlier in the Daily Worker, that Lysenko’s attacks “on the importance of the chromosome in heredity seem to me to be based on a misunderstanding. This would be very serious if he were dictator of Soviet genetics.” Lysenko had also scorned the tools Haldane employed daily and vitally in his work. Numbers were irrelevant to biology, Lysenko once declared. “That is why we biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations that confirm the useless statistical formulas of the Mendelists.” It was an outright dismissal of the meat of Haldane’s career.

Even so, on air, Haldane handled Lysenko’s primary claim to biological fame—the vernalization of wheat—with delicacy. “This is a very revolutionary discovery if true,” he said, before offering a thin conjecture of why it could be true. He didn’t mention that Lysenko had run his experiment only once or that British scientists hadn’t been able to replicate his results. Circular reasoning was sufficient to demonstrate that Lysenko’s results were valid: “Lysenko says that these transformed wheats have proved useful in cold parts of Siberia. I find it very hard to believe that the Soviet government would back him were this false.” Lysenko was right because the USSR had declared that he was right.

To the news about the Soviet state’s harassment of its biologists, Haldane responded with a soft cluck of disapproval. “If, as I am told, Dr. Dubinin’s laboratory in Moscow has been closed down, I am very sorry to hear it,” he said, as if he had been just told that Dubinin was in bed with influenza. Then, immediately, an evasion: “But I am even more interested in London than in Moscow. In London, there is no regular practical course in plant genetics for botany students. This seems to me a serious matter which we might well put right before we start telling Moscow what it ought to do.” Haldane was even peremptory about his friend Vavilov’s internment and death in a gulag. “You may have been told that Vavilov . . . died in prison,” Haldane said, a sentence structured to clothe itself in doubt. “According to a very anti-Lysenko article in the Journal of Heredity, [Vavilov] appears to have died at Magadan in the Arctic in 1942, while breeding frostresistant plants.”

But there was, by this time, not much uncertainty about Vavilov’s end. For years, scraps of news had blown into the West about his disappearance. Charlotte herself, after her own journey to Moscow during the thick of the Second World War, had told her husband that Vavilov was nowhere to be seen. (“One has not heard of him for a very long time,” a Russian friend told Charlotte. And then, looking at her, Charlotte thought, as a wise old hen might look at an unwanted ugly duckling suddenly thrust into her care, the friend added with meaning: “There have been many changes here, you know, since you were last in Moscow.”) In 1945, the journal Nature was sure enough of Vavilov’s death to publish an obituary, deducing correctly that he ended his days in Saratov; two years later, the Journal of Heredity described Vavilov as “a martyr of genetics.” Journalists and eyewitnesses had written in London, Paris, and the United States of how the Soviet Union swatted down its dissidents, forcing them through show trials and then consigning them to gulags. Discomfort about Vavilov’s fate ought to have coursed furiously through Haldane’s radio address. Instead, he accorded Vavilov only a glancing reference, a conversational swipe, and moved on.

Haldane concluded: “I think that a number of Lysenko’s views, both positive and negative, are seriously exaggerated. But so, I think, is the view that you cannot change heredity in the direction you want. . . . I do not think it will be such an easy job as Lysenko believes. But that does not mean that we can neglect his work, or that of Michurin.” It was an old trick, straight from the debating union: a flimsy rebuttal disguised as an even hand and an open mind, a conclusion basking in the achievement of reaching no conclusion.

In the days that followed, Haldane received befuddled letters. A surgeon in Swansea wondered how it was that “official Russia does not know [about] the overwhelming mass of evidence for the gene theory of heredity.” Whatever Lysenko’s methods were, they could not lead to the madness of condemning Mendelism or of insisting on “a special brand of Russian science.” An agronomist solemnly abjured his Communist allegiances. Neither Lysenko nor any other Russian scientist had succeeded in thoroughly disproving Mendel’s theory of heredity, he wrote, yet it had become difficult in Moscow to even buy a textbook on Mendelism. “When I see apparent repression occurring in connection with things scientific, which I do understand, I begin to wonder how many things I do not pretend to understand are similarly repressed or distorted.”

Haldane’s sister, Naomi Mitchison, wrote to him as well—a careful, gentle letter that fingered the chinks in his defense of Lysenko. One of the other speakers had suggested that Lysenko, a second-rate man, couldn’t be expected to have first-rate ideas. “I remember you saying much the same about Lysenko yourself at one time,” she recalled. If acquired characters were indeed heritable, Naomi said, she would naturally be delighted. “But equally obviously, the Drosophila work is still valid and it doesn’t help to call people names.” Some of the Russian scientists who disagreed with Lysenko were sure to have been doing important, necessary work, and she had no way of knowing if they had been ousted from their positions. “This, I think, represents the point of view of a good many people who are worried, willing to suspend judgement, but also anxious not to condone the kind of thing which they condemned in the Nazi scientists. And, unless you are going to talk entirely to the converted, you have to consider them.”

In 1948, Haldane was the chief intellectual in the tent of the British Communist Party, and one of the foremost geneticists on the planet. In choosing whether to endorse Lysenko or tear him down, Haldane was picking between his political fidelity and his scientific integrity. His decision to be soft on Lysenko, to be bland and ambivalent about Lysenko’s so-called science instead of shaking it until its falsities tumbled out, confounded everyone who knew him. How could he have made this mistake? He, Haldane—the devotee of the scientific method, the proud unsentimentalist, the scientist whom the Nobel-winning biologist Peter Medawar called “the cleverest man I ever knew”—why did he side with the party against science and against his own colleagues? What had transpired in his life until then that led him, in this juncture, to choose the party? What happens in anyone’s life, for that matter, to lead them to the choices they make?

We think instinctively of science as a realm of pure objectivity, forgetting that it is still a pursuit of humans, with all their prejudices, hopes, arrogance, and other foibles. The methods that scientists employ, and the conclusions they draw, rely heavily on their own particular histories and on the culture in which they work. As a result, the Lysenko affair is an oddly perfect way to understand Haldane. A man stepped outside his character, and in so doing, revealed that character to us. We peer through this keyhole, and we see all of Haldane: his ideas about science, the pressures of his politics, the complexity of his influences, the full and vivid sweep of his life.

2.The Deep End

ON THE DECK OF THE HMS SPANKER, the boy put on his diving suit: boots with freighted soles, 20 pounds apiece; rubber overalls with another 40 pounds of weights fixed to the back and to the chest; a helmet, a bubble of copper with small portholes and valves. All told, the outfit weighed 155 pounds. Its elastic cuffs were designed to snap shut around the wrists, to keep the water out. But the boy was only 13 years old, and although he was tall for his age, his limbs were still slender. The suit hung dangerously loose upon his arms.

In the diving logs, they listed him as Jack. His full name, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, was too long and too easily confused with that of his father, the physiologist John Scott Haldane, who was leading this expedition. At home, they called him Boy, but that wouldn’t do on a scientific mission. So Jack it was.

Jack hadn’t known he would be diving. Before the Spanker started to nose around Scotland’s western coast—off Rothesay, up through the narrows of the Kyles of Bute, then near the mouths of the fjord-like Lochs Riddon and Striven—Jack was on shore, with his mother Louisa and his sister Naomi. It was still summer, the final week of August, 1906. The new term at school hadn’t yet begun. Jack and Naomi, who was 8, spent the days outdoors, in the hills. They climbed into a quarry and were promptly attacked by a cloud of midges; they stumbled on a beach, where they watched barnacles