John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, 1892-1964

Abstract

Few families have their history so well documented as the Haldanes. J. B. S. Haldane, writing of his father (1961g), says: ‘He was born with a historically labelled Y chromosome. That is to say, his ancestors in the putative direct male line since about A. D. 1250 are known. There are, I believe, about fifteen similarly labelled sets of Y chromosomes in Britain. Their possession is generally a handicap, but may help to protect the possessors against the voice of the Establishment.’ There is no need to detail Haldane’s ancestry because much of it can be found in the historical novel The bull calves by his sister, Naomi Mitchison, and in his mother’s autobiography Friends and kindred . It is clear from these three publications that energy, enterprise and outstanding intellectual achievement have, for many generations, been features of the family environment and, insofar as they have a hereditary origin, have been contributed as much by the female as the male line. Haldane was born in Oxford on 5 November 1892. His intelligence and prodigious memory were recognized early. Before he was five he could read newspaper reports of British Association meetings at a pace that was ‘deliberate, but not exasperatingly slow’ and memorized poetry with unusual ease.