BIOGRAPHY

ANDROLINKLATER HIS OWN GUINEA PIG

SUFFERANDSURVIVE: GASATTACKS, MINERS’ CANARIES, SPACESUITSANDTHEBENDS– THEEXTREMELIFEOFDRJ S HALDANE

★By Martin Goodman (Simon & Schuster 422pp £14.99)

SCIENCEIS ANaccumulative body of knowledge, and what was once an astounding breakthrough quickly becomes background information. Three pages in a standard A-level biology textbook can teach you about the helical structure of DNA, whose discovery won a Nobel Prize for Crick and Watson fifty years ago, while two paragraphs are enough for John Scott Haldane’s century-old work in understanding how we breathe. Yet Haldane deserves to be celebrated not only for his discoveries, but for the manner in which he practised science. Nothing demonstrates his approach better than the way he made the miner’s canary a safety device. Any tiny creature would have served as well. Investigating mine explosions and sewer poisonings in the late nineteenth century, where carbon monoxide and other lethal gases lurked invisibly in the air, Haldane himself usually carried a mouse. With a metabolic rate twenty times that of a human, it reacted within seconds to gases that would take minutes to kill a person. Miners kept canaries, however. To encourage them to use their pets as safety devices, Haldane devised a square cage that allowed the surrounding air to get in but, once the bird collapsed telling the miner to race for safety, automatically became an enclosed box with its own reviving oxygen supply. Thus he ensured that the canary would survive, as well as its owner. To determine exactly how much time men and birds had, Haldane experimented by sealing himself in a lead coffin and breathing in different quantities of carbon monoxide; he would test his blood and breath until he fell unconscious. His personal example was as persuasive as his science. Born in 1860, and brought up in a Perthshire family whose motto was the terse instruction ‘Suffer’, the tweed-suited, walrus-moustached, and admirably idiosyncratic Haldane learned medicine in Edinburgh and philosophy in Jena, becoming both an experimentalist

MADegree in Biography Starting January 2007

and an idealist. In this fascinating biography, Martin Goodman speculates that listening to the laboured breathing of an adored elder brother as he died of diphtheria led Haldane to specialise in respiration, but it is also true that he found himself attracted to studying the metaphysical point at which the breath, the pneuma or spirit, entered the body. Too sceptical and contrary to accept the constraints of academic life, Haldane found an alternative university in the field of public health, and a laboratory in overcrowded slums, factories and mines. Among late Victorians, not even Henry Mayhew had a more complete knowledge of the poor than Haldane, from the air they breathed to the faeces they excreted. Breathing is so fundamental to life that we rarely think about it. That may be just as well, given the complexity of the process by which nitrogen and oxygen, in a ratio of four to one, are transferred from the environment to the blood, and in exchange nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide are returned to the environment. The focus of Haldane’s research was the manner in which haemoglobin, the iron-red protein that gives blood its colour, combines with such gases as oxygen, carbon dioxide and, most readily of all, carbon monoxide, and carries them to different parts of the brain and body. The ‘Haldane effect’ describes the critically important seesaw mechanism that allows haemoglobin to take up more carbon dioxide as it loses oxygen, and to carry more oxygen as it releases carbon dioxide. His discoveries not only made life safer for miners and slumdwellers, but enable today’s divers, mountaineers and astronauts to breathe artificial gases at greater depths,

Haldane: a breath of fresh air

Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MAin Biography was the first postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK.

Course director:Jane Ridley

Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG

Tel: 01280 814080

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 BIOGRAPHY

higher altitudes and in emptier space than should be humanly possible. Goodman writes enchantingly if waywardly of this beguiling man. In a typically vivid sentence he describes Haldane’s decision to use himself as his own guinea-pig: ‘Short of having a laboratory under his command, the dark and sublime organism of his own insides offered a fine alternative arena.’ And his accounts of how Haldane unravelled the causes of death among miners killed in underground explosions are as gripping as detective stories. But the chronology is exasperatingly obscure, and the author’s shaky grasp of the science inspires little confidence. Partly it’s a failure to understand fully scientific details like the diffusion of oxygen from the lungs into the blood. But more importantly he does not convey the larger picture that shows one discovery, such as Haldane’s about the role of haemoglobin as a transporter of oxygen, fitting into another, such as that made by his friend, Christian Bohr (father of the physicist, Niels), about the mechanism that triggers the downloading of oxygen to the tissues and muscles. Together they transformed the existing knowledge of how respiration worked. Most disappointingly, Goodman only refers to but fails to explore the intimate connection between all Haldane’s work and his deeply held spiritual faith. Even in his own day, Haldane’s belief in vitalism, the existence of an eternal life-force common to all organisms, was controversial. Today, the scientific jihad launched by Richard Dawkins against all forms of spiritual belief would see him ostracised. Yet the importance of these inner beliefs becomes obvious in one of Goodman’s best chapters, concerning the use of poison gas in the First World War. Here Haldane’s moral sense that a connection must exist between scientific discovery and individual well-being can be seen pitted against the value-free belief of Fritz Haber, inventor of chlorine and mustard gas, that science was equally good whether it killed, tortured, or healed. Not the least of the reasons for reading this biography is to be confronted by that stark struggle between good and evil in science. Haldane fathered two notable children, the novelist Naomi Mitchison and the geneticist J B S Haldane, whose work in the 1930s touched upon such modern concerns as kinship selection and the neo-Darwinian theories outlined in Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Both had frequently observed their father’s experiments in which he poisoned himself to the point of unconsciousness with carbon monoxide, and in 1936 they watched him die. ‘He had a look of intense interest on his face,’ Naomi recalled, ‘as though he were taking part in some crucial experiment in physiology which had to be carefully monitored. I could only go on the look. But it made me feel that here was an experience deeply worth having.’ To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 37

ANDREWLYCETT

HARD ON THEIR HEELS

STANLEY: THEIMPOSSIBLELIFEOFAFRICA’S GREATESTEXPLORER

★By Tim Jeal (Faber & Faber 570pp £25)

DRLIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME? MISSIONARIES, JOURNALISTS, EXPLORERS& EMPIRE

★By Clare Pettitt (Profile 244pp £15.99)

‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ is one of those well-known phrases whose deeper significance is strangely elusive. I first heard it as a child, while living in what was then called Tanganyika in the 1950s. Somewhere not so far away at Ujiji in that same country, one white man had once greeted another thus. The man who spoke the words was Henry Stanley, an American journalist with a questionable reputation. The other was the famous missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone, who seemed to be one of the good guys. But what were they doing there? Why the curiously stilted greeting? And why all the fuss? I realised it referred to an important moment in the exploration of Africa. But, so far as I was concerned, this was a place I romped through on a daily basis. It did not need discovering. And anyway (though this thought was not fully articulated), what about the native inhabitants? Did they not know about the place? The answers to those questions were hidden in a miasma of ‘symbolic complexity’ – to quote a phrase used by Clare Pettitt. Over the years the circumstances became clearer. Livingstone led the way in opening up the African continent to Europeans. Having discovered the Zambezi and various Central African lakes, he was trying to pinpoint the source of the Nile on Lake Victoria when in the late 1860s he went awol and was presumed lost. Stanley, an enterprising Welshman turned American, seized the opportunity to find him and make his name. But while Livingstone has been treated kindly by history, Stanley has come off badly, branded variously as an opportunist, liar, racist and sadist. His nadir came in 1989, when Frank McLynn published the first part of his two-volume biography which accused Stanley of being motivated by a ‘volcanic rage against the world’ as a result of his deprived background, as well as being impotent and a repressed homosexual. After writing his ground-breaking life of Livingstone in 1973, Tim Jeal always wanted to turn his attention to

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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