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THE MEANINGS OF ‘LIFE’: BIOLOGY AND BIOGRAPHY IN THE WORK OF J. S. HALDANE (1860–1936)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2011

Steve Sturdy
Steve Sturdy*
Affiliation:
GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY
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Abstract

In the course of his somewhat unorthodox career in science, the physiologist John Scott Haldane occasionally turned to biography to portray the aims and values that he associated with such a career. But the same concerns can also be discerned in his scientific writings which drew, in large part, on experiments he conducted on himself. For Haldane, biology, as the science of life, was inseparable from biography, as the depiction of a life in science; and he embodied both these enterprises in his own autobiological investigations. Analysing these connections in Haldane's work serves to illuminate the contested role of science in the growth of professional society and the emergence of the intellectual aristocracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 21 , December 2011 , pp. 171 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2011

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References

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40 Haldane, ‘Heredity of the Gleneagles Family’, 269. Haldane was not alone in arguing thus. Mrs Humphry Ward, herself a member of the intellectual aristocracy through her family connection to Matthew and Thomas Arnold, worked similar arguments into her best-selling novel Marcella. Her literary success had recently enabled her to acquire an estate in Hertfordshire. Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward, Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (Oxford, 1991), 141–2Google Scholar.

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50 J. S. Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality: An Examination of the Mechanistic Theory of Life and Mind (1913), 88.

51 Haldane, ‘Life and Mechanism’, 118, 121.

52 J. S. Haldane, The Sciences and Philosophy: The Gifford Lectures, University of Glasgow, 1927 and 1928 (1929), 50.

53 Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), 179–90.

54 See for instance his chef d'œuvre, Respiration (Oxford, 1922), which emphasised the mediating role of the blood in regulating a host of organic functions, and which ended with a chapter of ‘General Conclusions’ arguing that the facts of respiration made clear the impossibility of a mechanistic account of life.

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58 Those whose political ideas were informed by philosophical idealism, in particular, were inclined to denounce both the ‘mechanical’ economics of laissez-faire liberalism and the ‘mechanical’ socialism of the Fabians and others further to the left, and to urge instead what Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant call a ‘moralised capitalism’ that located the impetus to social betterment in the shared sentiments of citizens: Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford, 1984), 31–3, 83–7.

59 Sturdy, ‘Biology as Social Theory’. Haldane's elevation of humoral over nervous regulation, and the preference for decentralised rather than centralised government that he associated with it, has interesting parallels with the view of Arthur Keith and Morley Roberts, discussed in Hayward, Rodhri, ‘The Biopolitics of Arthur Keith and Morley Roberts’, in Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in Inter-war Britain, ed. Lawrence, Christopher and Mayer, Anna-K. (Amsterdam, 2000), 251–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Haldane's views on how to effect reforms in industrial practice, and the limits of legislation to do so, are discussed in Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 160–3, 174–83.

61 On the relationship of science, authority and identity in the practice of self-experiment during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Schaffer, Simon, ‘Self-Evidence’, in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. Chandler, James, Davidson, Arnold I. and Harootunian, Harry (Chicago, 1994), 56–91Google Scholar; Jackson, Noel B., ‘Critical Conditions: Coleridge, “Common Sense”, and the Literature of Self-Experiment’, ELH, 70 (2003), 117–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Haldane's experimental style is discussed further in Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 201–41.

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65 Cf. Söderqvist, Thomas, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne, trans. Paul, David Mel (New Haven, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more psychologistic approach to science as self-realisation.

66 The risks Haldane ran in the course of his work are well described in Goodman, Suffer and Survive, passim.

67 Cf. Smith, Roger, ‘The Embodiment of Value: C. S. Sherrington and the Cultivation of Science’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 283–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.