John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (/ˈhɔːldeɪn/; 5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964[1][2]), nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS",[3] was a British-born scientist who later moved to India and acquired Indian citizenship.

He established human gene maps for haemophilia and colour blindness on the X chromosome, and codified Haldane's rule on sterility in the heterogametic sex of hybrids in species.

He was the first to suggest the central idea of in vitro fertilisation, as well as concepts such as hydrogen economy, cis and trans-acting regulation, coupling reaction, molecular repulsion, the darwin (as a unit of evolution), and organismal cloning.

[9] He was a professed socialist, Marxist, atheist, and secular humanist whose political dissent led him to leave England in 1956 and live in India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961.

[23] At age 8, in 1901, his father brought him to the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club to listen to a lecture on Mendelian genetics, which had been recently rediscovered.

[24] Although he found the lecture given by Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire, Demonstrator of Zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, "interesting but difficult",[11] it influenced him permanently such that genetics became the field in which he made his most important scientific contributions.

[28] In July 1906, on board HMS Spanker off the west coast of Scotland, Rothesay, young Haldane jumped into the Atlantic Ocean with the experimental diving suit.

[1] To support the war effort, Haldane volunteered to join the British Army, and was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) on 15 August 1914.

[42] As Hall did not retire until 1939,[40] Haldane did not in fact succeed him, but resigned from the John Innes in 1936 to become the first Weldon Professor of biometry at University College London.

[2] In 1956, Haldane left University College London, and joined the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta (later renamed Kolkata), India, where he worked in the biometry unit.

Officially he stated that he left the UK because of the Suez Crisis, writing: "Finally, I am going to India because I consider that recent acts of the British Government have been violations of international law."

Jerzy Neyman objected that "India has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractive.

To test the effects of acidification of the blood he drank dilute hydrochloric acid, enclosed himself in an airtight room containing 7% carbon dioxide, and found that it 'gives one a rather violent headache'.

But, as Haldane stated in What is Life,[56] "the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment".

His partisan, Edgar Adrian (a 1932 Nobel laureate), had almost convinced Trinity College to offer him an appointment as a Fellow, but that was ruined by an incident when Haldane arrived at the dining table carrying a gallon jar of urine from his laboratory.

Around that time Philip Dally was making a BBC documentary about eminent living scientists, which included Sewall Wright and the double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling.

The poem first appeared in print on 21 February 1964 issue of the New Statesman, and runs:[59][60] Cancer's a Funny Thing: I wish I had the voice of Homer To sing of rectal carcinoma, This kills a lot more chaps, in fact, Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked ...

[62][65] Following his father's footsteps, Haldane's first publication was on the mechanism of gaseous exchange by haemoglobin in The Journal of Physiology,[30] and he subsequently worked on the chemical properties of blood as a pH buffer.

[68][69] In 1904, Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire published a paper on an experiment attempting to test Mendelian inheritance between Japanese waltzing and albino mice.

[26] As was Haldane, Sprunt had joined 4th Battalion Bedfordshire Regiment at the start of World War I, and was killed at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on 17 March 1915.

Under the solar energy the anoxic atmosphere containing carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water vapour gave rise to a variety of organic compounds, "living or half-living things".

He formalised the concept in a technical paper published in 1949 in which he made a prophetic statement: "The corpuscles of the anaemic heterozygotes are smaller than normal, and more resistant to hypotonic solutions.

He predicted that environmental conditions can favour the increase or decline of either the dominant (in this case the black or melanic forms) or the recessive (the grey or wild type) moths.

[108] At the John Innes Horticultural Institution, he developed the complicated linkage theory for polyploids;[39][109] and extended the idea of gene-enzyme relationships with the biochemical and genetic study of plant pigments.

He was pressed to speak out about the rise of Lysenkoism and the persecution of geneticists in the Soviet Union as anti-Darwinist and the political suppression of genetics as incompatible with dialectical materialism.

He introduced the term[dubious – discuss] in his speech on "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years" at the Ciba Foundation Symposium on Man and his Future in 1963.

They would be made from people who were held to have excelled in a socially acceptable accomplishment.His essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924) posited the concept of in vitro fertilisation, which he called ectogenesis.

Haldane also wrote an essay criticising Lewis's arguments for the existence of God, entitled "More Anti-Lewisite", a reference to the poison gas and its antidote.

[118] In 1923, in a talk given in Cambridge entitled "Science and the Future", Haldane, foreseeing the exhaustion of coal for power generation in Britain, proposed a network of hydrogen-generating windmills.

[119][120][121] In his An Autobiography in Brief, published shortly before his death in India, Haldane named four close associates as showing promise to become illustrious scientists: T. A. Davis, Dronamraju Krishna Rao, Suresh Jayakar, and S. K.