Jbs haldane biography of michael
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UPDATE: Greg Mayer noted that Jonathan Weiner reviewed the new Haldane bio in the New York Times, also favorably. The link is below, and here’s one quote from Weiner’s review:
“A Dominant Character” is the best Haldane biography yet. With science so politicized in this country and abroad, the book could be an allegory for every forskare who wants to take a stand. “In the past few years,” Subramanian writes, “as we’ve witnessed deliberate assaults on fact and truth and as we’ve realized the failures of the calm weight of scientific bevis to influence government policy, the need for scientists to find their voice has grown even more urgent.” Haldane’s political principles were “unbending and forthright,” as Subramanian says, and his science illuminated all of life. In both these ways, for all his failings, he was “deeply attractive during a time of shifting, murky moralities.”
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J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) was probably the most colorful char
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J. B. S. Haldane
Geneticist and evolutionary biologist (1892–1964)
For another British forskare, see John Scott Haldane.
John Burdon Sanderson HaldaneFRS (; 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 worked in the fields of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field,[1] he taught biology at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Institution, and University College London.[4] Renouncing his British citizenship, he became an Indian citizen in 1961[5] and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute until his death in 1964.
Haldane's article on abiogenesis in 1929 introduced the "primordial soup theory", which became the foundati
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American Scientist
Haldane’s father, born in Scotland, was an academic at the University of Oxford, and the son was drawn into his father’s research on the effects of different atmospheric gases on the human body. One of the finest features of Subramanian’s biography is his demonstration of the intellectual continuity between father and son. He notes that the elder Haldane regularly took his scientific ideas into the world in service of a range of practical problems, such as improving the air quality in industrial Great Britain. J. B. S. Haldane absorbed both his father’s passion for physiology and his eagerness to apply it to the world.
After being admitted to study mathematics at Oxford, the younger Haldane switched to ancient history and philosophy. His love of classics did not keep him away from science, however, and he was drawn into the emerging field of genetics before being swept away by World War I. As an officer in the Black Watch (a “very Scotch” regiment sent to Fran