Always a Good Show
""I've been very much a dabbler, and I'm not ashamed of it. Sometimes I wonder idly what I might be remembered for a hundred years from now—but I don't really very much care what people think about me, especially a hundred years hence." Perhaps John Burdon Sanderson Haldane did not really care, but last week, when it came time for BBC-TV to present a prefilmed obituary of the versatile British scientist in which he appeared, it was clear that he would be remembered for a multitude of contributions to man's knowledge of his world and of himself.
Infected with Experiment. Geneticist Haldane would have been the first to deny that his intellectual gifts and interests could have been genetically determined, but there was no doubt that they were early and firmly imprinted on him by his father, John Scott Haldane . Longtime professor of physiology at Oxford, the elder Haldane risked his own life by deliberately inhaling carbon monoxide for more than an hour and by sitting in ovens heated as high as 300° F. Young John was only four years old when his father took him down into coal mines and sewers to let him experience the befuddling effect of methane gas. Having figured out why divers get "the bends" and devised the decompression tables on which all diving practice has been based ever since, his father put young J.B.S. into a diving suit and dropped him into 40 feet of water. It was a quick but effective lesson for the boy; it taught him how to keep his Eustachian tubes open.
Thus the boy was thoroughly infected with the bug of self-experimentation. Gassed in World War I, he plunged into experiments to compare the effectiveness of different types of gas masks. Sent to India, he tested the value of his typhoid inoculation by deliberately drinking unboiled water and chewing betel nuts bought at filthy roadside stands. Haldane did not get typhoid—but he caught a sand-fly fever, which was about as bad.
Sex Viri. Demobbed, Haldane took a post as a lecturer in biochemistry at Cambridge University. He also took another man's wife, Writer Charlotte Franken. When he had to pay £1,000 damages as corespondent, the university asked Haldane to resign. He refused. He was called before the Sex Viri* and fired. Haldane appealed, and a special university court upheld Haldane in his contention that a professor's private life is none of the university's business. Then Haldane and Charlotte Franken got married.
In 1933, Haldane switched from Cambridge to the University of London. Wherever he went, he persisted in self-experimentation. He had the blood supply to his arm shut off with a tourniquet until the arm was paralyzed, then watched another man move it with an electric current. To upset his body's acid-alkali balance, he drank ammonium chloride and panted for days afterward. To prove that "sunstroke" is not caused directly by the sun's rays, but by the overheating of the brain and spinal cord, he sat in Egypt's broiling sun for two hours, periodically dousing his head and spine with water. He got no heat stroke, but he suffered a severe sunburn across his broad shoulders.
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