J. B. S. Haldane coined the word clone with almost no formal training in biology
At four, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, young Jack Haldane asked his doctor whether the blood was oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin. He grew into one of the twentieth century's great biologists with no real biology degree, coining the words clone and cloning, and eventually swapping British citizenship for Indian.
Haldane was born in Oxford in 1892, son of the physiologist John Scott Haldane, and grew up as his father's lab assistant and test subject. From about age eight the two experimented on themselves, including with poison gases. At 13 he jumped into the sea off Scotland in an experimental diving suit for his father's decompression research, work that underpins what became known as Haldane's decompression model. At Oxford he took first-class honours in mathematics and then classics; his only formal biology was an unfinished anatomy course.
That did not slow him. He taught at Oxford and Cambridge and spent most of his career at University College London, using mathematics to help merge Mendel's genetics with Darwin's natural selection and found population genetics. With his sister, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, he first demonstrated genetic linkage in mammals. His 1929 essay on the origin of life introduced the idea of a primordial soup, and he correctly suggested that the sickle-cell trait gives some protection against malaria. He also floated the core idea of in vitro fertilisation and the concept of a hydrogen economy.
His contemporaries struggled for superlatives. Peter Medawar called him the cleverest man he ever knew, and Arthur C. Clarke thought him perhaps the finest science populariser of his generation. He was also combative: a trench mortar officer in the First World War who was wounded twice, and later a committed Marxist and atheist.
In 1956 he left for the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, citing the Suez Crisis, better research prospects and a preference for Indian food. He adopted Indian dress, declared that sixty years in socks was enough, and became an Indian citizen in 1961. He died in 1964, leaving his body to medical science so he could stay useful.
Source: J. B. S. Haldane
