Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  HALDANE agreed with this.

  HARRY reiterated that there were lots of things they would like to do but could not; there had got to be a lot more give and take. He pointed out that this was a wrong time for HALDANE to be deserting them, and it would be no good thinking that this would not come out, it would. . . .

  HALDANE again said that he was at the stage where he wanted to sit back a bit.

  HARRY pointed out that HALDANE could not have had a more reasonable person to deal than himself. He reminded HALDANE of his obligations, and said anything on their side they could do they would, and he would have another “shot at it”.

  HALDANE said he would not make any promises and would leave the situation as it was at the moment; he said he saw HARRY’s point, but would not make a definite decision now.

  HARRY seemed perturbed that once HALDANE had resigned from the Party, they would not be able to conceal the fact.

  CAMPBELL mentioned that he had had the offer of a car for HALDANE but HALDANE stated that at the present moment he had not [been able to?] get a garage to put it in.

  Writing for the Daily Worker must have been lucrative. Normally such work would pay modestly, if at all, but the paper had substantial subsidies from Stalin, funneled through Eastern Europe and other parts of the Communist empire, where bales of Daily Worker copies were ordered. But what were the “obligations” that Harry reminded JBS of?

  A week later the Party was still concerned that Haldane might let it down. Harry Pollitt had a visitor. “Various sums of money mentioned. Later HARRY stated that HALDANE was always changing his mind; then [VISITOR] stated that HALDANE had asked him to find him accommodation in Sydney? and that he had written to his brother in Sydney. [VISITOR] appeared to be worried about sums of money, HARRY told him not to worry.”81

  MI5 waited to see if Haldane would present a possibility for cooperation. A “reliable source” was in touch in July 1950.82

  HALDANE is clearly going through a period of great mental stress. He is having continuous and troublesome arguments with the Daily Worker; all, of course, due to LYSENKO. HALDANE complains that he is not allowed to put a balanced case. . . . He maintains that some mistakes and some good work has been done by Western biologists, but at the same time some of LYSENKO’s ideas are interesting, as HALDANE points out, “At least he knows one end of a chromosome from another”. HALDANE has also been asked to support western scientists who themselves support LYSENKO. This he finds himself unable to do, as he cannot take the absolutist attitude. HALDANE has not stopped altogether his articles for the Daily Worker, but they will not be once a week, but more probably once every few weeks. He has left the Editorial Board of the Daily Worker.

  This analysis was supplemented by a curious note conveying J. D. Bernal’s opinion on Haldane’s mental state. No source is mentioned. Was it directly from Bernal, or relayed by a third party?

  Professor BERNAL is of the opinion that J.B.S. HALDANE is at the moment an ill man. BERNAL states that at the best of times HALDANE was always a difficult person and a man possessed of a very bad temper. HALDANE is, he believes, a great deal older than his actual age owing to the effect which his past experiments have had on his constitution; he is, for example, apparently suffering from some incipient disease which is the result of one of his earlier experiments. HALDANE has now, according to BERNAL, got himself a second and impossible wife who is a theologian. She writes in a newspaper called “The Lamp.” BERNAL thinks that HALDANE’s private life83 has always been his downfall.

  Not all of his information was accurate—Helen Spurway might have been “impossible” but she was no theologian. Perhaps he had said she was bibulous?

  Alison Macleod, the TV critic for the Daily Worker and a stalwart Party hanger-on, ultimately broke faith over Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin in his secret speech of 1956. She later admitted that “We all knew the Russians were talking nonsense about our favourite subjects. . . . Haldane seemed to share this attitude.” She said that around this time “a Sunday newspaper got hold of the fact that Haldane had left the Party. He issued an evasive statement and went into hiding. The chief sub-editor, Allen Hutt, told me that the Communist leaders could not find Haldane. ‘We should have been much firmer with him!’ Hutt snapped.”84 But she was mistaken; Haldane had not left the Party.

  At the close of 1950, MI5 decided that it was still too risky to approach Haldane. A longtime associate of JBS had informed them that he was “most unlikely to make a co-operator” in their sense, and that he was “still in a highly nervous and emotional state.” Besides, he was “typical of the type of intellectual Communist who, far from having his political ideas dictated by his brain, has always been the slave of his emotions.” They preferred to bide their time to see if he would become more approachable.85

  An MI5 note about Haldane’s state of mind, December 12, 1950. National Archives, KV 2-1832.

  The stalemate between Haldane and the Party petered out into glum silence. No formal resignation was ever revealed, and Haldane preferred to remain evasive when asked directly by the press about the relationship. What is more, in late 1952 he again approached the Party. “Telephone bugging of CPGB BURNS and MARGARET86 suggests that Haldane was short of money, wanting to buy a house, and tried to write for Daily Worker, but had been turned down even ‘after all he had done’ for the party, because of his political unreliability on Lysenko.”87

  It may have been around this time that Alison Macleod ran into him again. “I came on Haldane by chance, in an underground train. We had met several times, but I reminded him who I was. I told him how much my little girl was enjoying his book: My Friend Mr. Leakey. Then I said: ‘Your old friends wish that you would get in touch with them.’ Haldane gave me a look of absolute horror. I realised for the first time what he had been through. I also knew that nothing I said would persuade him that I was not a tail, set on him by the Party. I could do nothing but let him get off at the next station, and see for himself that I was not following him. I never saw him again.”88 Mac leod may not have known which “old friends” Haldane was thinking of.

  It was five years or so before Haldane appeared once more in the Daily Worker, with his photograph on the front cover of the issue of March 1, 1956, offering his opinions on civil defense in a nuclear war.89 Perhaps the Party had Haldane in a spot because of his relationship with Montagu’s espionage ring, the X Group: mutually assured destruction. Money and other perquisites were repeatedly on offer in 1950, and may have been accepted at some stage. In the end, neither got what they wanted most, but each avoided their worst outcome.

  Haldane did not alter his finessing of Lysenko by much over the years, but was now more discreet, sticking to academic forums. He held out hope that the man was good in parts, and that something resembling acquired characters would surface somewhere.

  Declining a trip to the USSR in 1951 (again citing the pressure of work), Haldane asked those who were going to try to get him some newt specimens—newts were a recent interest of Helen Spurway. The request suggests that Lysenko, and Michurin’s notion of “distant hybridization,” were still of interest.

  I am very desirous to get living specimens of the newt Triturus cristatus from the Soviet Union. There are two sub-species, Triturus cristatus cristatus in Russia, and Triturus cristatus karelinii from the Caucasian region. We already have a number of specimens of karelinii which are descended from the stock which belonged to Kammerer,90 who, you will remember, arrived at conclusions similar to those of Lyssenko,91 about thirty years ago. But we do not know whether some of the results obtained by crossing them with animals from Western Europe are effects of ‘distant hybridisation’, to use Michurin’s phrase, or [are due] to the fact that their ancestors have been domesticated for many generations. Either conclusion would be of interest. . . . Our Russian colleagues may be interested to learn that some of Kammerer’s stocks still survive, and will certainly understand the interest of work on distant hybridisation . . .92


  At a symposium at Cambridge in 1953, Haldane commented that a paper presented by Cyril Hinshelwood “was useful in presenting results comparable with those on which Lysenko’s criticism of Mendelism is based, in circumstances which permitted a cooler discussion than is often possible.”93 Hinshelwood thought, along with several other microbiologists at that time, that bacteria could be “trained” by exposure to environmental agents, though he did not connect that to heredity. In reality he was selecting mutant strains, a fact that had already been experimentally demonstrated by then.94

  In the following year, in a review of Cyril Darlington’s popularization The Facts of Life, Haldane brought up Lysenko again. Darlington had covered Lysenko crisply and acidly, as in his BBC broadcast of 1948. Haldane resorted to Hinshelwood’s bacteria, which he said had been “trained” to ferment sugars, and that this learned capacity “can sometimes be transmitted for thousands of generations.” Unspecified work by Jacques Monod, Winge, and Spiegelmann supposedly showed the same thing (although there seems to be no support in the literature for this attribution).95 Haldane thought that “training” and other “facts” about bacteria would have “made Lysenko’s results on higher plants less implausible.” Even Michurin’s ideas had some support. Being too critical of Lysenko would only strengthen him. “Lysenko has, I believe, discovered a number of new facts. But he has also denied a number of well-established facts, and made quite unjustifiable claims.” Nevertheless Lysenko had “stopped a lot of research work of great biological interest by workers who wished to work on lines different from his own.”96 This was the first public criticism, however mild, by Haldane of Lysenko’s role in suppressing genetics in the USSR.

  Later in 1954, addressing the conflict between mutation and selection, Haldane omitted Lysenko by name, and referred only to “statements of the modern Russian school,” which unfortunately depended on data published but “not translated into languages which I understand,” in which “they claim to have obtained adaptive inheritable changes in a number of plants. It is probable that genes which for any reason are induced to greater or lesser activity than usual might alter in consequence, such alterations being particularly likely to appear as mutations in the germ line where, as in higher plants, the germ cells are directly descended from the highly active cells of the growing point.”97

  At the end of the 1950s, Haldane was still misrepresenting and dissimulating, roping in bacteria again. “Some readers will suppose that recent discoveries in the Soviet Union have overthrown Mendelism. Exceptions to it have been claimed, probably sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly. However, many Soviet geneticists who make such claims fully realise they are dealing with exceptions. . . . I think it has yet to be shown that the results obtained from such processes as grafting are likely to have been of any importance in evolution. For example, Michurin’s claim that grafting may facilitate hybridization of species has been verified. And hybridization has played a part in evolution. But grafting must be very rare in nature, particularly between animals, and between herbaceous plants. On the other hand, in bacteria a process very like Michurinism is normal.” Here Haldane refers solemnly to “a recent paper by Gluschenko [sic].”98

  The claim that Soviet geneticists “fully realise” that they are “dealing with exceptions” is artful. They might realize it without saying it; the trouble is that the Lysenko complex actually said the exact opposite. The nonspecific claim that “grafting may facilitate hybridization of species” is unverifiable. What does “facilitate” mean, and where did Lysenko claim that?

  Later we will consider Haldane’s idiosyncratic self-obituary, broadcast on BBC television after his death in 1964.99 What is relevant here is the section on Lysenko, which has been much misrepresented. Here Haldane offered some real criticism, though it was carefully qualified and considerably mystified, principally by inventing Lysenko the passive agent.

  Haldane started out by assuring his audience that “Lysenko is a very fine biologist and some of his ideas are right.” But those “ideas” are “much more often right for bacteria, in my opinion, than they are for larger organisms such as animals and plants with which we are familiar.” So far this is a repetition of the attention-transfer defense. As he had from the beginning, Haldane stipulated that some of Lysenko’s ideas are “wrong and badly wrong” but this was quickly qualified—other people, including himself, can be proved wrong too!

  Haldane added that “it was extremely unfortunate both for Soviet agriculture and Soviet biology that he was given the powers that he got under Stalin, and that he used to suppress a lot of what I believe, and what most geneticists believe, to be valuable work.” That which is “unfortunate” happens only by chance. Was Lysenko’s suppression of genetics a chance event? No, but this phrasing allows the force to be muffled and the direction of events to be flipped. Even more so when Haldane helpfully adds that “if I had been made dictator of British genetics or British physiology I should have been equally disastrous.” It could have happened to anyone.

  Forgetting his own passionate advocacy of planned science Soviet-style for thirty years, Haldane then suggested that Lysenko had been a victim of overambitious scope: “I do not think that any one man is big enough for the job of directing a branch of science.” Tactically mistaken perhaps—“one gets the best results from science by giving people a good deal of rope, and letting them go on with work which looks as if it were not going to be very fruitful but which sometimes is.” Commission converts to omission; Lysenko, always active with rope, is made passive again. Haldane ends this section with an echo of X Group days, as we are warned that scientific programs “suffer from the evil of secrecy, which I have no doubt may be necessary but must slow down progress very considerably.”

  A deep sense of weariness is unavoidable when working through Haldane’s arguments touching Lysenko; they pant and perspire with bad faith. Haldane no more believed that Lysenko was a “fine biologist” than he lacked time to actually read his works. Likewise, the idea that Haldane resigned or even separated from the Party because of the suppression of science by Stalin must be scotched once and for all. Haldane retreated in silence from the Party because his own freedom to finesse Lysenko was removed. While he was alive, he never showed much concern for the suppression of science or scientists in the Soviet Union. Instead, he actively provided covering fire for the suppressors.

  As it happened, that “fine biologist” Lysenko went on to survive the fall of Stalin and inflict still more damage on Soviet agriculture. He acquired new sponsors in the form of Khrushchev and, to a lesser extent, Brezhnev. Despite a drastic loss of influence, he was never entirely discredited in the USSR, even after his death in 1976. Reports still circulate from time to time that new adherents have emerged somewhere in the remnants of the old empire. The temptations of Lamarck need no autojektor.

  Since our understanding of genetics is continually expanding, it is quite safe to hold out for discoveries of unexpected phenomena along the way. We now know that the epigenome assists the genome in expressing genes. In some simple organisms, germ cells can sometimes be passed on in “pre-expressed” form, though typically, but perhaps not always, they do not persist down through the germ line to subsequent generations. It is not clear yet what the adaptive significance of this phenomenon is, if there is any. Almost all organisms rigorously ensure that the “epigenetic marks” in expressed cells are reset when they are passed on, to ensure that the resulting cells are “totipotent” and capable of the full range of genetic expression in offspring. Mammals seem especially good at this erasure, but errors will undoubtedly happen in any such process.

  It will take many years to sort out the swirl of fantastic claims that have already arisen, and continue to arise, in this field, greatly assisted by the dangerous allure of statistical significance tests and a general lack of incentives for preregistered replication of experiments. Measures like preregistration are essential for controlling otherwise-disguised multiple comparisons, w
hich give experimenters vastly more bites at the cherry than their “statistical significance” calculations purport to account for. It is safe to predict a fall into disrepute, in specialist circles, of fanciful claims to have transmitted psychologically mediated behavior epigenetically. It is also safe to expect that in some other circles such claims will simply live on forever, since they supply a persistent demand.

  Contrary to Haldane, these developments will never vindicate Lysenko, any more than the discovery of jet travel vindicated those who claimed to have flown from Moscow to Algeria on broomsticks after rubbing jam on their elbows, even though they sometimes serve sandwiches on those flights. Lysenko didn’t believe in genes, let alone epigenes, which are part of the same system. Thus it is known that vernalization is expressed through epigenetic means, but it is also known that those epigenetic marks are not transmitted to future generations. All of which would have greatly mystified Lysenko since, discounting Haldane’s flights of fancy, Lysenko really didn’t know one end of a chromosome from another.

  11. SOCIAL BIOLOGY

  The connection between genetics and human society, specifically politics, appears early and often in Haldane’s discursive writings about science. Two aspects of this must be kept separate: the idea that genes matter, and the idea that the human gene pool ought to be manipulated in desirable directions—eugenics. Haldane held differing versions of both these beliefs throughout his life. A belief in eugenics presupposes a belief that genes matter, but the reverse is not true. One might believe that genes matter without committing to a program that would deliberately alter their frequencies. That aversion might be based on religious or ideological grounds, fatalism, humility, indifference, or a worldview that sees mankind as irredeemably flawed, in the sense of “original sin.” Or one might doubt that man has the required wisdom. Haldane had no such aversion himself.