Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  While in Delhi I had done a little rather second-rate theoretical work on genetics, working on results obtained by Morgan9 and his colleagues in New York. I now started on biology in real earnest. I began learning the technique of gas analysis under my father’s direction, and finally became rather good at it. It is important to realise that the majority of scientists are highly skilled manual workers. Some of us are much more. For example, Aston,10 the discoverer of isotopes, has a manual virtuosity worthy of a Van Eyck or a Stradivarius. We are, in fact hand workers as well as manipulators of verbal or mathematical symbols. The exceptions to the rule are mathematical physicists such as Sir James Jeans,11 whose curious theory that God is a pure mathematician has recently been hailed as a scientific pronouncement.

  I decided that I would teach physiology, and began learning that subject with about six weeks’ start on my future pupils, though I already knew a small section of it, the physiology of breathing, rather well. My father put Pete Davies12 (now a Professor in Adelaide) and me onto a really stiff problem involving blood gas analysis. We had to learn to take blood from a finger, defibrinate it by stirring so that it did not clot, and expose it to a known gas mixture. Then a measured amount had to be transferred into a special apparatus without contact with air; acid was added to it, and the quantity of carbon dioxide driven off was accurately measured.

  I am not naturally skillful with my hands, and it was three months before we could get our duplicate determinations to agree, and our real work began. Since then van Slyke,13 an American biochemist with a genius for designing apparatus, has made the technique a good deal easier, but I do not think more accurate. Our three months of failure taught us a lot. Some scientists have a moral lesson to teach the world, because we are up against Nature, and Nature may be defined as “That which does not accept excuses.” Never before in life had I been in a situation where there was noone to whom I could give some plausible reason when I failed.

  One of my principal objections to religion is that most religions teach that the Author of Nature accepts excuses. We are pardoned as the result of our own repentance, or Christ’s blood, or the prayers of the Saints, or the holiness of the river in which we bathe. The Almighty is represented as equipped with the moral prejudices of a human judge, and with complete access to all evidence. So there must be some way of getting round him, or we should all be damned.

  But nature does not behave in this manner. It punished us inexorably for the oddest things. For not boiling or sterilizing water one is condemned to death by cholera. For some offence or offences whose nature we have not yet discovered, death by cancer is the penalty. We are just beginning to realize such facts as these in the sphere of biology. We resolutely refuse to do so in the sphere of human relations. We believe that if only we had enough “men of good will” (a hateful phrase) we could operate our present economic system, or lack of system. We expect a young couple to succeed in the complicated psychological and physiological adventure of marriage when their knowledge of the relation of the sexes is based on dirty stories and sentimental books. In fact we refuse to be materialistic, and pride ourselves upon our refusal.

  I also developed, at least to a small extent, the craftsman’s conscience, that feeling of responsibility for the quality of my work which is one of the marks of a good manual worker. In 1935 and 1936 a number of pieces of machinery on British warships were intentionally damaged. A naval war with Italy was then possible. When the British Government ceased to oppose Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, in any practical way, the sabotage stopped too. A less subtle mind than that of Sir Samuel Hore might have suspected fascist agents. Sir Samuel at once saw the hidden hand of Moscow, and five skilled dockyard workers were dismissed. None of them were communists, but all had a record of active work for their class. In the debate in the House of Commons which followed, Mr. Gallagher stated that a good workman would not spoil his own work. This statement was as intelligible to the conservatives as an appeal for the preservation of scenery would have been to an audience of blind men. And it was, I think, an exaggeration. A good antifascist artisan might spoil his work to overthrow fascism, though it would go against the grain. He certainly would not do it to help fascism.

  This technical conscience, this refusal to turn out second-rate work, will, as William Morris realised, be one of the pillars of morality in the workers’ state. I do not remember that it was even mentioned as a possible moral principle at Eton, where morality meant not going to bed with a person to whom one was not married. I am, so far as I know, the only person who has ever got duplicate determinations of urea by a volumetric method to agree to within one part in a thousand. And I am a better communist because of it.

  Davies and I also developed a certain degree of intellectual conscience, of which more later. As soon as we had learned our methods we set to work. Our business was as follows. In a normal man the lungs and kidneys cooperate to keep the blood at a certain degree of alkalinity. The lungs are driven faster if the blood gets too acid, so as to blow out carbon dioxide from it. If the blood gets too alkaline the breathing slows down and carbon dioxide accumulates, thus reducing the alkalinity. Similarly if the blood gets too acid the kidneys turn out a more acid urine, and produce more ammonia to neutralize some of the acid which must be cleared out of the blood. In some diseases, including lung and kidney diseases, the regulation breaks down.

  It was our task to upset the alkalinity of our blood in various ways, and for a variety of reasons. First we had to verify the principles stated above, some, but not all of which, were then known to be true. Secondly we had to make them quantitative, to answer such questions as this “If I diminish the amount of bicarbonate (alkaline reserve) in my blood by 30% how much more will I breathe, and how much more acid will my kidneys secrete?” Thirdly we had to find out how far the symptoms in various diseases could be explained by changes in the alkalinity of the blood. For if so we might find out how to regulate it when the natural method was upset. And lastly we had to keep our eyes open in the hope that something would turn up. For the last two purposes man is the ideal experimental animal. Even a dog, let alone a rabbit, cannot tell you if he has a headache, or an upset of his sensations of smell, both of which I obtained as symptoms during these experiments.

  All these expectations were fulfilled in greater or less degree. Our colleague Kennaway,14 who later discovered the substance in lubricating oil which gives rise to mule-spinners’ cancer, happened to confuse a sample of my urine with one which he was testing for other purposes. He found in it a substance which is usually present in the urine of diabetics. Every scientist makes mistakes. A good one profits by them. Kennaway followed up this clue, and we found that when the tissues are too alkaline neither sugars nor fats can be burned completely. Our work was incomplete because, although we could increase the alkali in our blood by eating sodium bicarbonate, we could not drink enough hydrochloric acid to diminish it appreciably. Or at least we would not, as it would have meant an unusually painful death.

  Meanwhile I had a certain amount of laboratory instruction in physiology and organic chemistry. But it was scrappy; and I have never taken a scientific degree, nor have I passed an examination in science since I left school. I also took part in the social life of the university, and of various circles connected with it, including that of the Morrells at Garsington, rather cattily described by Aldous Huxley in “Crome Yellow.” Aldous Huxley, whom I have known since he was twelve years old, is a most instructive person.

  He was two years junior to me in college at Eton. At the age of sixteen he took up biology. He was a born observer, and would have been as good a biologist as his brother Julian had opportunity permitted. Dis aliter visum.15 After one term’s work he developed a staphylococcus infection of both eyes. The pupils went white like those of an old dog, and he was almost wholly blind for five years. During this time he was left very much to himself, as his mother was dead. No wonder smells mean more to him than to the rest of us. His sight slowl
y recovered, and about 1915 he could read with a magnifying glass, and came up to Oxford, where he took a brilliant first class in English Literature. But he was, and is, embittered. It took not only superb natural gifts, but a staphylococcus, to make the man who most perfectly voices the spiritual muddle of the English middle class intellectuals.

  In 1919 Barbusse was writing16

  “Nous sommes ceux cui n’ont jamais eu de lumière,

  Que l’ombre universelle a repris chaque soir,

  Ceux dont le sang vivant, le sang profond, est noir,

  Ceux dont le reve obscur salit tout, ce qu’il touche,

  Et nos yeux sont aussi ténébreux que nos bouches.

  Vides et noirs, nos yeux sont, aveugles, nos yeux

  Sont éteints: il leur faut le grand secours des cieux.”

  “You and I are of those who have never had light,

  Whom the shadows have covered anew every night,

  Whose deep living blood is stagnant and black,

  And whose dim dreams defile all they touch in their track.

  Black and empty, our eyes too are blinded. Our eyes

  Are as dark as our mouths are. We need the great help of the skies.”

  But Barbusse found the way out. Huxley has not. He can only repeat “Oh! Comme j’ai souffert, comme j’ai dû souffrir!” And he will go on persuading his compatriots that their unhappiness comes from within, that “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.”17

  As if Aldous Huxley was so much wickeder than the rest of us as to deserve blindness, or his generation so much wickeder than that which came before them as to deserve fascism. Fascism, like blindness, is a symptom of conditions for which we are not individually responsible. The responsibility is a collective one.

  If I am writing so freely about a friend it is only because he has taken similar liberties with me. Mr. Scogan, in “Crome Yellow” voices a curious mixture of my own opinions and those of Bertrand Russell. I am also, I think, one of the principal sources of Shearwater, the physiologist in that extremely amusing book “Antic Hay.” And just because some of my characteristics are noticeable in him, I must point out that the portrait contains other elements. Shearwater is given a charming, but neither faithful nor intelligent, wife called Rosie. I was not married when the book was written. My present wife avenged Rosie by reviewing “Brave New World” in “Nature” under the title “Dr. Arnold and Mr. Huxley,” the suggestion being that the souls of Aldous ancestors Dr. Arnold (headmaster of Rugby) and Professor T. H. Huxley, fought like Jekyll and Hyde for the possession of his pen. Shearwater is further endowed with a hopeless passion for a not really inaccessible lady. This is also contrary to fact.

  And he will go on persuading his compatriots that their unhappiness comes from within, that “Th18

  In October 1919 I became a fellow of New College and have held academic posts involving teaching ever since. Our Warden was the justly celebrated Spooner, who, on Armistice Day “opened the windows and flung out all his hags,” and was once discovered wandering about Greenwich enquiring the whereabouts of the Dull Man. It turned out that he had an appointment to meet a friend at the Green Man at Dulwich. Such, at any rate, were the stories whose manufacture was one of the chief occupations of the undergraduates of the college. The nearest thing to a Spoonerism that I ever heard him make was the statement, in the course of a sermon, that “Now we see through a Dark, glassly.” Freud attributes this habit to a deep-seated inner conflict due to causes which cannot be decently disclosed. A more materialistic explanation is that Spooner was an albino, and had very bad vision. He overcame this handicap, and was an efficient and beloved head of the college. But the strain may have told on those parts of his brain concerned in speech.

  I lectured on genetics, and later in physiology, committing the usual fault of callow lecturers in being far too abstruse. Simplicity in lecturing is an achievement. I also had to give individual instruction to those medical students who were studying physiology, including some from other colleges. I was rather good at this. In 1922 three New College men out of 60 candidates sat for the Honours examination, in physiology, and secured three of the six first classes awarded.

  Among my pupils were Brain and Strauss,19 now well-known neurologists, and Janet Vaughan.20 Janet gave me an appalling insight into female education in England. She came to me with an essay on the nervous regulation of the heart beat, or some such subject. She had read innumerable authors, mostly German, of whom I had never heard, and stated the various theories which they held. But she would not give her own opinions. Apparently at her educational establishments, girls were taught to know their place, and not to think for themselves. I pointed out that when she became a doctor she would have to form opinions on rather little evidence, and act on them; and I systematically bullied her into expressing her opinions, which I than [sic] criticized. After a few similar experiences with women pupils I am absolutely sceptical as to innate differences of ability between the sexes.

  They may exist for all I know, but I know no more about them than about the back of the moon. Given the existing educational and social system, my experience of women colleagues is clear enough. I would always sooner choose a woman for accurate routine work, and a man for work requiring initiative and action based on incomplete evidence. Thus I prefer to go to a woman dentist and a man doctor. It was, I think, Langevin who said that men were better scientists than women because they are lazier. The women will plow through oceans of routine, the men look for a short cut. And science consists largely of short cuts.

  The great women scientists have mostly done arduous routine work which admitted of no short cuts. Thus Mme. Curie cleaned up radium out of six million times its weight of dirt. She had the mind of a first-rate chemist and the soul of a first-rate charwoman (which is a pretty good kind of soul). I met her in the year before her death, presiding over a conference in Madrid. She was aged and immensely tired. She probably knew that she was dying. And she worked for eight hours or so per day. Her life had included not only the isolation of radium and polonium, but a very tempestuous love affair. Like those other very few people who have lived maximally, I have little doubt that she was quite ready to die when her time came. If such qualities as hers are the peculiar property of her sex, women are not merely useful in science. They are indispensable.

  In 1920 I returned to the problem of making myself more acid. The problem was how to smuggle an ounce or so of HC1 into my blood in such a form that it would not dissolve my teeth, gullet, and stomach on the way. I argued as follows. “If you give a dog a little hydrochloric acid21 he excretes part, but not all, of it in the urine as ammonium chloride. Now incomplete reactions are generally reversible. I am a set of chemical reactions some of which are reversible. I will drink a solution of ammonium chloride, and some of it will be turned into hydrochloric acid.”

  I was probably the first person to drink something because he thought he was a system of chemical reactions. This is a piece of materialistic thinking. Nevertheless I am not perhaps more materialistic than the average man, merely more consistently so. If you say, “I am in this room, and weigh twelve stone” you are not branded as a crass materialist. Your idealistic friends do not at once retort that you are an immortal spirit outside space and do not weigh anything. Some kinds of materialistic thinking are regarded as common sense. A materialist is a man who wants to see a little more common sense of this kind in general use.

  Putting my theory into practice I drank 5 grams of ammonium chloride in 100 cc. of water. But the effect was not to make me more acid, as I had hoped. It merely made me violently sick. Later on I diluted the stuff still further, and got the predicted effects, and a good many others for which I had not bargained, though none of them did me any permanent harm.

  These experiments, and others of the same kind, have often been regarded as showing unusual courage on my part. I do not think that this is the case. I had the firm conviction that I (or my body, if you prefer
that phrase) obeyed the laws of chemistry like any other piece of matter. I acted on this conviction. If I had been wrong I should have been killed. If an engineer designs a motor car to go at 120 miles per hour without shaking to pieces no one regards him as a hero if he goes for a passenger in the car on its trial run. They would regard him as a coward if he refused to do so. My behaviour was analogous. But it appeared unusually brave because we are accustomed to think in an accurate and materialistic manner about motor-cars but not about ourselves. This is not to say that we should regard ourselves as machines. We are to some extent machines. But we are also alive. However because we are alive it does not follow that we are immaterial, or that the matter of which we are composed ceases to behave as matter.

  Now, curiously enough, at this time I did not think that I was a materialist. I thought that I was an idealist of the Hegelian kind (which I still think is the best kind). After studying the philosophy of Marx and Engels I examined my own conduct, and changed my mind. I should be willing to define a man’s philosophy as the set of theories on which he is willing to stake his life. He will often say that he believes in some other set of theories. This may not matter a great deal, but it may lead to confused action, and it may deceive other people. So it is desirable to adjust your theory to your practice, as well as vice versa.

  Thus in Spain today I have met comrades who said that they were Catholics or Anarchists. They also said that they were anti-fascists, and acted as such. I did not dream of arguing them out of their principles. For one thing we were too busy. Indeed political commissars have orders to do their best to prevent such arguments in the army. Communists hope that Catholic and Anarchist comrades will come to realise that the Communist party line is the only one that can lead to victory, and that in fact without knowing it, they have been acting as Communists. Then they will examine Communist theory, and conclude that it has some bad holes in it, but is a pretty good guide to action. A little later they will perhaps find that the holes are not such very big holes after all. And then they will ask to join the party.