Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  Besides my biochemical work on myself I did some genetical work on poultry and rabbits, and also produced some genetical theory involving rather elementary mathematics. I was the first person in Britain, perhaps in Europe, to support Morgan’s theory that the gene, the unit of heredity, is a definite thing at a particular place in a particular chromosome.

  This theory, by the way, was not invented by Morgan in 1910, but probably by Correns in 1902.22 But Correns never followed it up or used it to predict observable phenomena or to suggest experiments. And very likely it was not re-invented by Morgan individually, but appeared as a social rather than an individual product in conversations with his junior colleagues Sturtevant, Bridges, and Muller.23 At any rate that is how theories have often appeared during my own work with colleagues.

  The obvious alternative possibilities were that genes were immaterial, or that they were properties of gametes (spermatozoa or eggs) as a whole, like the characteristic note of a stretched string, which is not located in any particular part of it. These theories were certainly incorrect. And I was justified in backing Morgan’s theory in 1919. Nevertheless it is wrong, at least in part. Muller and Prokovieva24 have since shown that some genes, at any rate, are not material objects, but rearrangements of a very small part of a chromosome. That is an example of the dialectical way in which science grows. I was historically right to back Morgan’s theory. Muller and Prokovieva’s emendation of it was only possible after the original theory had proved a satisfactory guide to practice for twenty-five years, and for almost all practical purposes, Morgan’s theory (like Newton’s theory of gravitation or Dalton’s theory of the indivisible atom) can be used with complete confidence. But each carried within it the seed of its own negation. Needless to say I did not think of such themes while counting my chickens or considering how to mate my rabbits.

  In 1921 I spent three months as a biochemist in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. I was acting as temporary assistant to Professor Meakins while Davies, whose job I took, was in Australia. By singular good fortune a strike had delayed the completion of the laboratory, and I had a good deal of spare time, during which I was allowed to go round two wards with the medical students, and thus learn some medicine as very few laymen can learn it.

  The sociology of medicine is most interesting. The poor get fairly good service from their panel doctors, though certainly not such good service as the rich. On the other hand they are not encouraged to think themselves ill when there is nothing wrong with them, nor given large amounts of expensive and useless medicine. As outpatients in hospitals they are kept waiting for hours on hard benches, and do not generally get good attention. Often too they are attended by students who are only learning their jobs. And they may have to wait a long time before admission to a ward when seriously ill. Once in a ward of a good hospital they get better treatment than money can buy. But they are often turned out before cure is complete, and rarely spend long enough in convalescence.

  The middle classes get better medical attendance, but when ill they are generally sent to nursing homes most of which are far worse than the average hospital. Further the horrors of solitary confinement during most of the day are added to those of disease. The most expensive physicians and surgeons generally hold a hospital post, and therefore serve the poor as well as the very rich. The same man may remove the King’s appendix and the dustman’s. A member of the middle classes cannot afford him. But he may obtain the services of a very good doctor who has not yet made his or her name.

  The very rich are treated at home or in good but extremely expensive clinics. They can afford expensive doctors, but are liable to be exploited if their ailments are imaginary.

  I do my best to get the advantages of all these classes. When there is room, as at Oxford, I go into an ordinary hospital ward for an operation. For diagnosis, for example examination of my heart if it drops beats, I also gate-crash a hospital, where the electro-cardiograph and other instruments are up-to-date. As a communist I want to see the poor getting as quick service as the rich, and the middle classes as efficient as the poor. I get them myself, and others will get them when we have an adequate hospital system free for all. Free medical attention, by the way, is communism rather than socialism.

  I took little part in politics before 1933. In 1918 or 1919 I made my last appearance as a liberal sitting behind Mr. Asquith on a platform at Oxford. And in June 1919 I acted as chucker-out at a meeting addressed by George Lansbury and Austin Harrison to protest against the origin [sic] version of the Treaty of Versailles, which was even more unworkable, and an even more flagrant breach of Wilson’s promises to Germany, than the final form of the treaty. The interrupters, who were the sort of people who now hail Hitler, threw tomatoes. I had my tactical scheme prepared. I approached one of the smaller ones from behind, placed a finger in each nostril, and dragged him backwards, hooked and struggling like a salmon, and too agitated to hit me in a vital spot. The rest followed, but before they rescued him they were half way to the door.

  I am no boxer or wrestler. My tactics are to grapple with a man and use my weight to bump him against a wall or floor. I remember being down once or twice, and there was some rather half-hearted fighting with chairs before we cleared the Corn Exchange. On my way home the interrupters counter-attacked. I took refuge in a jeweller’s doorway between two plate-glass windows, determined to break them if attacked. My opponents did not assault this position, and on the approach of a policeman, who scented danger to Property, they dispersed.

  But most of us were far too busy for politics. I have never known a group of university students who worked as we ex-soldiers worked. There will perhaps be a similar group after the Revolution. It had taken a combination of enthusiasm and discipline to change us from civilians to soldiers. Now we had to reverse the process, which required a great moral effort. It took me six months to break myself of a craving for regular exercise, which I do not need, since, in the early forties, I can still climb or swim a mile untrained.

  Some of us never made the psychological change back, and remain with a permanent war fixation. Many of those who did not make it would have fitted very well into a socialist society. In our age of inhuman competition they have drifted into drink, crime, and fascism. I found, first in research into my own physiology, and later in communist party work, the moral equivalent of war.

  In 1922 Professor Hopkins (now Sir Frederick) asked me to come to Cambridge as Reader in biochemistry, that is to say second-incommand of the department of biochemistry, of which he had just been created head. I accepted, and worked at Cambridge for the next ten years. Although I did some research and some teaching, my most important duty was the supervision of research work carried on by others on a great variety of subjects, including the chemistry of men, animals, higher plants and bacteria.

  My salary was £600 per year, and Trinity College gave me a bedroom with a sitting room, board and amenities such as newspapers at an extremely cheap rate. This was a great advance on New College, which gave me £150 per year, rising to £250, free rooms, and a subsidy towards my evening meal. Besides this I had a pension of £40 per year for 25% disability till 1921. Moreover prices were falling. I was far better off than most of my colleagues of the same age. And I have never known poverty or unemployment.

  On the whole the economic position of scientific workers has worsened in the last thirty years. They have become cheaper because there are more of them, and they are un organized. The highest paid positions in universities are chairs at £1000 - £1500 per year. A few medical chairs are worth £2000. But these are the plums. Fellows of the Royal Society may earn £400-£600 per year. And salaries have not risen appreciably since the war. In fact they have fallen. About 1921 the government added 10% to the salaries of university teachers. But this, and 5% of the former income, goes into an insurance and pension scheme. I find it hard to believe that during the twenty years which have to run before my pension becomes due there will not be considerable inflation. If so I
shall lose my money, which I should not do if I had bought a house or a grand piano with it. Meanwhile however the insurance companies can use it to finance rearmament, British films, and other important objects. In earlier years some of them lent a good deal to Germany.

  If however such considerations occurred to the university staffs, they were forgotten in the joy which was felt that professors would in future retire at 65. It is not easy to become a professor, but once one has reached this exalted rank the need for serious work is over. It was then understood that a professor could be dismissed for anything but inefficiency. I shall tell later the story of how I broke this precedent. Professors elected under the old statutes have no retiring age. Some of them still hold their fiefs at over 80. The chair of pharmacology at Cambridge was held by one such, Professor Bradbury. The work was done by his Reader, Dr. Dixon, some 20 years his junior, one of the acknowledged leaders of his science.25 Dixon hung on waiting for Bradbury’s death. But he was a worker, and had strained his heart. So he only survived Bradbury by about two years.

  For the younger scientific workers one of the central phenomena of life was and is unemployment. They are a characteristic example of over-production, or rather under-consumption. During the latter part of the 19th century there was a scarcity of scientifically trained men and women. They were wanted to solve industrial and other practical problems. Some of them made a good thing out of their scarcity. My father though badly paid in his early years, later earned £1500 per year on a part-time job.

  This scarcity was remedied by the endowment of numerous university laboratories, technical colleges, and so on, and of not very generous scholarships to keep them filled. The demand for teachers, who are, so to say, production goods in this industry, created a temporary boom. This was accentuated by the number of young scientists killed in the war. I got in on the boom. If I had been born five years later I should not perhaps have been so fortunate.

  From 1923 onwards I assisted in turning out an annual dozen or so of highly trained biochemists onto the market. Those who secured first classes in Part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos (a post-graduate examination) could be sure of a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research amounting to about £150 per year, if they had not private means. They then received two or three years of training in research, which led to a Ph.D. degree. They were then put on the market, the Rolls-Royces of the biochemist manufactury.

  And what a market! I only watched the marketing of the high-grade stuff. Articles with London [or] Manchester degrees do not command such high prices. A few got college fellowships or demonstratorships in our laboratory. They are assured of secure if not lucrative academic posts. Others drifted through various scholarships, studentships, and grants into and out of industry and medical research.

  It was not as if they were not needed. They were, and are. In medicine we are up against thousands of problems which need biochemical knowledge for their solution. The surgeons still haven’t got the ideal antiseptic which kills bacteria and is quite harmless to human cells. If you think such humanitarian considerations old fashioned, the national defence of Britain is largely a biochemical problem. Plants make wood, straw, and fibre out of sugar. They also make sugar into starch. If we could reverse the first process and imitate the second, Britain could feed itself, at any rate for several years. However, such an invention is not a likely source of profit to anyone, so noone is working on it, and if a lot of us starve to death in the next war, that will be just too bad.

  The struggle for jobs is conducted with the aid of testimonials, so I had to write several of these every week. At first I hoped that the slump would be temporary, and that we should get back to the situation of early 1920, when almost everyone was at work. I interested myself in economics, and might have become an inflationist, had it not been for the consideration that my salary arose from Local Loans yielding a fixed annual sum in sterling. About this time I was concerning myself with the growth of populations, and with the question why some populations wobble, and others remain fairly stable. Thus the rabbits of Canada increase in numbers until every eleven years, an epidemic wipes all of them but about one in a thousand out. The foxes which eat them naturally oscillate in the same way. The rabbit plague causes a famine among them in which some starve to death, and some are caught in traps. On the other hand the numbers of beavers do not fluctuate to any great extent.

  Now the equations for the growth of a population with birthrates and death-rates determined in a certain way obviously resemble those for the production of a commodity. Lotka26 had shown that, under certain specified conditions, birth-rates and death-rates will settle down again after a shock. For example if a lot of young people are killed in a war the death-rate will be lowered thirty years or so later, when they would otherwise be dying of old age. But oscillations due to such a cause are damped out, like waves in treacle.

  I asked myself, under what conditions, in a highly simplified and theoretical economic system, oscillations would die out, and when, on the other hand, they would increase, like the wobbles in a shaft which is whirling beyond its limit of safety. Actually I assumed that the mathematical economists had answered the question, which is after all fairly fundamental. And I wanted to use their answer for my work on populations. I found that they had not. On the contrary, no mathematical economist had ever employed an integral equation, such as occurs in this problem. I found that under certain conditions small oscillations would increase indefinitely. I offered to vote conservative in the 1924 election if anyone could prove that I was wrong.

  But the Cambridge economists were not interested, and I found no journal to publish my results. Ten years later Tinbergen,27 an economist at ______ introduced integral equations to investigate the determination of the period of trade cycles. My own investigation, on stability, was complementary to his. Integral equations now became respectable in economics, and I published my paper in 1934 in the “Review of Economic Studies.” It admittedly deals with a grossly simplified system, like the mythical men who exchange boots for corn. But it does show that in a system which is stable according to the principles of text-book economics, fluctuations may become larger and larger. For the benefit of mathematicians I may say that the condition for instability is that the real parts of at least one pair of complex roots of a certain transcendental function should be positive. Later on I discovered that Marx had managed to say in words a great deal more than I had said in symbols. I do not of course claim to have proved mathematically that capitalism is unstable. I have only shown that it may be rather less stable than had been supposed. But I can perhaps claim the distinction of being the only person in whose conversion to Marxism functions of a complex variable played any important part.

  If I had confined myself strictly to science and mathematics, except when playing golf, bridge, or other amusements suitable to my station in life, I should now, I suppose, be ripening into respectability, well-known in my profession, and looking forward to a knighthood a little before my funeral. But I have never played golf, and have a unique record at lawn tennis, at which I have never been beaten, having played exactly one game and won it. I probably dislike ball games because I am very bad at them. My weight of 245 pounds is by no means adapted to most forms of athletics; while a couple of wounds handicap me to a slight extent, and furnish an admirable excuse for not playing games, which I dislike. I am also a conscientious objector when it comes to shooting birds and rabbits. After all I have been shot myself. If I had been a sport addict I might never have taken either to popular writing, or to politics.

  In 1923 the Century Magazine published “Daedalus” and I embarked on a career of popular writing. The immediate effect was an unexpected piece of luck. A female reporter from the Daily Express, having read the article, came down to interview me and to ask for information on biological questions, for a book which she was herself writing. To my astonishment, the resulting paragraph in the Daily Express not only kept to the facts, but, as had b
een stipulated, did not mention my name. For this and other reasons I fell in love with the reporter, and my love was reciprocated.

  She was already married, but not successfully. Her husband’s conduct would have enabled her to secure a divorce under Scottish, but not English, law. It had, at any rate, terminated the marriage as a practical proposition. However, in order to dissolve a marriage in England, adultery is necessary. I informed the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University that I proposed to commit this act, to which he replied “Oh.”

  A few months later the stage was set for the necessary formality. My future wife and I arrived, at a certain hotel. She did not like its appearance, and insisted on going to another. It was, however, essential that evidence should be furnished. We could not run the risk of losing the detective. But my wife has not been a reporter for nothing. With eagle eye she marked down a rather nondescript young man in the hotel lounge. He was, as she surmised, the sleuth. I asked him to accompany us to the other hotel, which he did, carrying one of our suitcases. The next morning he appeared in our bedroom with the morning papers. Save for one moment when I had feared that we might lose sight of the detective, everything had passed off without a hitch. Such is the sad reality concerning the profession of Sherlock Holmes and Inspector French.

  In the autumn of 1925 a Decree Nisi was pronounced, my name appearing as co-respondent. I then received a letter from the vice-chancellor suggesting that I should resign my post. And here I must pause to explain the peculiar conditions under which professors and readers held their posts at Cambridge. They could be deprived of them if a body called the Sex Viri (meaning Six Men, not Sex Weary) found them guilty of gross or habitual immorality. But so far every professor who had found himself in my position had resigned. I might have done so had the Vice-Chancellor recommended it a year earlier. But I felt his present suggestion might not be quite spontaneous. I did not resign.