I was then called before the Sex Viri, who consisted of heads of Colleges and Professors of law. The Reverend Dr. Pearce, who afterwards became a bishop, appeared to be their leading spirit. They produced a cutting from the Times, describing the case. I did not plead that the Times is not infallible, though as I have read my own obituary notice in it, I know that it is not. I brought some documentary evidence that I had not broken up a home, because there was not a home to break up. I offered to call witnesses and suggested that I might be legally represented. These suggestions were not accepted.
It was once more urged that I should resign. And all the best people thought that that was the very least that I could do. Unlike King Edward VIII in somewhat similar circumstances I dug my heels in, although it was pointed out to me that after such a scandal I could never hope for a good position elsewhere. I was formally deprived of my office and fell back on my second line of defence. I had the right to appeal from the Sex Viri to a tribunal of five judges appointed by the Council of the Cambridge Senate. I appealed. During the first term of 1926 I continued to live in College, for which I must thank my colleagues at Trinity, and to deliver my lectures, for which I must thank Professor Hopkins. Meanwhile Mr. J. M. Keynes28 took up my cause in the Council of the Senate, and insisted that the tribunal should be a little less Anglican in its make-up than the Sex Viri. As however its president was Mr. Justice Avory29 (who had the reputation of being a hanging judge) and included the Provost of Eton, an eminent authority on the Fathers of the Church, it was not a body of revolutionaries.
When I came before it I was very ably represented by Mr. Stuart Bevan K. C.30 Further, Professor Hopkins and my father gave evidence on my behalf. The case was heard in the law courts, but the public was not admitted. A majority of the court decided in my favour, and restored me to my position at Cambridge. I do not know hwo [sic] they voted. I am not sure whether Mr. Justice Avory was more horrified by my conduct or by the fact that the Sex Viri, like the jury in Alice in Wonderland, had delivered their verdict before hearing the evidence.
The court may or may not have been influenced by the knowledge that a verdict in the opposite direction would not have ended the case. I intended to stand for reelection, and my Union, the National Union of Scientific Workers, after investigating the case, had decided to advise its members and others not to apply for the position. As my chief wanted me back, this would have created a situation of some interest.
I was able to carry my fight through for three reasons. I had some private means from a legacy, much of which went in damages and costs. I had an alternative livelihood, for I had discovered that I could write for the daily press. And I had a Union. Soon after this the conservative government passed the Trade Unions Act of 1927. Our union contained a number of government employees, and in order to include both them and such persons as myself, it was forced to transform itself into the Association of Scientific Workers, thus giving up the rather limited powers of interference in “trade disputes” such as my own case, which it previously possessed.
I finally obtained the blessing of the State on my union with my dear wife and comrade in the middle of the General Strike of 1926, and we lived at Cambridge for the next six years. Unfortunately we have no children of our own. However her son Ronald lived with us, and we soon had a couple of students who were doing research without visible means of support. One of them stayed on for some time after getting a job, and helped to keep us young.
By 1932 I knew some biology. I had worked under two great biologists, my father and Hopkins, who were in a way complementary to one another. My father was not a materialist though in his later years he was not an idealist either. He saw through the fallacies of the mechanistic theory of life, and was at his best when investigating a function such as breathing. Hopkins is a materialist, in the laboratory at any rate, but I find his point of view rather too mechanistic for my liking. His greatest work has been on chemical lines, as when by investigating what was needed to supplement a diet of known composition in order to keep rats alive, he proved the need of small quantities of the substances which are now called vitamins. It was obvious that in practice both my father and Hopkins were somehow right, although they disagreed on many fundamental points. It was not until I read “Feuerbach” and “Anti-Dühring” that I saw how their contradictory views could be reconciled.31
From 1927 to 1937 I held a part-time advisory position at the John Innes Horticultural Institution near London. On the whole my time there was wasted, as I had little actual control over the work done. However I was able to help some colleagues, particularly Miss de Winton, in really fine work, and I had the good fortune to discuss Darlington’s remarkable discoveries concerning the chromosomes with him, and may have assisted some of his embryo thoughts into the world. I also started Miss Scott-Moncrieff on her brilliant research on the chemical side of plant genetics.32
But my main contributions to genetics were theoretical. With R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and a few others, I have built up a rather complicated mathematical theory of population with special reference to evolution. Many of our colleagues think that we have gone too far ahead of the facts. This may be so, but at least our theory has made us look for facts which were not previously suspected, and find some at least of those for which we were looking. It has also made us investigate the exact meaning of a number of words in common currency. Thus Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest, but never defined fitness exactly. Fisher and I have had to do rather complicated calculations about natural selection. So we had to define fitness fairly rigorously.
Some of my calculations led to surprising results. Thus it appears that, as a result of the survival of the fittest, a population may become less fit, just as the effect of gravity on a spinning top is to make it stand up, instead of falling down. I came across so many paradoxes of this sort that I was rather reluctantly compelled to adopt the dialectical terminology which Engels, and to a less extent Marx, took over from Hegel and applied where Hegel had failed to apply it. As soon as I did so, my ideas about evolution began to arrange themselves.
Meanwhile I carried on with biochemistry. I demonstrated the presence in insects, rats, and green plants, of a peculiar respiratory ferment discovered by Warburg in yeast, and with Cook and Mapson I later studied it in bacteria.33 I also wrote a book on enzymes (or ferments) which had the merit of being so much shorter than any of the vast German works covering the same ground that it was translated into German and Russian. Unfortunately I backed the wrong horse in at least one case where I had to choose between two competing theories. But my main work was the supervision of other people’s research.
In 1933 I came to London as Professor of Genetics at University College London. It was only a half-time job, and I might have had considerable difficulty in starting a department. But I had an immediate stroke of luck. Herr Hitler supplied me with two first-rate junior colleagues, Dr’s. Grüneberg and Philip, who were of Jewish origin.34 I had some difficulty in finding them salaries, but when this was done through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation, we got a real school of Genetics started in London. Interestingly enough, neither is a communist, and I have never tried to convert them. I should be unlikely to succeed where Hitler has failed, even if I thought it correct to influence my subordinates.
Among my main discoveries in London was the rate of mutation for a human gene. It is often believed that human abnormalities which are handed down to descendants are always due to heredity, that is to say derived from an ancestor. This is not so. If it were, eugenics would be a much easier task than it actually is. But the severer abnormalities, such as haemophilia (the bleeding disease found in many of Queen Victoria’s descendants) would soon be wiped out by natural selection if they did not constantly arise afresh by a process called mutation, whose rate I was able to measure. I also discovered the type of human inheritance called partial sex linkage, and made the first, very rough, map of the positions of genes on a human chromosome.
I have had a remarkable opportunity of studying the administration of science under our present social and economic system. It is a wonderful muddle. Most of the research work in “pure” science is done at universities by people whose principal duty is to lecture. The system of teaching by lectures has been out-of-date since the invention of printing, though it was of course necessary in the middle ages. Most of the time which students spend in lectures would be better spent in reading text-books, and discussing them in small groups with a teacher of whom they can ask questions. This system is actually followed in the scientific honours courses in certain Scottish and English provincial universities. The only indispensable lectures are those in which the lecturer critically discusses work which has not yet been dealt with in textbooks. By far the best lecture course that I have ever attended was Professor E. S. Goodrich’s advanced course on vertebrate anatomy at Oxford.36 But that is mainly because Goodrich is a superb blackboard artist. However, professors are paid to lecture, and often have no other specific duties. In a properly organized educational system the writing of first-rate text books would be subsidized. They would be cheaper, and more constantly brought up-to-date. In England the mediaeval method of teaching is well paid by the State and the universities, while textbooks are left to private enterprise. I lecture to audiences often of only a dozen students. I am not at the time of writing, provided with a secretary. I should like to be paid to write textbooks, and to lecture mainly to workers, many of whom enjoy a lecture a week, rather than students, who are bored by two or three per day.
I believe that a large proportion of the money spent on research is wasted. Much of the industrial and military research is secret, and therefore the same problem is tackled by workers employed by different firms and governments. A good deal of the so-called pure research is useless for other reasons. These reasons will become clearer if I describe some features of a really admirable body, the Medical Research Council. This council administers a sum of about £___,000 per year, which is spent partly on the National Institute for Medical Research, and partly on subsidies to individual workers or groups of workers.
The first secretary, Sir Walter Morley Fletcher, had the reputation of being an autocrat, probably because he stood up to the bigwigs of medicine and science. On the other hand he treated junior workers like myself with the greatest consideration and courtesy. But courtesy is not a warrant of efficiency. He took the revolutionary course of appointing committees to advise him which were composed, not of Old Gentlemen, but of the men and women concerned in in [sic] the research in question, some of them being under forty. In fact he introduced democratic methods. These committees keep a jealous and efficient control over the money allotted to them, and remarkably little of it is wasted, because their members are technically competent to criticize all suggested expenditure. The Royal Society also spends most of its income on research which is carefully watched by its committees.
This efficiency is not, however, found in all such bodies. I have seen men receiving grants from the Development Commission engaged in activities very different from those for which they were paid. I have noticed the utter absence of planning of genetical research in this country, which would presumably fall into the province of the Agricultural Research Council.
One reason for this inefficiency is not far to seek. In June 1937 I read that Professor H.E. Armstrong had been appointed Chairman of the Lawes Agricultural Trust, which administers the Research Station at Rothamsted.37 Professor Armstrong is a venerable figure with a wide knowledge of chemistry, but he is over 80 years old, and I was not surprised to read in “Nature” a few weeks later that owing to ill health he had been unable to preside. So far from being an isolated case this is typical of a whole group of institutions. In one of these the chairman, a distinguished scientist now 80 years of age, receives £600 per annum for attending four meetings per year and signin [sic] some papers in between, whilst research workers of ten years standing and with international reputations under his care receive £300 for a year’s work.
Finally there is a certain amount of real corruption, mainly among administrative workers. I do not propose to give examples for two very simple reasons. I cannot afford it, and if I were rich enough to risk a libel action, no publisher would be willing to share my risk. A jury might consider that Mr. A. was fully justified in using his position as an employee of a scientific institution to establish relations between it and a firm from which he also received emoluments. Or they might think that Mr. B’s little perquisites were entirely legitimate. Our standards of honesty in such matters are at present altering rather rapidly for the worse. Any reader is therefore entirely at liberty to say that my statements are a baseless expression of political prejudice. And I certainly think that corruption is exceptional in scientific institutions, whereas it is extremely common in many other branches of our national life.
It may however be pointed out that both inefficiency and corruption are far less likely to occur in laboratories or other scientific organizations which enjoy a measure of self-government, and where the junior workers have a say in the direction, than in those which are controlled either autocratically or by a committee appointed from outside, and with little first-hand acquaintance with the work in progress.
I see little prospect of any very great improvement in British scientific research under capitalism. For efficiency we need a combination of planning and democracy. And these are incompatible under capitalism. Scientific research is certainly more planned (though not necessarily better planned) in Germany than in England. But it is carried out on the Führer-Prinzip (leader principle) and the leaders are not chosen primarily for their scientific attainments. And the plan being imposed from above, inevitably tends to neglect fundamental research, that is to say any research into basic principles which will only yield results after a long period, in favour of research which will yield immediate results. Originality in subordinates is also discouraged.
In England we have far too sharp a division between pure and applied science. The universities are mainly concerned with the former, and very properly discourage work in their laboratories on behalf of individual firms. The majority of firms do not encourage research which may yield no profit for many years, and then perhaps to their competitors. In the Soviet Union the same worker is often engaged in “pure” (i.e. long-term) and immediately applicable research, to the great benefit of both. My father’s work, which led simultaneously to the saving of thousands of miners’ lives and the discovery of how breathing is regulated is an example of what might be and what will be when the internal contradictions of our existing society have been abolished.
This was possible because the practical application of his work was to life saving, and not directly to production. The problems arising in industry are just as scientifically interesting as those of hygiene, but as long as industry is conducted for private profit there will either be a gap between university research and factory research or the university laboratories will be run for the benefit of capitalist groups. In a socialist commonwealth science takes its natural place as a combination of theory and practice for the common good.38
APPENDIX 2
HALDANE ON THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT
The manuscript for this letter to the New Statesman is in the Haldane Papers, University College London.1 The strikethroughs in the text indicate Haldane’s hand-written erasures.
IS THERE A RUSSIAN ENIGMA?
by J.B.S. Haldane
A number of writers to the New Statesman ap
pear to find the foreign policy of the Soviet Union difficult to explain or to reconcile with their theories on the regarding that state. Now I can quite understand people hating the Soviet Union. If I were rich enough or believed a quarter of the anti-Soviet propaganda which I read I probably should hate it myself. But I cannot understand how an intelligent person can find its policy in any way inconsistent. On the contrary it appears to be almost fantastically consistent, certainly far more so than those of the British, French, or German governments. Of course the Soviet policy changes, and changes dramatically. But these changes are occur in response to changed circumstances.
The Soviet policy is based on an objection to two things, capitalism and wars, which the rulers of the Union, and the vast majority of its people, believe to be intimately connected. They want to see other countries adopt socialism and since. Further they believe that attempts to bring socialism about by constitutional means would be countered by fascist revolution in most countries they where parliamentary government exists, and while in fascist countries it could only come socialism could only be established by revolution from the left. Hence they hope to see revolutions in other countries.
Lenin naturally hoped that the revolutions of 1919 in central Europe would lead to socialism there, as in Russia. When this hope failed two policies were open, to devote their efforts to main effort to stirring up revolutions abroad, or to building socialism at home. The former was the policy of Trotsky, the latter is that of Stalin. Stalin realises that genuine revolutions must come from within, and that in most circumstances the an attempt to impose it from without socialism from without would be regarded as imperialism. For this reason Outer Mongolia has not been abruptly socialized. It is a democratic republic with a strong tendency towards socialism, but capitalism has not been fully abolished there. The government of the Soviet Union could do so abolish it tomorrow if they it wished, but they it prefers to wait for the Mongolians to do so of their own free will. A peaceful and constitutional transition to socialism is far more probable in Outer Mongolia than in Great Britain.
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